Meetings are for show, petitions don't stop anything, if people are serious about stopping this, they will have to have a better lobbyist and more money to pass around the state capitol than the energy folks.
Or, if people are serious about stopping this, they could really stop using less energy whether for home cooling in the summer, petrochemical industry (lots of products that make life easier and depends on natural gas). or other industrial development. Conservation is an option, it is a lot more than a personal virtue. And while the effciency of our appliances increases, so do the number of devices we own that need power (computers, pdas, cel phones) etc. If there is not a demand for the natural gas, there is no need for expensive lng plants. Or, it could be produced locally, as it might have been offshore of Destin up on the Panhandle. As it is, Florida is already importing a lot of natural gas via piplelines. Having it produced somewhere else and shipped in does externalize (make someone else suffer) the environmental impacts that it sounds like a lot of folks at the meeting wished to avoid.
I guess there are no really easy solutions just a lot of alternatives in which some people will be indulged and others will be put upon. Can we at least agree that the population that benefits the most should be required to carry most of the costs whether environmental, aesthetic, or other? Trouble is the assignment and valuation of such costs and benefits are sometimes difficult, what a friend of mine called "an exercise in infinite regression".
I recall that at the Coastal Zone 89 or 91 meeting, an official with the California Coastal Commission asserted that because of the state's stringent appliance energy efficiency standards, they had earned the right not to have offshore oil development off the state's coast, having effectively more than offset the energy equivalent gained from offshore development. An interesting arguement, except that at the time California was importing huge amounts of crude oil from the Alaska North Slope, and Prince William Sound is still showing the effects from the accident that resulted from that development, an unfortunate casualty of modernity (not that I am in any hurry to return to the thrilling days of yesteryear.)