Unusual: Full Court to Hear Case Against Obama Clean Power Plan
We’ve written plenty about President Obama’s draconian, so-called “Clean Power Plan” (see our stories here). In a nutshell, Obama and his servile Environmental Protection Agency are attempting a massive federal takeover in how electricity gets generated–by requiring more electricity is produced by so-called renewable sources. They’re doing it through limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power generating plants. It puts coal out of business completely. But the dirty little secret is that Obama is also taking aim at natural gas too (see Obama Stabs Natural Gas Electric Plants in Clean Power Plan). More than half of the states have joined together to to stop the plan by filing a lawsuit. In a surprise move, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the EPA from implementing the plan until the lawsuit brought by the states gets a full airing (see Supreme Court Shocker – Justices Halt Obama’s Clean Power Plan). The first step in the process of getting that airing happens at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In another move that surprised everyone, the DC District Court on Monday announced that the full court (9 of 11 justices) will hear the case and not the normal three-judge panel. Typically you start with three judges, and any decision can be appealed to the full court (which typically gets denied), and from there it goes to the U.S. Supreme Court. The DC court is removing a step so the process goes faster. Is that good (for those of us who believe this is unconstitutional), or bad? Depends on the news source you read…
Read More “Unusual: Full Court to Hear Case Against Obama Clean Power Plan”
In March MDN brought you news of an environmental Nazi confab in New York City, headlined by New York Attorney Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Al Gore (see 
Some great news to share. A landowner in Wayne County, PA–in the Delaware River Basin–has filed a lawsuit against the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) asking a judge to declare the DRBC does not have jurisdiction to prevent construction of a natural gas well. MDN has chronicled, for years, the lawless actions of the DRBC in seizing power it does not have to block shale drilling in essentially two PA counties where there is measurable quantities of shale gas that could be extracted: Wayne County and Pike County. DRBC’s former director, Carol Collier, is a hardened anti-driller who colluded with Josh Fox in making his infamous propaganda film Gasland. Collier is gone and it was thought her replacement, Steve Tambini would bring some order and sense to the organization (see 
Energy Transfer Equity (ETE) pushed and prodded and poked and cajoled and insisted, and finally with the help of an inside corporate raider, forced Williams to agree to a buyout/merger (see 
This is the tale of landowners who negotiated a lease without consulting a qualified oil and gas attorney, and later regretted the decision. In 2008 the owners of a small hunting and fishing camp in Tioga County, PA negotiated and signed a lease with East Resources, which was later sold to SWEPI (i.e. the shale drilling arm of Shell). The lease, so the landowners thought, guaranteed that 11 wells would be drilled on the 240-acre property, and that a pipeline would be used to flow gas only from those wells. The landowners got a nice signing bonus–$287,000. They also got $164,000 for a pipeline right-of-way. But only one well was ever drilled–and it’s capped. And there is a pipeline–flowing other people’s gas through it. The landowners sued and a district court judge ruled last week that the landowners don’t have a case for their “shattered dreams” as they thought they did. It all comes down to a poorly worded lease and signing a lease without running it by a lawyer first…
A group of radical/leftist environmental groups have just launched their latest “sue and settle” case against the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). For a description of the despicable practice of sue and settle, where our own government colludes with these groups in a faux lawsuit which “forces” an agency to do what it wanted to do but couldn’t otherwise under existing laws, see this MDN story: 
Something noteworthy has happened in western Pennsylvania and (so far) local media has chosen not to cover it. So MDN is happy to break the following story about South Fayette Township in Allegheny County (near Pittsburgh). South Fayette is one of seven PA towns that sued the state after the Act 13 law was enacted in 2012 (see 
The partners in the Constitution Pipeline, including Williams and Cabot Oil & Gas, have come roaring back against Gov. Cuomo and his pusillanimous Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) after the DEC lied last Friday in announcing they would not grant stream crossing permits for the pipeline project. Yesterday Cabot, along with Williams, issued a STRONGLY worded rebuttal that says, in part that the DEC’s “stated rationale for the denial includes flagrant misstatements and inaccurate allegations, and appears to be driven more by New York State politics than by environmental science.” Flagrant misstatements is another way of saying the DEC lied, which is exactly what we said yesterday (see