[00:00:18] Speaker A: Welcome to Uptown Chats, a podcast where we share stories about environmental justice by and for everyday people. I'm your co host, Lonnie.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: And I'm your other co host, Jaronous.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: And today we're talking about liquefied natural gas, or Lng, as the fourth episode in our wrong direction mini series. Our special guest, Rochetta Ozane, who's the founder and director of VSSL Project of Louisiana, a small mutual aid and environmental justice organization based in southwest Louisiana. But before we get to that, Jaron, can you share WEAC's mission?
[00:00:47] Speaker B: I sure can. WEAC's mission is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and or low income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Thank you for that. So, Jaron, what is liquid high natural gas? I think some people are familiar with this more than some of the other things that we talked about so far. But can you give us a bit of an overview of what it is?
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah, I think this is a good idea. Liquefied natural gas. Let's start with the natural gas piece first. Many of you may know natural gas, a fossil fuel energy source. So it's burned, you know, comes from the ground, and it's not renewable.
The largest source of natural gas is methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. It's one of the reasons that we're concerned about it. It's effects on climate change. So natural gas is produced from shale and other types of sedimentary rock formations. Remember geology class back in the day, back in science, sedimentary rock formations that are in the ground. So natural gas is produced by forcing water, chemicals, and sand down a well under high pressure through a process that's called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that you may have heard of. And at the top of that well, natural gas is collected in these gathering pipelines and then sent to a natural gas processing plant before it is distributed out. And today, the United States is actually the world's largest producer of natural gas, which just a couple decades ago was not the case. And so that has grown a lot. And the majority of natural gas is delivered in gas form via pipelines that you may be familiar with in the United States. But the growth in the international market for natural gas has led to the use of natural gas in a liquefied form, otherwise known as liquefied natural gas. So liquefied natural gas Lng is just a form of natural gas that's been cooled to a liquid state at about negative 260 degrees fahrenheit. For the purposes of shipping and storage just makes that process easier. But that's cold.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: That is very, very cold, which probably, probably sounds really good right now in these hot summer days that we have been having. But, yeah, and I think one of the things that is always shocking to me, and we get into this with our conversation with Rochetta, is that this all sounds bad. Everything that you read sounds horrible. So how was this even considered a possible solution to the climate crisis? And so we'll get into that a little bit later with our interview. But this also kind of touches close to home here in New York City and kind of in our own backyard with the North Brooklyn pipeline that was proposed. But then advocates got together and were able to stop this piece of the pipeline for liquefied natural gas. And so a quick, brief overview of what happened there. So about 2016, there were advertisements and Brooklyn newspapers notifying the public that there's going to be a rate hike in their energy bills. So we're going to increase the bills. And so to the tune of about $245 million over a year long period, is what they were going to gather. But no one had no clue what this was supposed to be funding or what it was going to go towards or anything. And then about 2019. So three years later, Brooklyn residents learned that the hike was going to pay for 7 miles of new frac gas. What Jaron talked about, a whole transmission pipeline beneath the neighborhoods in Brooklyn, I think, and Brownsville in east Williamsburg, which are environmental justice communities. And this became known as the North Brooklyn pipeline, but it's national grids, part of their metropolitan reliability infrastructure project, but it became known as the North Brooklyn pipeline because that's what it really was. It's just a part of the pipeline for liquefied natural gas. But there are a lot of folks who came out to protest this pipeline going into the neighborhood. And there was a lot of different actions that were going on. There were petitions that were signed. There were lawsuits that were filed.
