PennEast Pipe – A Study in Rationality vs. Irrationality
Last Wednesday MDN told you that PennEast Pipeline, a $1+ billion new greenfield pipeline project from Luzerne County, PA to Mercer County, NJ, was close to resubmitting an application for the project with the New Jersey Dept. of Environmental Protection (see PennEast Pipe Readies Revised NJ Freshwater Wetlands Permit). The very next day, on Thursday, PennEast filed the reworked application. An article chronicling the new application is instructive in the pipeline debate–pointing out the positions of those in favor and those against.
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Chester County, PA District Attorney Tom Hogan has sunk to a new low. We told you back in January Hogan and his highly-paid staff, motivated by politics, were investigating Energy Transfer, their Sunoco Logistics division and anyone/anything to do with ET’s Mariner East pipeline projects, looking for “crimes.” All he found were minor violations by two off-duty PA constables (see 
A paid political activist who is not a doctor but works for the so-called Physicians for Social Responsibility (left wing group), told a hearing in Murrysville (Westmoreland County), PA on Wednesday that she could not prove fracking leads to negative health affects on those living near the activity, but in the very next breath she essentially said it does, saying there’s a “strong correlation” between fracking an ill health. Her proof? A list of Big Green-paid for “health studies” (propaganda campaigns).
We don’t know if you watched any of the most recent round of Democrat presidential debates. We couldn’t hack it personally. But some brave souls did, including Katie Klaber, former (founding) head of the Marcellus Shale Coalition and now head of her own consulting firm. Katie points out Bernie Sanders said the oil and gas industry is willfully destroying and planet and said those of us in the industry are engaging in “criminal activity.” You might just dismiss it as “just crazy Bernie,” he always talks that way. Except other candidates said equally disturbing things about the fossil fuel industry too. Katie says it’s time for candidates to stop vilifying our industry. She’s right.
We have a proud tradition in America of vigorous debate and free speech. We have protests. We still, for now, have a free press where we can express our ideas–whether others agree with us or not. But some on the environmental left go too far. They don’t just protest, they break the law. Some even become violent. Take the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project, as an example.
This is no joke. It’s not an “Onion” piece where we’re trying to fool you. In June the New York State legislature passed a horrific “energy” bill that was later signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (see 
Yet another cockamamie “study” (i.e. propaganda) about the negatives of fracking–this one done by the University of New Hampshire claiming a few hikers and outdoor enthusiasts in Pennsylvania will have to find someplace else to hike and enthuse…because of evil Marcellus fracking. The thing that really angers us is that Pennsylvania taxpayers paid for this “study”!
Lee Wasserman is director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a New York-based charity started in 1967 by heirs of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Wasserman is a man-causes-global-warming Kool Aid drinker, and he uses the considerable money available to him to “fight climate change.” For a smart guy he’s really, really dumb. In a New York Times editorial last week, Wasserman paraded his ignorance for all to see by declaring the petroleum industry’s continued search for oil and gas is “rampant corporate irrationality.”
The actions of one man seeking access to confidential risk assessments and plans for the Mariner East pipelines in the Philadelphia area will, if successful, put information into the public domain that terrorists can potentially use. Note we don’t believe it is the intent of this man to grant access to sensitive information to terrorists. But that is the consequence, the outcome, the result of his actions–if a court now reviewing the case grants his request.
The same U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judges who quoted from Dr. Seuss’ book “The Lorax” in a previous decision against Dominion Energy’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) have, once again, delivered another blow to ACP. In a very poor decision issued on Friday, the clown judges overturned reissued permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for the project, claiming the permits don’t do enough to protect bumble bees and bats.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper has engaged in a months-long smear campaign to imply the shale industry in southwestern PA is guilty of causing a “cluster” of rare childhood cancers–even though there’s an old uranium dump in the same vicinity as those cancer clusters (see 
Earlier this week MDN told you that a New Jersey state appeals court shot down a lawsuit (one of many) against New Jersey Natural Gas’ (NJNG) $130 million, 22-mile natural gas pipeline project called the Southern Reliability Link (see 
Less than 24 people (some of them paid protesters) gathered at a park in Jersey City, NJ to protest and ask NJ’s leftist Governor, Phil Murphy, to block NJ Transit’s plan to build a tiny 140-megawatt natural gas-fired electric plant in Kearny, NJ (see 
Fossil fuel haters who refuse to allow a new natural gas pipeline in Massachusetts are causing real economic harm in cities like Holyoke. The mayor of Holyoke is one of those inflicting economic harm–on his own citizens!–by opposing a small 2.1-mile expansion of the Tennessee Gas Pipeline. A Holyoke City Council member is floating a resolution to support the pipeline, trying to change hearts and minds. Is he spitting in the wind?
The City of Philadelphia owns the largest municipal-owned natural gas utility in the country, Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW). Philly sits not far from, and now benefits from, abundant, clean-burning natural gas deposits in the PA Marcellus. And yet there are those lunatic nutjobs who want Philadelphia to do what the city of Berkeley, California (which we call Beserkley) did and ban the use of natural gas in new buildings. Philly, to its shame, is conducting a “study” to figure out how to transition PGW away from selling natgas. The so-called study is being funded by Bloomberg, meaning it’s a shame from the start–not a true study but a propaganda piece.