This is how stupid liberals are: They think banning fossil fuels, like natural gas, will lead to less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It doesn’t. Citywide (and soon statewide) bans preventing the use of natural gas for cooking and home heating actually force the use of *more* natural gas, not less. We explain how and why below.
Read More “Natural Gas Bans in Cities Lead to the Use of MORE Natural Gas”
Joe Biden visited Pittsburgh yesterday to make a major policy announcement. Fortunately, he was lucid enough to actually know which city he was in! Biden unveiled a $2 trillion “American Jobs Plan” which raises corporate and individual tax income rates. It is half of his total package (another plan with another $2 trillion is coming in a few weeks). The Jobs Plan is supposed to be a plan to rebuild roads and bridges and other infrastructure. The Jobs Plan is misnamed. Much of the money has nothing to do with infrastructure and jobs. Instead, it’s the Green New Deal under another name, targeting the elimination of fossil energy in the name of saving the planet.
Read More “Biden $2T Jobs Plan the Green New Deal Repackaged – a DISASTER”
MDN friend Tom Shepstone has published a fascinating confessional from an attorney who used to be a committed “environmentalist” but who has left the left and now calls himself a conservationist. This is an important article to read because it captures the essence of everything that is wrong with the environmental left in this country and around the world. It chronicles the change in the environmental movement over the past 20-30 years. It illustrates the difference between reasonable and unreasonable.
Read More “Transformation from Environmental Radical to True Conservationist”
Joe Biden is proposing an insane “infrastructure” plan that will run into the trillions of dollars. All of that money comes from somewhere folks. Money is not free and you can’t simply print it forever without inflation going haywire and the U.S. becoming the new Venezuela. But we digress. As part of spending more money on infrastructure, Biden is looking to change the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which regulates construction of infrastructure, by putting back into place strangling regulations that Donald Trump relaxed so it doesn’t take a decade to build a new road.
Read More “Biden Looks to Block O&G Pipelines by Expanding NEPA Red Tape”
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf continues his efforts to force his state, without approval by its citizens (via the legislature) to join the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a glorified carbon tax on coal- and gas-fired power plants. What Wolf and his lackey Pat McDonnell at the Dept. of Environmental Protection refuse to tell PA citizens is just how high the RGGI carbon tax has climbed. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports the most recent RGGI quarterly auction, held on March 3, 2021, resulted in the highest price (tax) per ton of CO2 yet.
Read More “RGGI Carbon Tax Hits All-Time High – Gas-Fired Plants Close”
Yet another attack on the oil and gas industry by the officially out-of-control Democrats in Congress. In years gone by a few fringe leftists from the Democrat Party have introduced several bills, including the FRAC Act, aimed at permanently ripping the U.S. Constitution apart by overriding states’ rights to regulate and control oil and gas drilling within their own borders. Using the faux excuse of man-made global warming, the FRAC Act overrides the individual states and grants broad/sweeping power to the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate fracking. The Dems are at it again, reintroducing the FRAC Act and four other bills (called the “Frack Pack”), all aimed at restricting/eliminating fracking nationwide.
Read More “Democrats Intro 5 Bills, Including FRAC Act, to Ban Fracking Everywhere”
Two radical left Democrat FERC commissioners and one backstabbing RINO FERC commissioner voted last week to approve an 87-mile natural gas pipeline project in South Dakota and Nebraska. So a natural gas pipeline was approved by two Dems and a RINO (this is not a joke setup). The approval is a good thing, right? No, it’s not. The criteria they used in approving the project establishes a new precedent, new guidelines, that will be used for all pipeline projects going forward. The precedent is to consider how much man-made global warming a new pipeline will generate, which is (of course) nonsensical and can’t actually be measured. In other words, these three will now use made-up, pretend nonsense numbers of their own choosing to decide whether or not to approve any and all pipeline projects moving forward.
Read More “FERC Changes How it Approves NatGas Pipes, Chatterjee a Backstabber”
In July 2018 three radical environmental groups dropped their objections to permits the Pennsylvania DEP previously granted for the Mariner East 2 Pipeline. Clean Air Council, Mountain Watershed Association, and THE Delaware Riverkeeper “settled” their appeal of 20 permits issued to Sunoco for the ME2 project (see Enviro Groups Back Down on Challenging DEP Permits for ME2 Pipe). After settling, the radicals demanded that Sunoco/Mariner East pay $228,246 in legal fees, even though the radicals are the ones who did the suing! Last month Commonwealth Court told the radicals to go pound sand (see ME2 Pipe Does NOT have to Pay Anti Attorneys in Lawsuit Settlement). The radicals are now petitioning the PA Supreme Court to hear the case and force ME2 to pay for sky-high attorney fees that the radicals chose to pursue!