They won. That campaign won. And we can. And so in 2023, in March of last year, there was a victory, and they defeated the final leg of the pipeline that was going to go into Brooklyn, as well as the liquefied natural gas vaporizers at the LNG depot, basically at the apex of the pipeline route. So this was a big victory for everyone and to be celebrated. We'll drop some links in our show notes if you want to follow that story a little bit more to see how that was defeated.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah. So really, this goes to show that a lot of people are very much aware that LNG is not what they want in their communities, and it's not the right direction that we want to be going in. And so much so that even in January of 2024, earlier this year, the Biden Harris administration announced a temporary pause on pending LNG projects across the United States. And React was actually one of the first environmental justice groups to call for a pause on LNG projects and for the administration to broaden the scope of the public interest reviews to address the cumulative impacts of these projects.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: Yeah, and we thought that was such a great victory for that pause that we were. That the administration was taking a moment to actually listen to what we've been saying about liquefied natural gas and how it needs to be stopped. Unfortunately, in June, though, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, which Anastasia talked about in our first episode in the series, they voted to approve the construction operation of venture Global's proposed Calcasias Pass two, or known as CP two, liquefied natural gas project. And so this decision kind of comes despite the fact there's broad opposition from frontline communities and advocates and environmental and environmental justice groups, elected officials, and many other stakeholders who sounded alarm.
Basically everyone has sounded alarm about this for months, about harmful impacts of CP two in general, and the proliferation of these LNG projects and exports. And so we've been, we're going to be following this as well. It's unfortunate. So it seems like the pause has basically been reversed as we continue to build out these projects.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's just a little snapshot of what Lng is and some current recent history of where it fits into the landscape. But we're going to get much more into that with helpful freshetta. So what do we say we just jump right into that interview?
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Let's go.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Before we get too far into our interview with you, can you please give us a brief introduction of yourself?
[00:07:44] Speaker C: My name is Rochetta Ozain. I am the founder, director and CEO of the Vessel Project of Louisiana. The vessel project is a small mutual aid grassroots environmental justice organization. We do everything from assisting the community with their emergency needs, such as bill assistance, emergency food, emergency shelter, clothing, toiletries. But we also provide education on what's happening locally, what's happening on the state level, what's happening nationally and internationally as it relates to environmental issues and fossil fuel build out. We register people to vote. We make sure that people have information about candidates, make sure people have, you know, rise to the polls and a place to kind of huddle on election days. And we do so much, it's hard to really give a summary because we consider ourselves a dot connecting organization. And also as a net, we catch, you know, the people who fall through the cracks of the assistance of other organizations, you know, people who may not qualify for traditional assistance. And we try to catch those people and also really working at the intersection of environmental justice and mutual aid. So that's what I do with the vessel project. But I'm also the co director of the Gulf Fossil Finance Hub, where we educate the community on all of the financing that goes into the fossil fuel industries that are being built out into the community. We put pressure on the banks and the insurance companies to divest from fossil fuels, and we encourage them to instead invest in those communities that they claim to care about and just kind of redirect those funds into the type of infrastructure that those communities are wanting above all else. I am a mom.
I have six children, three girls, three boys. All of my children are very involved and active with the work that I do. Many of them have spoken at various events. Some of them have, you know, articles and op eds that they've done. So you've probably seen them marching at the front lines of whatever march or parade that I'm leading wherever I am in the world. Also, I have one grandbaby, and my children and my grandson is who. I'm doing this for their health conditions that they face because of the pollution in the air, because of our polluted water, and living in a community with very low resources. They're the reason that I'm doing this.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Well, I think of all the people we've had on the show so far, you take the cake in terms of doing the most. Wow. I am in awe of all the work that y'all are trying to do and how y'all are getting it done. I don't know, y'all must have superpowers or something. But thank you for taking your time to join us for this episode, because I feel like you're here discussing a really important topic, which is liquefied natural gas. So thank you for joining us for this.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: Yeah. And also just training the next generation of folks to be a part of this movement. I think that's awesome as well, and getting us starting as young as possible. So, yeah, we can kind of kick in. We're here to talk about liquefied natural gas, and we kind of just want you to see if you can give us, like, a broader understanding of what is liquefied natural gas or lng and what's kind of the landscape going on, particularly in the US, of course.
