Transformation from Environmental Radical to True Conservationist
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 
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.
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 
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.
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?
Masquerading as a nonpartisan, independent nonprofit, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) reportedly “conducts research and analyses on financial and economic issues related to energy and the environment.” The Institute’s stated mission is “to accelerate the transition to a diverse, sustainable and profitable energy economy.” In other words, they’re anti-fossil fuel, populated by biased Democrats with a vested interest in seeing Big Oil and Big Gas bankrupted. It’s no surprise the IEEFA just released a “report” saying the financial rationale for building the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) has “evaporated” and, you know, Equitrans (the builder) should just forget about finishing the project and write off the billions already spent.