PA AG Kathleen Kane’s Dirty Deeds Against Minuteman Environmental
Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, will appear in court today to answer charges that she is, herself, a criminal. She will appear in Montgomery County court to face nine criminal charges, including perjury (i.e. lying under oath). As we have reported, Kane is attempting to divert attention away from her own criminal actions by resurrecting an old porn case, claiming angry white men are out to get her (see AG Kathleen Kane’s Defense: Dirty Old Men are Out to Get Me!). Kane has lost the confidence of everyone, including PA Gov. Tom Wolf–the most liberal governor in America, who is calling on her to resign. Kane lost our confidence from her first day in office in 2012 when she started out by targeting the drilling industry (see Will New PA AG Go After the Marcellus Drilling Industry?). One of the many companies in the Marcellus industry targeted by Kane for extinction over the past three years was Minuteman Environmental Services, a PA company that serves the shale industry with several different businesses (see PA’s Anti-Drilling AG Charges Minuteman with Enviro Crimes). Kane orchestrated what can only be called a terror attack on Minuteman and its owner Brian Bolus and his family (see Minuteman Enviro Says PA AG Office “Terrorized” Family Members, Filing Lawsuit). Amazingly, Minuteman is still in operation–even though Kane and M&T Bank, working with Kane, froze Minuteman’s assets and tried to bankrupt them. An employee of Minuteman has written a guest editorial for MDN to point out that although Kane is going to court for reasons unrelated to the travesty she’s inflicted on Minuteman, folks should not forget the damage she’s done to the industry, in particular the damage she’s done to Minuteman and its workers…
Read More “PA AG Kathleen Kane’s Dirty Deeds Against Minuteman Environmental”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, located in New York State, released a decision yesterday in a case known as Beardslee v. Inflection Energy, LLC (copy of the decision is embedded below) that may create problems for future shale drilling in New York State–should the existing statewide ban ever be lifted. Yesterday’s decision is good news for landowners in one sense–it officially upholds the right of Tioga County, NY landowners party to the lawsuit to be released from old leases made in pre-Marcellus days when landowners signed leases for $3 per acre. Those leases were signed before the words “Marcellus” or “Utica” meant anything other than municipalities in New York State. (Interesting factoid: both shale plays are named after the NY towns where they were first identified. Further interesting factoid: both Marcellus, NY and Utica, NY banned fracking before the statewide ban was official.) The Second Circuit upheld a previous decision which we first wrote about in 2012 (see 
The Chief of the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management for the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (currently Rick Simmers) is a man with a lot of power. He has the power, according to a ruling just handed down on August 12, to make his own decisions about suspending permits to operate in the absence of specific violations of a law or regulation. In September 2014 Simmers suspended permits for two wastewater injection wells in Trumbull County, OH after a very low level earthquake was detected close to those wells (an earthquake that couldn’t be felt at the surface and caused no damage of any kind). American Water Management Services sued saying they hadn’t violated any laws or regulations on the books and their permits could not just be arbitrarily revoked like that. But the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission said nope–Tom Cruise, er, a, Mr. Simmers can arbitrarily do what he wants when there is no specific rule or guideline or law–because he has the best interests of the people at heart…
Everybody’s suing everybody. That about sums up the mess created (sadly) by none other than Aubrey McClendon. The subsidiary businesses that were once part of McClendon’s new company, American Energy Partners (AEP), continue to run away from Aubrey as fast as they can. On Monday, Ascent Resources, once called American Energy Appalachia Holdings but separated from the AEP mothership in June (see