[00:11:23] Speaker C: So, in the last several years, the United States has become the largest exporter of methane gas in the world. Not just in North America, but in the entire world. We are the largest exporter, which is very important, because when liquefied natural gas first came online, we were importing it, and now we're exporting this commodity. So when you think about liquefied natural gas, you think, oh, it's not harmful. It has natural in it. So liquefied natural gas is primarily methane, and it can contain also up to 10% ethane and propane. Methane is the primary contributor to the formation of ground level ozone. It's a hazardous air pollutant, and it's a greenhouse gas. Methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat, the atmosphere. So when you think about the liquefied natural gas, again, just as that, you know, lng product, you might think, well, that's not harmful. You know, it's a product that's been created that they're using for whatever. But in order to make this product, it is. It is processed through a process called liquefication, which involves cooling it at extremely low temperatures to make it easier to transport. So once they create this product and they cool it down, and they put it in these shipping containers and they ship it across the water, this is when, you know, the methane emissions are going into the air, leaks are happening in the water. We're fracking to get this product out of the ground. We're shipping it over to other communities. And when you think about this whole process in the creation of this liquefied natural gas, which you've probably already said to yourself, how is this natural if they're creating it? Because something natural means it was already there. It was already in that, you know, sort of formation. Nothing should have to be done to it or added to it. When you start cooling it and heating it and adding things to it, it's now unnatural, right? It's just like me saying that my face is naturally beat, but I have on makeup that's not my natural face. And that is what LNG is. It is a natural product that things have been added to, that it's been super cool, super heated, and then it shipped across our waterways. That is what makes it unnatural. That is what makes it unsafe. And in fact, that entire process makes LNG more harmful than coal. So everybody who was fighting against coal, who doesn't understand what LNG is, should be just as angry and upset that they fought this hard to get coal out of communities. And yet this product came along and is poisoning the communities worse than coal ever could. The other thing about, you know, LNG, while it's supposed to be considered a cleaner burning fossil fuel compared to coal and oil, it is actually a greenwash term. So when they put the term out like liquefied natural gas, the word natural captures people's attention and it makes them automatically believe that this is okay. But that is greenwashing. And what greenwashing is, is when industry and government and different officials try to bend the truth a little or not tell a full truth. And that's what liquefied natural gas is doing. It is still healing communities just as quickly as coal, just as quickly as petrochemicals, just as quickly as these other chemical facilities. And it should be the number one thing that we're fighting against right now, because, in fact, the proposed build out of these liquified natural gas projects in communities of color, in indigenous communities, where we are already overflowing with other types of industries, would mean the death of these communities. This is genocide that's happening with the build out of these projects, and it's being greenwashed as a natural, cleaner way of burning gas. But it's completely not. It's completely false. And we should be angry and we should be talking about LNG.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: I appreciate the power and importance that you bring to this conversation, because really, I think it feels like to so many people that it's just kind of like a Dundee. Like, it's already, like, baked into our system that, you know, it's just. It's just the reality now when. When the truth is that, no, this is a decision that was made to go down this path, and that decision led to impacts, like you're saying, for black and brown communities across the country. And we have the power to undo that decision and to move in a different direction, which is kind of what we're faced with now. And you kind of touch on some of the different challenges and misconceptions around LNG. And it's interesting. Some of the things that you shared are similar to what we heard from Anna during our interview about hydrogen, in terms of the way it's framed, in terms of it having to be cool to be transported and having issues with leaks and things like that. But LNG is interesting because it kind of was brought on board as, quote unquote, to help address the climate crisis. Right. But there's more nuance to that. So I want to know if you can share a little bit more about how LNG kind of became a part of this conversation, framed as a way to combat the climate crisis. I mean, it kind of seems to us, of course, now, of course, that doesn't make sense, but at the time when it was kind of coming on the scene, how did it kind of get framed that way? And I think that's tied into what you're talking about, greenwashing. But can you kind of build on that a little bit more?
[00:17:38] Speaker C: Of course. So, every time I'm asked this question, it's hard to kind of go back to the starting point. But when you think about, you know, the environmental justice movement, and you think about things like, this movement has roots in the Civil Rights act, right? In the civil rights movement, this is not by happenstance, it is not by chance that these type of facilities are built in communities of color. So we could talk about LNG. We could talk about coal. We could talk about this new carbon capture or whatever the thing may be. But at its core, what's happening is communities have been deemed sacrifice zones for big oil and gas or production or for money.
