Note: The text of this post was first published as an oped in the News Leader on 6/12/2024.

GASLIGHT: The perfect title for a book about the defeat of the largest, most expensive, unpermitted, fracked-gas pipeline in American history: the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Jonathan Mingle’s new 282-page thriller chronicles the true story of the six-year fight.

GASLIGHT is available from the publisher, Island Press

The people of Augusta County would have suffered more miles of the 42-inch-diameter pipeline than any other county in its three states, 600-mile length.

GASLIGHT: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Future. I couldn’t put the book down. It reads like a James Michener novel, weaving the stories of the passion of the people in the path of the pipeline with the history of place. Mingle connects the dots between what was occurring in Washington at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and what was occurring in the courts, where arguments were being heard over multiple permits.

Gaslight The Movie

From Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: Gaslighting is the act of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage. The term was inspired by a 1938 play and the 1944 movie Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman, whose character marries a man who tricks her into believing she is losing her mind so he can steal her money.

Gaslighting is exactly what Dominion and Duke Energy did to promote their fracked-gas pipeline, and it’s the perfect title for Mingle’s work. The book is a great factual expose, supported by thorough research.

Selfie of GASLIGHT author Jonathan Mingle with Robin and Linda Williams in the background singing “We Don’t Want Your Pipeline.” Book event at Staunton Public Library, 6/13/2024

One gaslighting trick during the six-year fight was Dominion’s assertion that the fracked gas was needed. But the truth, as Mingle states it, was that “almost 80 percent of that gas would go to power plants that were owned by Dominion’s and Duke’s own subsidiaries.”

Gaslight at Union Hill

But that wasn’t the greatest gaslighting trick. The greatest gaslighting trick was performed by our own Department of Environmental Quality and the state’s Air Pollution Control Board whose representatives asserted that the population in Buckingham County’s Union Hill was not predominantly Black. They claimed the population was less than 40 percent when in fact it was 84 percent. But the people of Union Hill saw through that trick and went to court. And they won.

This case, Friends of Buckingham v. State Air Pollution Control, is now one of the best examples of environmental justice in American history. Mingle expertly writes the riveting story.

Gaslight in Deerfield

The stories come alive. From Augusta County’s Board of Zoning Appeals, from which Dominion tried to obtain a special use permit to build a pipe yard in Deerfield, to the Supreme Court of the United States, where Dominion claimed that America’s historic Appalachian Trail was not land.

In denying Dominion’s pipe yard, George Coyner, the chair of the county’s Board of Zoning Appeals stated, “It’s hard to support something nobody is in favor of.”

Augusta County Board of Zoning Appeals hearing on the Deerfield ACP pipe yard, October 4, 2018. The board voted against the pipe yard. Photo credit R. Whitescarver

In the Supreme Court case ACP and US Forest Service v. Cowpasture River, Dominion’s lawyer repeated to the justices, “The trail is not land, the trail is not land.”

“Nobody makes that distinction in real life,” Justice Elena Kagan countered.

Canals to Railroads, Fossil Fuel to Renewable Energy

Fracked-gas pipelines. Coal-fired power plants. The fossil fuel binge is coming to a frustrating and dangerous end. Mingle tells the story of Claudius Crozet, the French engineer who designed the Blue Ridge Tunnel for the railroad almost two centuries ago. Crozet advised Virginia’s Board of Public Works to stop investing in canals because it would be much more efficient and cheaper to move goods by rail. The board didn’t listen and kept investing in canal construction, which “wrecked Virginia’s finances and haunted its politics well into the twentieth century,” Mingle writes.

Through the many voices in GASLIGHT, Mingle instructs us that we are still building “canals” for fossil fuels when we should be ramping up renewable energy and storage. The term natural gas is itself a form of gaslighting. Natural gas is methane, a fossil fuel that is four times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. Let’s stop being gaslighted by the fossil fuel industry and move forward into the 100 percent renewable energy era.