Maryland Dems Introduce Liability Bill in Attempt to Ban Fracking
Maryland’s anti-drillers aren’t going down without a fight. On his way out of office, Maryland Democrat Martin O’Malley set the wheels in motion to allow fracking in the state (see Maryland Gets Ready to Frack! Gov O’Malley Files New Regulations). Almost immediately a Maryland Democrat in the House of Delegates, from a Washington, DC suburb, introduced a moratorium bill (see Maryland Delegate Introduces Moratorium, Before Fracking Begins). That bill isn’t getting any traction, so the Dems have returned to a favorite tactic used by totalitarian governments around the world: you’re guilty until you prove you’re innocent. It’s the exact opposite of the jurisprudence philosophy that underpins the greatest country on earth–ours. In the USA, you’re innocent until proven guilty. But a new bill just introduced in the Maryland legislature, actually supported by Maryland’s Democrat attorney general, would flip that around and presume drillers are at fault if there’s the least little change in water quality, air quality, etc. Under this bill, you’re guilty and YOU WILL PAY until you prove otherwise. In other words, this bill is a ban on drilling flying under a different name…
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There is an effort underway–a serious effort–for towns along the border in some upstate New York counties to secede from New York State and join Pennsylvania. Why? Because of New York’s ban on hydraulic fracturing. And no, this is not an early April Fool’s joke. MDN first started hearing of secession talk shortly after Gov. Cuomo’s disgraceful cabinet meeting in which he let bootlickers Howard Zucker (State Health Commissioner) and Joe Martens (DEC Commissioner) take the fall for a ban on fracking–a ban Cuomo himself wanted. We saw some signs and heard a few mentions of secession and chalked it up to understandably high emotions over Cuomo stealing away their future. But it seems it’s not just so much hot air. A group called the Upstate New York Towns Association has done some polling and found 15 towns along the border area of NY are ready to make the leap. There are, however, some major hurdles in the way…
Peters Township, in Washington County, PA, continues to “struggle” with whether or not they will allow Marcellus Shale drilling within their borders. Peters, you may recall, is one of the seven selfish towns that sued the state over the zoning provisions in the Act 13 law, eventually winning at the PA Supreme Court level (see 
MDN has done some more digging on Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s choice to run the all-important (for Marcellus Shale drilling) Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), John Quigley. As it turns out, we didn’t have to dig very far. Quigley himself writes a blog site called “John Quigley’s A Green Thing blog.” The name about says it all. We went looking through his previous statements and found more that concerns us about his impending stewardship of the greatest economic miracle to hit PA in more than 100 years. One of the things Quigley repeatedly lobbies for is a rapid transition from water-based fracking to waterless fracking, something that isn’t remotely possible in the next 10 years…