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"The geopolitical gains are worth the minuscule environmental alterations."

Funny how that calculus only applies to us rural folks. Nobody picks a route through the suburbs, bulldozes everything along it, and tells them they'll just have to live with it for the greater good even though it has no direct benefit to the area.

To be clear, I realize the value of pipelines and I also realize it's a heckuva lot cheaper to put where there are less people.

But the pipelines pick the route based on their convenience and cost savings (and sometimes for no particular reason at all), then they use the feds through FERC as a hammer to force property owners to capitulate. By the time most people affected know what's happening, the decisions have been made and there's no recourse.

If a project like this had gone through a populated area, there would have been endless public meetings with even the remotest stakeholders consulted. Everyone would know what's coming. Even today, less than a month before construction begins and the town sees a huge influx of people, there's been no articles in the local paper, and the vast majority of townspeople I've spoken to have no idea a pipeline is going through here. We don't even have traffic lights in town.

I work at the only medical facility in the county and it hasn't occurred to anyone to let us know we may have a surge in patients when our population triples.

The sad thing is that most people would probably support the project because they are patriotic and do see the benefit. But the way the project's been managed, I expect a lot of people to be furious that nobody bothered to let us collectively know what to expect. That callousness towards rural people and the disruption to their lives is all too typical and unfortunately, it's a conscious choice.