Great gem for attaching images to a rails app (maybe even Laravel). This article made it clear how to set this up
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/paperclip-s3

And this one made it clear why my development environment was not working.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11760597/s3-paperclip-working-on-heroku-but-not-localhost
I had to edit my .bash_profile
But instead of restarting the terminal I just did 

source ~/.bash_profile 

and then started that rails server again in that terminal.

If only I found a tutorial on using fog and paperclip since I am already using that gem for refinerycms