How Russia-Backed Environmentalism Is Leading to Blackouts in New England

F or the holidays this year, blue states gave their constituents the “gift” of blackouts and high electric bills thanks to Kremlin-backed environmental groups that have prevented these states from building pipeline infrastructure and kept them dependent on foreign energy.

Over 230,000 individual power outages were recorded in the New England region on Christmas Eve, with Connecticut alone having 87,056. Though it’s unclear how much can be attributed to typical extreme-weather challenges, this could be a sign of things to come. (While New England has much more experience with winter weather, the Mid-Atlantic and southeastern states had “only” 125,513 and 86,748 outages, respectively.) Adding to the pain is the price of fuel oil: New England went into the holiday weekend paying $30.2 per MMBtu, the rough equivalent of almost $180 for a barrel of oil, or more than double what most Americans are paying.

While not as severe, the outages are reminiscent of the 2003 mass blackout in the Northeast that resulted in nearly 100 deaths. “The most direct way to reduce excess deaths from a blackout is to try to prevent blackouts,” according to Brooke Anderson, one of the researchers behind that estimate.

New England failed to learn that lesson. The region’s slow recovery from the holiday blackouts this year is in part due to the region’s over-dependence on energy imported from America’s enemies. This dependence has forced power-grid operators to consider rolling blackouts and rationing measures.

New England originally planned to get its oil and natural gas from Appalachia, but the necessary pipelines were blocked and canceled starting in 2016 by a series of environmentalist protests targeting the region’s pipeline infrastructure. As Time put it, “The U.S. has a Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) problem with energy infrastructure.”

That resistance is spearheaded by segments of the environmentalist movement nominally more concerned with the fate of fish like the candy darter and the Roanoke logperch than their fellow man’s need for energy during the winter. In reality, some actors likely have more sinister motives: Environmental groups tied to the New England anti-pipeline movement have received tens of millions of dollars in “donations” from Russian-government-run energy companies.

It starts to make sense when you take a closer look at the interests involved. Boston was the U.S. hub of imported Russian oil and natural gas, with about 20 percent of New England’s supply coming from the country, until the invasion of Ukraine. This arrangement provided a boon to the Kremlin’s coffers, one Moscow was keen to preserve by exploiting blue-state environmentalism.

Now the region is reaping the consequences of foreign dependence. ISO New England — which runs the power grids of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont — warned consumers in October that rolling blackouts were possible this winter, as they were “cut off from their traditional Russian suppliers.” The power operator cautioned that “any severe cold spell could strain the power grid, thus requiring rolling blackouts to preserve the balance of electricity supply and demand.”

The folly of blocking vital domestic pipelines has been apparent for years. Before the Ukraine invasion, American oil and gas were about 200 percent cheaper than Russia’s. Further, a 2017 U.S. intelligence report concluded that high-level Russian oil and political interests funded American environmental groups to lobby for regulations and restrictions on fracking and pipelines to reduce competition, using energy as a political weapon against America.

In 2014, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then NATO’s secretary-general, stated: “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations — environmental organizations working against [fracked] shale gas.”

Russian state media are obsessed with scientifically incorrect claims that U.S.-produced energy is dangerous, even producing a documentary on the subject. When New York State banned fracking, the Kremlin propaganda machine praised the move, claiming, “New York is now leading by example.”

Russia-backed environmentalist protests eventually led to a wave of pipeline cancellations, which prevented New England from being powered by excess energy from nearby states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. Blocking the U.S. from tapping its powerful domestic-energy supply is exactly what Vladimir Putin wants.

Russia understands that, in reality, fracking is only dangerous to the Kremlin’s geopolitical power and economic bottom line — and for decades was more than happy to finance green “useful idiots” in blue America to keep New England hooked on Russian energy. Now many New Englanders lack power, because environmentalists increased the region’s dependence on their paymaster. And they can hardly fall back on other forms of energy. While oil and gas from all sources provide about half the region’s supply, just 5 percent of New England’s power came from “renewables” as of late December. Solar generated less than one one-hundredth of a percent.

Anti-pipeline activists alone aren’t to blame; ridiculous American bureaucracy also plays a role. Though the U.S. overtook Russia in 2011 as the world’s largest producer of natural gas and Saudi Arabia in 2018 as the world’s top petroleum producer, overregulation has made moving those fuels within the U.S. difficult. A federal law called the Jones Act makes it cost-prohibitive to transport oil or natural gas on American-flagged ships sailing between U.S. ports. The combination of anti-pipeline activism and this 1920 law has exacerbated the current energy crisis in blue states.

“New England is the sole region of the United States to import LNG [liquefied natural gas] today,” ClimateWire wrote in May, in a warning about how the war in Ukraine could make New England shiver. “New England lacks gas storage. Its pipeline network is limited. . . . The region’s gas plants could face interruptions in fuel supplies during an extended cold snap. Efforts to build new pipeline capacity, meanwhile, have encountered fierce opposition.”

The Northeast isn’t the only part of America dependent on imported oil, as the fracking-led drive for freedom from Middle East petroleum has one giant California-shaped asterisk. A whopping 22.3 percent of the state’s oil imports comes straight from Saudi Arabia, while another 20.4 percent comes from Iraq, according to a 2021 survey by the California Energy Commission.

As America’s blue states suffer blackouts and high energy costs, oil moguls abroad are having a happy holiday season — thanks to anti-pipeline environmentalists and overregulation.