Climate Lawyer Admits (Brags) Lawsuits Are a Back Door Carbon Tax
For years, we’ve tracked and sometimes discussed lawsuits (a better term is lawfare) from the left against fossil fuel companies. These lawsuits seek to blame oil and gas companies for causing global warming by putting “too much” carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, even though you breathe CO2 out with every breath you take, as do all mammals. The left doesn’t even care if it loses these lawsuits (although they’d love to win some of them) because the very act of forcing companies to defend themselves, and paying big money to do so, means they must raise the price of their goods, and consumers eventually pay those higher prices. A Big Green attorney working on some of these lawsuits openly admits—we’d call it bragging—that the lawsuits are a backdoor carbon tax aimed at forcing consumers to pay more. It’s SICK. Read More “Climate Lawyer Admits (Brags) Lawsuits Are a Back Door Carbon Tax”
In October of last year, MDN told you that both EQT Corporation and Tenaska are “dipping their toes” in the carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) space (see 
In April, MDN told you about a new greenfield expansion of Kinder Morgan’s Elba Express pipeline into South Carolina to serve growing demand for natural gas in the state (see 
On September 29, some 105 Democrat state legislators from 10 states across the PJM Interconnection region released a joint letter urging PJM to take immediate action to accelerate the deployment of unreliable renewable energy projects—to favor unreliable renewables over fossil fuels. The letter, organized by the partisan left-wing National Caucus of Environmental Legislators (NCEL), highlights urgent concerns about grid reliability, rising energy costs, and recent federal actions against renewable energy. A group of Pennsylvania Republican legislators responded with their own letter asking PJM to disregard the lunatic letter from NCEL. 
In 2022, then-Massachusetts Attorney General (now Governor) Maura Healey bragged she had “stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state” and that she opposes new natgas infrastructure in the state. 
Nations at a meeting of the UN’s International Maritime Organization voted to delay by one year a decision on a global tax on carbon emissions from shipping. The U.S. campaigned against the measure, with President Donald Trump and other officials arguing it was an “untenable global carbon tax” that would harm the U.S. economy. The delay, a major win for Trump, was backed by 57 countries, including the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia, while European nations and the UK, which had supported the regulations, were on the losing side of the vote. 
Earlier this week, a seven-member, all-Democrat group of Pennsylvania House of Representatives members announced a six-bill legislative package aimed at regulating the “responsible development” of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in the state. “Responsible development” is code for “no development” of new AI data centers. The proposed onerous legislation focuses on environmental and community impacts related to the centers’ water and energy use, emergency preparedness, community standards, and transparency. Don’t be fooled. This is an attempt to throttle new data centers to prevent more natural gas from being used to power them. 
Ohio Democrat House members have introduced a bill to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. House Bill (HB) 399 would ban fracking under Lake Erie (which has NEVER been proposed or even thought of), and ban fracking under state-owned parks, which is now happening. With respect to drilling under (not on) state-owned parks, when it happens, nobody knows it’s happening (see 
Pennsylvania state Rep. Greg Vitali, a radical Democrat and the majority chairman of the state House Environmental & Natural Resource Protection Committee, introduced legislation (H.B. 1946) this week that would increase the current setback distances for unconventional oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania from 500 feet to 2,500 feet, effectively banning all new shale drilling in the state. Period. End of sentence. And Vitali (and the other radicals who have signed on to the bill) know it. The bill doesn’t stand a chance in the Republican-controlled Senate, but that’s not the point. The point is (a) fundraising, and (b) there is no other reason, except fundraising. 
Unintended (but entirely predictable) consequences are now happening in New York State. In January 2023, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a leftist Democrat, floated a plan to ban natural gas hookups in every single new home and business across the “Empire” State (see 
Commonwealth LNG is developing a 9.5 MTPA (million tonnes per annum) liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project located near Cameron, Louisiana. In September, Commonwealth announced it had signed a deal with EQT Corporation to provide 1.0 MTPA of LNG for EQT to resell (see 
Radical environmentalists once again have their knickers in a twist. When don’t they? In August, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) reissued a certificate for the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) project, a billion-dollar-plus project designed to increase Transco pipeline capacity and flows of Marcellus gas heading into New York City and other northeastern markets by an extra 400 MMcf/d (see 
In January, MDN brought you the great news that the six largest banks in the United States had canceled their memberships in the awful Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), a group of woke banks under the umbrella of the equally terrible United Nations (see 
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility in the country. In 2021, MDN told you that TVA is spending over $1 billion to replace six coal-fired plants with natgas-fired turbines (see 
In April, Knighthead Capital Management, Homer City Redevelopment (HCR), and Kiewit Power Constructors Co. announced a plan to convert the former Homer City Generating Station, previously the largest coal-fired power plant in Pennsylvania (Indiana County, 50 miles east of Pittsburgh) into a more than 3,200-acre natural gas-powered data center campus, designed to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (see