President Donald Trump has said he wants to grow the American oil and gas industry and build more pipelines — including one in New York.
Before a meeting with Gov. Kathy Hochul last month, Trump set his sights on one project in particular called the Constitution Pipeline. First proposed in 2012, it was meant to transport gas from Pennsylvania through New York’s Southern Tier and Catskills to meet up with other pipelines outside of Albany.
But it was never built. Instead, after years of protest from environmentalists and community advocates, officials in New York denied the pipeline a key permit. Environmental advocates heralded it as a major win against the oil and gas industry.
Now, Trump has said he wants to bring that pipeline back.
“I hope we don't have to use the extraordinary powers of the federal government to get it done," Trump told reporters before meeting with Hochul. "But if we have to, we will.”
Trump and Hochul were supposed to talk about congestion pricing, the new toll for drivers entering some parts of Manhattan, during that meeting. But Trump also said he wanted this pipeline, raising questions about whether he would try to strike a deal with Hochul to push it through.
Hochul has said publicly she is not interested in revisiting the issue. Her office would not answer further questions about it.
The oil company behind the project, Williams, told Reuters that it is interested in building the pipeline if it receives support from the state. The company did not respond to WSKG’s questions.
Still, many environmentalists worry Trump will push ahead, renewing concerns that New York’s upstate rural landscape could be bisected by a new pipeline and restarting a bitter environmental fight.
“For people who fought it for 10 years, the idea that that threat is going to come back over their heads is a really terrifying notion,” said Anne Marie Garti, one of the leaders of the initial fight against the pipeline.
Garti grew up in New York’s Delaware County, near the Constitution Pipeline’s proposed path. She said she loves the area, and was appalled when she first heard about the project in 2012.
Garti and other community members worried about residents who would have to move because of eminent domain, and environmental risks from pipeline leaks. Many environmentalists also opposed building new infrastructure that would enable the continued use of fossil fuels, which contribute to climate change.
But Garti also knew that pipelines are regulated largely by the federal government, which at the time approved most projects. She didn’t want that to happen in her community, so she helped start a group called Stop the Pipeline to protest it.
Many environmental groups joined the cause, as well as some famous people, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now heads the Department of Health and Human Services for the Trump administration. At a 2016 rally at New York’s state Capitol, Kennedy called the pipeline a “tired, dinosaur, expired business model.”
The Stop the Pipeline group scored legal wins as well. Garti realized the state had the power to refuse the pipeline one key permit under the Clean Water Act. She and other groups organized protests and intervened in the permitting process to bring attention to the water issue.
In 2016, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation denied the pipeline its Clean Water Act permit. The next day, Garti remembers two landowners involved in the movement took one of the group’s “Stop the Pipeline” signs and brought it to the local Constitution Pipeline office.
“They wrote on it, ‘We stopped the pipeline,’” Garti recalled. “And they taped it to their door.”
The company lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of the ruling and later appealed it. But the courts upheld the decision. Stop the Pipeline's legal approach became an example for activists around the country trying to fight similar pipelines.
Reviving the fight
The battle over the Constitution Pipeline seemed long over to many environmentalists when Trump mentioned it last month.
“No one's even talked about Constitution [Pipeline] in years,” said Alex Beauchamp, Northeast region director at the national advocacy organization, Food and Water Watch. “My reaction, and I think everyone who fought its reaction at the time, was like, ‘What the heck is this?’”
Even if Williams pursued constructing a pipeline across the region again, the company would still need to acquire a permit under the Clean Water Act from the state. That’s unlikely to happen unless Hochul supports the proposal.
Still, the fact that Trump discussed the pipeline with Hochul, and has continued to bring it up, is concerning to Beauchamp and other advocates.
“I think we're sort of forced to take it seriously, sadly,” said Beauchamp. “Even though it does seem completely crazy.”
On the ground in the Southern Tier and Catskills, some organizers are already preparing to fight back.
More than 200 advocacy groups recently sent a letter to Hochul and other governors urging them to push back against any proposed new pipelines in the Northeast.
One of the groups that signed the letter is the Cooperstown and Oneonta chapter of the Indivisible movement, which aims to push back against Trump’s policies.
Environmental advocate Virginia Kennedy recently started the chapter. She said she's been connecting with local residents to ensure they're prepared to protest the pipeline once again.
“Power never cedes itself,” said Kennedy. “So you fight, and you fight on.”