Massachusetts Senator Conducts Faux NED Pipeline Scoping Hearing
In a shameless act of political pandering, the president of the Massachusetts State Senate, Stan Rosenberg (Democrat), ran his own version of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) scoping hearing. Such hearings, while meant to elicit useful information about where a pipeline should, and should not, run, usually devolve into freak shows by anti-drilling zealots who parade and preen before the cameras and microphones–making fools of themselves. We’ve seen it many times before. So Rosenberg, apparently not satisfied that there’s not a FERC hearing every week where anti-drilling zealots in Mass. can gripe and moan and complain, set up his own faux session. He “listened” to some 60 people complain about the proposed Kinder Morgan Northeast Energy Direct pipeline. Stan says he’s going to hand deliver transcriptions of the entire sordid affair to FERC, personally…
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We have a troubling development to report about the future of drilling in West Virginia–something that has happened largely under the radar, until now. More than 200 residents in WV (likely those who don’t own the mineral rights under their land) began filing “scores” of “nuisance” lawsuits over the past couple of years against Antero Resources and Hall Drilling, in places like Doddridge County. The lawsuits claim excessive traffic, odors and noise from nearby drilling make it “impossible” for them to enjoy their homes. Each lawsuit has its own unique circumstances and should be handled separately–one size does not fit all. The troubling development is that all of these lawsuits (dozens? hundreds?) have been rolled up into one mega lawsuit that sits before the WV Mass Litigation Panel…
Grant Township in Indiana County, PA has a problem: They’ve hired a potty mouth lawyer to represent them who has a HUGE conflict of interest. Grant’s town attorney is also the lawyer for (and executive director of) the litigious and extreme left-wing group Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a group committed to ending the use of fossil fuels. We’ve written plenty about the antics of the CELDF, including their lawsuit on behalf of an ecosystem (see 
A researcher with the California Institute of Technology has taken a close look at what would happen if five major universities–Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia and NYU–heeded the siren call of anti-fossil fuel nutters to divest their considerable endowments from holding any fossil fuel-related stocks. Just those five universities would lose a combined $200 million of value in their stock portfolios should they divest from fossil fuel stocks. Such efforts have been going on for some time. Not long ago Syracuse University divested all fossil fuel stocks, which will lead to losses in their endowment fund (see 
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has buckled to pressure from politicians to schedule yet another scoping hearing in New Hampshire (the third such hearing in tiny NH, the 14th overall), and extend the period for public comments, for the Kinder Morgan Northeast Energy Direct pipeline project that would bring much-needed supplies of abundant, cheap and clean-burning Marcellus/Utica Shale gas to New England (see 
So four anti-drillers are sitting at a bar…no wait–that’s another story. Four anti-drilling activists who teach at three different colleges–University of Florida, Florida State University, and North Carolina State University (none of them nowhere near the Marcellus/Utica Shale)–got together and concocted a sham study that used an ONLINE survey of 225 people (i.e. unscientific) in the Marcellus/Utica region who visit public parks. Based on the GIGO survey results, the researchers say one-third of Appalachian folks ain’t a goin’ to no park with frackin’ nearby, nosiree. Of course, it’s likely they wouldn’t even know whether or not there is fracking nearby since you typically can’t tell from more than a few hundred feet away where a well is being drilled. We wonder if the researchers also asked the same 225 if they would fly in to or out of an airport with fracking nearby? If that’s your criteria for whether or not to do something, whether there’s fracking nearby, you won’t be using Pittsburgh International Airport where some 47 wells are being drilled as we write this…
Pennsylvania anti-drillers from a local chapter of the Izaak Walton League, a so-called conservation organization, attempted a smear job on the Marcellus Shale industry–and it’s come back to bite them. The Izaak Walton gang has been testing water from Ten Mile Creek that runs through Washington and Greene counties in western PA for the past four years. Last year the League raised an alarm that there are high levels of radiation and other nasty things in the creek. The League immediately started pointing a finger at the Marcellus industry, accusing drillers of illegally dumping untreated wastewater in the creek (see 
We shouldn’t be, but we’re stunned. We’ve discovered that anti-drillers are funding studies to discover how best to fool you. What words, phrases, stories and lies will resonate the best, and move low information types, to oppose fossil fuels. They study it and actually publish their findings (crow about it) for all the world to see! We’ve known for a long time that so-called peer reviewed research is nothing more than bought-and-paid-for propaganda (read this recent story in the New York Times: 
Although anti-fossil fuel nutters in New York State have worked to oppose converting electric generating plants from burning coal to clean-burning natural gas (see 