And so it doesn't matter what the product is, because something is always coming. So when we start figuring out, oh, this is harmful for us, even though we fight against it from the beginning. Like, we. We march, we protest, we attend the hearings, and we say, don't bring this to our community. But then when the results come out and it's like, oh, wait, maybe this was harmful. There's already something behind it. So whenever you're like, you know, what is that? What was the rollout? How did this happen? Why did lng come on board? Is because, again, if you go back to the civil rights movement and when activists were fighting against railroads being built in communities of color or separating communities, you talk about highways coming through and bridges coming through, and then you talk about trash dispensaries and coal burning plants. It was just one thing after the other until we got to LNg. And, you know, and now right behind lng is carbon capture and storage. This goes all the way back to nindiism. And, you know, when white people were like, we want these things to come. They're gonna make money for us. We know they're dangerous. We don't want them in our community, so we're gonna put them over here in these communities. Oh, wait a minute. Black people are getting too loud about this. They're recognizing the harms. So, okay, we're gonna switch it up and change to something else. Still allowing the oil and gas company to linger on and make money, but using those same communities and sacrifices. And that's what it is. You know, LNG is just king right now. But as I stated, there's already something coming behind lng because lng is burning fossil fuels. And we learned in 6th grade science that fossil fuels don't last forever. So we know that we can't rely on this product forever, right? So as they're making as much money they can off of this product, pretending that it's safer than what we had before, like, oh, we're gonna. Okay, we hear you. We see you marching. We see you protesting, we see you signing petitions, we hear you. We're gonna throw this at you. We're gonna get ahead of you with our narrative to say that it's clean, it's green, it's safer. We're doing this for you. This is what you asked for. You said get rid of coal. You said it was killing you. So here's lng. It is beautiful. They made all these great commercials. They came into communities talking about lng and how many people they were hiring these communities and how people would be safer working at these facilities, you know, but they didn't talk about the other side. The pollution would continue and that the pollution would be worse. They didn't talk about, yeah, in the beginning, we might hire 300 people, but 300 people won't keep a job because we just need y'all to build the facility. Right? We don't need y'all to run the facility. So when those construction jobs are gone, your job is gone. They didn't talk about the fact that they were going to build these facilities on wetlands, which are natural storm search protection from the hurricanes and other disasters that we get along the Gulf coast. They also did not talk about the fact that when these lng facilities are built in these communities, that communities will be paying a different cost. Not just the cost of polluted water and the cost of polluted air, but also higher energy costs. We are living in the community where these products are being made, yet our gas prices are exponential and our heating and cooling for our homes, our energy costs are through the roof, not only because of the production of this in our community, but also, again, because of the amount of storms that we're getting. Every time we have a hurricane happen in Louisiana, in our communities, we get a hurricane charge on our energy bill. And you know that in Louisiana, energy, which provides electricity, is the monopoly here. So we already don't have energy equity, energy justice. And these facilities come into our community and we get the disproportionate burden of paying higher costs at the expense of providing a product to be shipped and exported to other places. And finally, they are saying that our communities have to be a sacrifice so that communities in other countries, such as, you know, countries in Europe, so that they don't have to rely on Russia for their energy needs.
Why are we being killed and sacrificed here in the US for other communities when those same communities are saying, we don't want fossil gas, we want to move to renewable energy, we want to move away from these fossil gases? We've brought people from those communities here, we've given them tours. They've seen how our communities looked. They saw that the lack of resources in our communities, they saw the way people are living in our communities. And they do not want to see sacrifice us for this product. We've brought this to the federal level to say, no, you can no longer say, this is a security issue. This is a you helping your allies. No, this is, again, the US sacrificing minority people who've never been important to the US. Let's be real. When we talking about black and brown people, we've always been of less importance to white or wealthier people. So we're going to just throw whatever we can in these communities. We're going to tell them what we want to get. We're going to get our narrative out first, right? And they're going to buy it. But we got smarter. We started educating each other. We figured out how to have community meetings, how to organize, bring people together and do some storytelling, talk about how my water is brown and it shouldn't be brown. In my community, where I'm paying taxes, where I'm paying, you know, rent or mortgage, I'm doing what I supposed to do. Why is my water brown? Why is it when I walk out of my front door, my air smells like chlorine or it smells like Rodney's? Why is it that I can't plant food in my, you know, in the soil around my house, around my community? Why is it that this facility can be fined over and over and over, yet they still get to operate? Why is it that I can no longer eat more than two pounds of fish out of the local estuaries? So we started connecting those dots, and everything led back to these industries, including LNG, which was supposed to be better than those facilities that were already harming us. So again, whenever we ask, well, how did this roll out? It goes way back. And when they started constructing railroads in our community all the way up to now, it's like it's a continuation.
