NY Pro-Drillers Lose 2nd Important Shale Drilling Court Case
Yet another defeat for shale drilling in anti-drilling New York. First, the most important case that will hamper drilling in the Empire State was lost just a few weeks ago (see Shale Drilling in NY is Over – High Court Upholds Town Bans). Yesterday, a lower court decided to toss out the “Article 78” lawsuit brought by the 70,000-member Joint Landowners Coalition of New York and Norse Energy against Gov. Andy Cuomo, DEC Sec. Joe Martens, and former Dept. of Health Sec. Nirav Shah (see D-Day: JLCNY Files Lawsuit Today Against Cuomo, Martens, Shah). The Article 78 lawsuit would have forced them to finally release new drilling rules as they are obviously colluding to stop the release. Other states take two years or less to review and allow shale drilling (see today’s story about North Carolina). It’s been over six years in New York, and with this decision, there is literally no end in sight…
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Three families near a WPX Energy wastewater impoundment near Ligonier (Westmoreland County), PA say their well water has been contamined by wastewater leaking from the impoundment. The case is just coming to light (at least for MDN) although the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has known and has investigated the “leaky impoundment” for going on two years now…
We’ve only spotted this news in (so far) two legal publications, but last Friday the Suessenbach Family Limited Partnership, using a Wilkes-Barre, PA law firm, launched a “sprawling class action” lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy and Access Midstream accusing the two companies of a $5 billion scheme to defraud landowners out of royalties rightfully due to them. MDN previously covered how this scheme worked (see 
This is a “hmmm, that’s interesting” revelation for MDN. Yesterday Magnum Hunter Resources, a driller mostly focused on the West Virginia Marcellus and increasingly Ohio Utica Shale, issued a press release yesterday to say that they’ve been successful in getting five of six “securities class action and shareholder derivative lawsuits” against the company dismissed–without paying a penny to either the plaintiffs or their lawyers. The company is working on a sixth (and last) such lawsuit now. What is a securities class action/derivative lawsuit?…
One of the Obama administration’s favorite tactics to do illegal end-runs around Congress (remember–Congress writes the laws, the President enforces them) is to have rogue agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency claim sweeping powers under older/existing laws. Like the Clean Air Act. Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court yanked on the EPA’s leash pretty hard and said, “Heal boy, sit down.” The EPA tried to simply rewrite a law passed by Congress in how the agency treats so-called greenhouse gases. The EPA didn’t like what Congress wrote, so they rewrote it. The justices said, “No, you can’t do that,” to the EPA. However, as Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out from the bench, the EPA still got almost all of what it wanted in this decision…