A dozen aging protesters (some of them former hippies) paced back and forth with apparently with nothing better to do, in front of an office building in Pittsfield, Massachusetts where Kinder Morgan has a small office. The protesters were there to demand that New Englanders continue to pay 4x what everyone else across the country pays for electricity, and to protest in favor of rolling blackouts in New England when electricity supplies dip because of high demand and lack of generating capacity, and to protest the availability of abundant, cheap, and clean-burning natural gas to heat their homes. Yep, they are stark, raving mad–and taken seriously by the liberal media in Massachusetts which covers this tiny minority of wackos as if they represent “everybody” in New England. The protesters, in their own words, told reporters why they oppose Kinder Morgan’s Northeast Energy Direct pipeline that will bring cheap, abundant and clean-burning Marcellus Shale gas to Massachusetts and other New England states: because they hate all fossil fuels, including clean-burning natural gas…
This story is amusing–PA Democrat infighting over the composition of the PA Gov. Tom Wolf’s Pipeline Infrastructure Task Force. You’ll recall we brought you Wolf’s announcement that the PennFuture Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley, would head a new task force to oversee (i.e. slow down) the development of local shale gas gathering pipelines (see 
The Philadelphia-based anti-fossil fuel group Clean Air Council has announced through their media/public relations mouthpiece (the taxpayer-funded PBS StateImpact Pennsylvania) that they’ve launched yet another frivolous lawsuit–this time against Sunoco Logistics and their Mariner East 2 pipeline plan. Clean Air Council has launched so many lawsuits against the oil and gas industry we’ve lost count of the number. The Clean Air Council, once called The Delaware Valley Citizens’ Council for Clean Air, is a non-profit (i.e. non-taxed) group engaging in political activity in violation of their non-profit charter–yet government officials ignore those violations. The Clean Air Council, without standing, filed a lawsuit in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas (the lowest trial court, essentially what other states call county court), charging that Sunoco Logistics, contrary to decades of accepted recognition as a public utility in Pennsylvania, is not actually a public utility and therefore cannot assert eminent domain against a few holdout landowners who refuse to allow the Mariner East 2 pipeline to be placed next to the existing Mariner East 1 pipeline already crossing their land…
It is time to get involved in the fight to end climate change madness that has metastasized in the brains of lunatic Democrats like Barack Hussein Obama. Paul Driessen, senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) which sponsors the All Pain No Gain petition against global-warming hype, and a senior policy adviser to the Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death, writes in a new column that there ARE climate issues we need to fix: the climate of fraud, corruption, and policies that kill jobs, hope and yes, kill people too. Paul doesn’t hold back. He has analyzed Obama’s recently released Clean Power Plan (CPP) and finds that if Obama’s plan is allowed to stand, it will limit the use of natural gas in electric power plants by 22% above 2012 levels until 2022, and after that, it limits natgas to only a 5% increase. In other words, Obama wants to choose how the electricity you use gets generated, instead of letting the free market choose. It’s obscene. It’s tyranny. It’s dictatorial. And, frankly, it’s un-American. Here’s how Paul’s latest column begins…
A potentially troubling development in Penn Township (Westmoreland County), PA. Apex Energy had a permit from the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection to drill a Marcellus Shale well in Penn Twp. An anti-drilling group called Protect PT filed a lawsuit against the town for allowing the well to be drilled with first requiring a full environmental impact statement (EIS)–something that drives up the cost of drilling a well. The town caved to pressure and withdrew permission to drill, so Apex also sued the town. A deal has been worked out. Apex will have to pay for and conduct an EIS, and then they will be allowed to drill. Other towns populated with anti-drillers are catching wind of it and eyeing it as a potential way to slow or stop drilling in their towns…
The idiotic governor of Hawaii, David Ige, recently signed legislation that will bankrupt his state down the road. Ige, with an irrational hatred of fossil fuels, including clean-burning natural gas, signed a bill in June that requires the state to use electricity derived 100% from so-called renewable sources by 2045–just 30 short years from now. This week Ige said that does not include the use of natural gas. Good luck with that. Germany is trying to transition to 100% renewable electricity and their electric rates are through the roof, stifling business and driving companies out of the country because they can’t afford to operate there. That’s the future for Hawaii. In particular Ige dissed LNG this week saying that even though it’s cheap and getting cheaper, “it is a fossil fuel.” There you have it. Fossil fuel prejudice on full display. We once coined the phrase “fracking derangement syndrome” or FDS for anti-drillers in the northeast. Seems to fit Gov. Ige too. Here’s the thing: the pen Ige used to sign the bill into law was made from and with the use of fossil fuels (plastics). His clothes? Made from plastic fibers, i.e. fossil fuels. The shoes on his feet? Partially made out of fossil fuels, and the energy used to make them came from fossil fuels. Same for the chair he sat in, the desk he used, the cameras snapping his picture, the car he drove to work, the materials used to build the governor’s mansion…all done with fossil fuels. It is IRRATIONAL to hate and restrict the use of fossil fuels because of an idiotic belief in man-made global warming. When will people like Gov. Ige wake up? His dangerous and twisted belief has just sentenced Hawaii to become little more than a third world country economically. Hopefully a future governor will reverse course…