When they see us winning against one issue, they like, okay. And I always tell black people, we got to be careful, because every time we think we winning is because they already have something else up their sleeve. So when we think we went in against coal, here come LNG. We think we're winning against LNG. Here comes petrochemical. We've always had to keep our head on a swivel because something was coming. And that leads me into why the vessel project exists. We can no longer only fight against things that are coming to our community. What we have to be doing is educating, empowering, building up our communities and making sure that when these facilities, when these project developers, when they go to these federal agencies and these federal regulatory commissions, they can't check a box that say that our communities need economic development because we're developing our community. And that is what vessel project is trying to do, stop whatever is coming next. We're trying to build a community up.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: There's so much to unpack there. And that was such an amazing response to that. But there was a couple things. I was taking a few notes, and I think Jerry and I have been learning throughout so far, when we're talking about hydrogen, when we talk about carbon capture, and now when we talk about LNG, there's this theme here about selling jobs to people in the community, there's something about this idea that something's going to be better than what was there before, even though it's still worse and horrible. And I find that just kind of like, the theme here is, like, finding ways to maneuver themselves into this space, fossil fuel industries and polluting industries, so that they can always have a hold. Right. That's the idea. It's like, well, what's the next thing? As you talked about when you were speaking and just taking that same power in there? That's where they're going to elected officials, and that's when they're going to legislators and regulators, and they're stealing the same pitch. And so there's a lot of people who don't have the same knowledge that you have who also fall for it. Right. Our legislators and regulators don't necessarily have the exact same quipped with the same knowledge to really understand and to think a little more critically and fight back all the time. Right. You know, they can't know everything about everything. So I think it's really important for people like you to kind of really voice why these are a problem and how they are really impacting environmental justice communities, communities of color, low income communities, and how they're being taken advantage of because they're being sold something that is, that is a lie, essentially. But yeah, those were the things that I think I wanted to touch on there as a response. And also there's just so much that you were connected to all of the things that we talk about. And so like, I, you know, even again, didn't know there was such thing as a hurricane charge. I don't live in an area that's considered quite a hurricane zone, even though New York City is experiencing our own versions of hurricanes. It seems like every season now and some of those impacts, but it's almost like these facilities are coming in saying that they're going to promise all of these things and all of these benefits are going to happen, but there are no benefits to it. It seems like there's nothing but harms that keep happening.
[00:29:12] Speaker C: But what we're doing as a community, we're working in silos. We're talking about one issue at a time, which is important because we should be highlighting it, but we should not be pushing away. People are connecting the dots, who's telling the full story? Because the only way we're going to win is if we tell the full story and we paint this full picture. As long as we're working in silos, talking about stopping one facility, another facility is coming. We have to make sure that we're working in coalitions, that we're partnering with each other. Because yes, Rochetta might be over here stopping this facility, but I know I got Doctor Beverly Wright over here, who's on the Ouija, and we come together and that's how we started to win. They're starting to see these connections, these coalitions, these stories being woven together. People are showing up saying the same thing and they're like, wait a minute, I was literally told in Vienna, Austria, while sitting there speaking with members of the green party of Europe, someone looked at me and said, rochetta, you're sitting in the same spot. Doctor Robert Bullock said in ten years ago, and you're saying the exact same things. He said, I was honored. But secondly, why are we still talking about this ten years later? Why hasn't things been done? This didn't just happen overnight. We've had people fighting this for years and enough is enough. Our communities literally can't take anymore. We've been hit with everything. And LNG is where it stops. This is where the bug stops. We have too much access to knowledge and information. Thank God for social media. Thank God for young people.
