Anti-Drilling/Fossil Fuel | Energy Companies | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Range Resources Corp | Regulation | Washington County
Cecil Twp Proposes Ban on New Shale Drilling via 2,500-Ft Setback
The Board of Supervisors for Cecil Township in Washington County, PA, has caved to pressure from radical leftists and is floating a plan to effectively ban all new shale drilling in the township by increasing setbacks from “protected structures” from 500 feet to 2,500 feet (a half a mile!). The supervisors will hold a special meeting tonight to discuss this lunacy. We strongly recommend you attend and voice your opposition.
Read More “Cecil Twp Proposes Ban on New Shale Drilling via 2,500-Ft Setback”
By now, you’ve read here on MDN and likely heard via mainstream news that Kamala Harris claims she’s had a change of heart and won’t (if she’s elected president, God perish the thought) ban fracking. How magnanimous of her. Praise Kamala. We don’t believe her for a New York minute, and neither should you. However, her recent remarks in attempting to rewrite history that she never did want to ban fracking (liar!) and that she won’t now is not sitting well with climate zealots in Pennsylvania. People like THE Delaware Riverkeeper and the co-founder of the Better Path Coalition. 
As we often point out when discussing the fugitive methane issue, the number one source of fugitive methane emissions, at 40%, is Mom Earth herself (i.e., “natural”). The number two source, at 24%, is agriculture. The number three source, at 21%, is oil and gas operations. Yet global warming nutjobs ONLY focus on emissions from O&G and ignore the other 79% of sources, including natural. Every now and again the nutters will mention other sources to try to protect their tattered reputations. Even then, they twist the science. Get this latest howler: Burning fossil fuels, which supposedly causes global warming, “may” be causing Mom Earth to emit even more fugitive methane that she otherwise would emit. So, we all must stop using fossil fuels right now or risk obliterating all life on earth. Or something like that. 
EPA Administrator Michael Regan used a considerable amount of fossil energy and emitted tons of carbon dioxide to jet over to Dubai last December to participate in the COP28 confab, where he released a final rule that was “two years in the making” to force the U.S. oil and gas industry to cut methane emissions by using budget-busting new technologies and onerous (frequent) inspections (see 
A Ph.D. writing an article for the Forbes website touts efforts by the radicalized Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in sniffing out methane by using both planes and (now) satellites. The Ph.D. opens his article with a factually incorrect statement: “MethaneSAT is a satellite designed to measure emissions of methane, the second most common greenhouse gas (GHG).” Water vapor is Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas. It’s responsible for about half of Earth’s greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide comes in at number two. Methane is a distant third in the list. Given the incorrect opening statement by our Ph.D., it makes you wonder what other mistakes there are in the article.
A lawsuit being heard this summer is designed to hold Big Green groups responsible for their actions. Energy Transfer (ET), the owner and operator of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAP), is suing Greenpeace and other alleged instigators for $300 million for the damages sustained by the company as a result of violent protests incited by the groups in North Dakota in 2016. Big Green is scared.
New York State has become the North Korea of the United States. It is narrow and parochial and devoid of freedom. If you operate a business in New York and you are not in a protected or favored class, or if your business does not bribe someone in the Democrat Party, you are in danger of losing that business. New York is aggressively hostile to any business remotely connected to fossil fuels. A “bitcoin miner” operating in beautiful Upstate NY, near the shore of Seneca Lake, uses a clean-burning (very small) natural gas power plant to power its 15,300 computer servers. The radical Democrats running the state, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, want it shut down and gone. Last October, NY antis were close to achieving their objective. But what’s this? The bitcoin miner is hanging tough and challenging the state in court. The facility is still online!
In March, we reported that two Democrats and one anti-drilling RINO who run Bucks County, PA government (a Philadelphia suburb) fell for the bait by Big Green and filed a lawsuit against Big Oil companies for supposedly, knowingly, causing the Earth to toast to a cinder (see 
For a leftist, the glass is always half empty, and the pie is always a fixed size. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe in human ingenuity and the American spirit of bigger and better and can-do and let’s get it done. It’s a stark contrast. Here’s the perfect example. Big pipeline companies and others are touting the coming rapid expansion in data centers due to artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of this being good news — the prospect of helping humans make new leaps in technology and breakthroughs in medicine and other sectors — leftists view AI expansion as a threat because it will use more electricity…electricity generated by dirty, evil fossil fuels.
We’re forced to report on a bill in New York State that is so stupid, it’s beyond words. We’ll do our best. The Democrats in the NY legislature passed a bill earlier this year that would create a “superfund” (big old pot of money) to be fed by slapping an illegal tax/fee on oil and gas corporations. The fee is to “pay back” the state for causing mythical global warming. (Create a mythical problem out of nothing, then create a faux cause of that problem — burning fossil fuels — in order to justify shaking down specific companies.) The NY bill would extract an astonishing $75 billion over the next 25 years — roughly $3 billion a year. It will never happen (never work) because O&G companies will fight it in court for years to come, but perhaps that is the point: to tie up O&G in court and encourage them to leave the state. You see, NY is closed for business. 
Have you ever noticed how anti-drilling leftists demand the right to mouth off whenever and wherever they want? If you deny them that opportunity, they get grumpy, fast. Last Friday, representatives from the U.S. Dept. of Energy and private company Allegheny Science and Technology (coordinating the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub, or ARCH2) held a virtual briefing about the ARCH2 project. So-called concerns and questions were not addressed until 40 minutes into the briefing, and then, only about 10 of the hundreds of questions antis flooded the call with got addressed. That ticked off the antis.
Here’s a sobering fact: A web of red tape and environmentalist lawfare in the courts have derailed six of the last seven proposed interstate pipeline projects that could have delivered Appalachian natural gas to New England, the Southeast, and other regions of critical demand. The only pipeline to survive was the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and it took a literal Act of Congress to get it across the finish line. Here’s another sobering fact: Oil and gas pipeline approvals have dropped by 50% during the Biden-Harris administration (compared to the last three presidents before Biden). The precipitous drop was on purpose.