Read More “PA Antis Still Trying to Shake Down ME2 Pipe for Attorney Fees”
Who’s actually worse–New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, or New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio? It’s hard to say. They’re both wacko leftists, although we’d say de Blasio is slightly left of Cuomo. Recently de Blasio proposed banning natural gas hookups in new buildings in NYC by 2030. It’s bloody nuts, but then so is de Blasio. He never bothers to calculate the cost of his reckless policies. Someone just has. The Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) did a detailed analysis of what de Blasio’s natural gas ban will end up costing NYC residents. The pricetag? $25,600 per household on average!
Read More “Study Shows de Blasio’s NYC NatGas Ban to Cost Each Household $25K”
Natural gas supporters in the Ohio and Pennsylvania legislatures are working to pass bills that will prohibit local municipalities in the state from banning the use of natural gas. Smart move. You might think such bans would not, could not happen in big oil and gas producing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, or West Virginia. You would be wrong. The cancer of anti-fossil fuel radicalism has spread across the country, funded by Big Green groups (like the Sierra Club), and is coming to a local municipality near you. Best to get out in front of it (on the state level) right now and ensure it doesn’t happen here, in the heart of the Marcellus/Utica.
Read More “OH, PA Bills Prevent Natural Gas Bans by Local Municipalities”
In a brilliant move aimed at boxing in the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), two northeastern Pennsylvania State Senators–Gene Yaw and Lisa Baker–along with members of the PA Senate Republican Caucus, filed a lawsuit in January against the DRBC accusing the quasi-governmental agency of “taking” the property rights of PA residents without just compensation under the law (see PA Senators Sue DRBC for “Taking” Property re Frack Ban). A group of 16 PA Democrat Senators has just filed to “intervene” in the lawsuit.
Read More “16 PA Senate Democrats Try to Block Republican DRBC Lawsuit”
It’s kind of funny to watch how leftists react when something doesn’t go their way. Tell someone on the left “no” or “wait” or “you’ll have to pay for that” and they melt like snowflakes. Sometimes they pitch the equivalent of a temper tantrum. That was our thought as we read about a leftist Democrat politician from New Jersey, Lisa McCormick, and her reaction to the Biden administration filing a brief that supports the PennEast Pipeline in U.S. Supreme Court.
Read More “NJ Antis Throw Temper Tantrum After Biden Supports PennEast”
On Monday a federal judge with the U.S. District Court in Ohio put a temporary hold on issuing any more oil and gas drilling permits to drill on previously issued leases in the (mostly privately-owned) Wayne National Forest (WNF) in Ohio. The judge cited the Biden administration’s hold on all federal leasing/drilling permits until it completes its political analysis first. The only good news is that the judge refused to toss WNF leases entirely, as was requested by rabid anti-fossil fuel nutters. The antis are still thrilled with the ruling. The judge’s action in blocking new permits directly affects Eclipse Resources (now Southwestern Energy) which owns leases they can now not drill on.
Read More “Federal Judge Blocks Permits to Drill in OH’s Wayne Natl Forest”
Three Democrat U.S. Senators are (once again) targeting natural gas for extinction. The new (but in reality old) way they’re attempting it is by floating a bill that would (if passed) assess an insanely high new tax on “methane emissions” from the oil and gas industry. The stated purpose is to “encourage” oil and gas companies to clamp down on methane emissions (something already happening without the “help” of these idiots, see NatGas Coalition Beats Methane Emissions Goal by 67% in 2019). What’s not in the bill is a plan to tax methane emissions from the #1 worldwide contributor to fugitive methane: agriculture.
Read More “New Federal Bill by Dems Unfairly Targets O&G Methane Emissions”
What a sad state of affairs. The very governmental agency charged with ensuring large corporations maintain honesty in their dealings with investors, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has devolved into a hack witch-hunting organization bent on locating and punishing those who disagree with a certain political view–the view that somehow mankind is causing catastrophic global warming. If corporations publicly utter anything outside the prescribed Communist diktat about global warming, the SEC will now come down on them like a ton of bricks. How sad and tragic.
Read More “SEC has 1,000 Witch-Hunters Ready to Smoke Out Climate Deniers”
Two Democrat federal judges with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (D.C. Circuit) are second-guessing a long-completed and flowing natural gas pipeline in the St. Louis, MO area–a pipeline that flows Marcellus/Utica gas to residents, businesses, and electric generating plants in the region. Why are we not surprised?
Read More “Democrat Fed Judges Grill FERC on Already-Done Spire Pipeline”