We have technology. We can connect the dots and paint a. A full picture, and that's how we are now winning. That's why they're now listening to us. They can't hide this stuff from us anymore. They used to say, hide it from us in a book. Well, listen, we don't even need a book because all these kids got to do is go on Google, and it's gonna pop up, and they gonna see. My children amaze me every day with stuff they can pull up and show and research in a minute. I'm thinking I'm giving them, you know, hard jobs and go research this. They come back in ten minutes. Here you go, mom. So, you know, it's not hidden from us anymore. And we are telling the truth. We're telling our stories about what's happening to us, and that's why we're here now. That's why we've been able to be so successful, and we're going to continue to be successful and continue to win.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: Thank you so much for such a comprehensive view of how interconnected these issues are, how deep the history is for this issue of LNG, but just, you know, polluting facilities in general and environmental justice. It goes back as far as you're willing to look in the United States especially. Really as far as back as you want to go. There is environmental justice history there. And I'm grateful for you talking about the storytelling piece and the knowledge. And I know that we're kind of getting near the end of our time together. So, any last thoughts or any last comments or thoughts that you wanted to make sure that we touched on before we wrap up our time together again? We're so grateful that you touched because we couldn't have covered this topic any better without you.
[00:32:42] Speaker C: I just want to thank you all for recognizing the importance of hearing the stories from the front lines, from the people in the communities. We act as such an amazing organization. I always refer people to we act's definition of environmental justice. And I think it's important that we have these definitions documented, because one of the things I want to say before we end this podcast is that I want people to understand that thinking about the climate crisis, you know, that's massive. That's big. That's huge. It seems like too much for any one person to think about. It's too much to bear. But if you think about just the environment and the definition of environment, and you know that your environment starts with your body, your body is the first part of your environment, if you're drinking bad water, if you're breathing in unclean air, you're not going to be your best self. You're not going to feel good. You're not going to want to go to work. You're not going to want to do anything because your environment is being poisoned, right? It starts with you, and then your community is your family, the people who live right there with you. That's the second part of your environment, right? If everybody in your community's water is brown and air is bad, your environment is experiencing injustices.
Start with your body. Start with your community, your local environment. And if we can get everybody to just start with their environment, their communities, that collectively creates the climate and that solves the climate crisis. You don't have to be an activist, a spokesperson. You know, if you're writing a song about it, if you're an artist and you're drawing about it, if you're telling a story about it, if you're bringing your children to, you know, these STEM events that they're having to teach them about science and technology and engineering, whatever it is, to try to make just your environment, your community, better, if we can get that, you know, multiply, that will solve the climate crisis. You don't have to think about it in such a big way. And that is what I try to tell people because it seems so dire. It's like, wait a minute, we're talking about, you know, an article. We're talking about the ice caps. We're talking about polar bears. I ain't never seen a polar bear. I live in Louisiana. You know, I've never seen an ice cap. I've never seen, you know, these icebergs. The only thing I know about the iceberg is that somebody should have shared a mattress in the movie Titanic. That's all I know. Do what it. Do what you need to do to make sure that you have clean air and clean water in your community and that will collectively solve this climate crisis.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: Don't want to say thank you so much, Rochetta. That was, that was a beautiful message. I really appreciate that.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: Thanks for listening. Don't forget to check out the next episode in our wrong direction mini series coming out on August 12. If you liked this episode, make sure to rate and review the show on whatever platform you listen on. If you have thoughts, we encourage you to reach out to us with your thoughts and
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[00:36:01] Speaker A: Also check out we act on Facebook at weact four. EJ, that's w e a c t f o r e jeze. And on Instagram X and YouTube at weact four, EJ. That's weact number four, EJ. And check out our website, weact.org, for more information about environmental justice.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: Until next time.
