NYC Commits Fossil Fuel Suicide – Sues Big Oil, Ending Investments
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is clinically insane. It’s time to put him in a straitjacket and prevent him from doing any more damage to a once-great city. de Blasio is using city resources to sue five oil companies, blaming them for “climate change”–the hoax that mankind is causing the earth to warm at an apocalyptic rate. The theory behind global warming is that burning fossil fuels (extracted by the five companies) releases carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere where the CO2 then acts like a canopy over the earth, trapping in heat from the sun, causing the earth to warm. And, as the theory goes, Mom Earth is warming up to such a degree that it will “soon” (any year now) kill plants, animals, mankind–all living things. All sorts of ills are laid at the feet of so-called global warming, now called “climate change”, including earthquakes, major storms, hurricanes, pestilence, racism. No, we’re not exaggerating. EVERYTHING is blamed on global warming. Even the record cold temperatures that we’ve experienced in the northeast are blamed on global warming! Wait–how can that be? How can a canopy effect trapping heat cause COLDER temps? Obviously it can’t–but these people will believe anything. Yes, CLINICALLY INSANE. But maybe not totally insane, because at its root, de Blasio’s move is not *really* about global warming and preserving the planet–it’s about an avowed socialist (de Blasio admits his perverse political leanings) attempting to steal money from those who earn it, in order to redistribute it to people who don’t earn it–people who will keep voting de Blasio into office in response to his political bribery. de Blasio has also instructed the city to divest its pension funds from any company that remotely has anything to do with fossil fuels. Now that IS insane!…
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One of the companies in the Marcellus industry targeted for extinction by Pennsylvania’s former Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, was Minuteman Environmental Services (see 
Tom Linzey, the attorney who founded and runs the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), has just been sanctioned by Federal Judge Susan Paradise Baxter and ordered to pay $52,000 to Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE) for his “bad faith” in continuing to press legal arguments on behalf of Grant Township (Indiana County, PA)–legal arguments that say the people of Grant have rights they actually don’t have. Linzey has continued to claim rights for the citizens of Grant that have no legal basis and have been discredited in court. Not only that, but Judge Baxter also referred the matter to the Disciplinary Board of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court with a request that they review Linzey’s actions with an eye to imposing more punishments against him. We’ve previously reported on the story of two Pennsylvania towns that were either hoodwinked, or perhaps willing led astray, by the radical CELDF into passing (now overturned) bans on fracking and injection wells in their towns–Highland Twp (Elk County) and Grant Twp (Indiana County). The two townships thought they would do an end-run around the state’s authority to issue permits for two injection wells–one in each township, by re-incorporating under so-called home rule charters. The towns essentially declared themselves independent of the state for a variety of matters, including oil and gas permits, which PA state law clearly says is a function of ONLY the state Dept. of Environmental Protection. In March, the DEP issued final permits for the injection wells AND sued each town to get those portions of their home rule charters, dealing with oil and gas, overturned (see 
What if a landowner leased his or her land decades ago and a driller drilled a conventional natural gas well on the property, and that well has produced commercial volumes of natural gas for years–and still does. And what if the lease gives that driller the right to drill (or not drill) in any given rock lawyer. And what if that driller is content to simply let that conventional well keep producing and not drill further down, into the now commercially viable Utica (or Marcellus) shale layer? Does the landowner, whose land is located where the Utica/Marcellus exists, have any case for taking back the rights to the deeper shale layers the conventional driller refuses to go after? That’s a case that went all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court in March of last year (see 
A relatively small number of landowners in West Virginia is using a novel legal argument to try and stop Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) from beginning construction. MVP is a $3.5 billion, 303-mile natural gas pipeline that will run from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a final approval for the project in October (see 
In September a group of 57 gentry landowners in Virginia and West Virginia, backed by an out-of-state Big Green group, sued the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in an attempt to gut the 80-year old Natural Gas Act that gives FERC the right to grant eminent domain for pipeline projects (see 
Chesapeake Energy is holding out an olive branch to Pennsylvania landowners–the offer of settling a years-old class action lawsuit for $30 million–as reparations for shafting PA landowners out of royalties. But–and it’s a big but–Chesapeake is also snatching the olive branch away unless/until the PA Attorney General’s office resolves its separate lawsuit against Chesapeake for the same thing. No deal with the AG? No final settlement. Chesapeake’s lawyer calls it “global peace”–which we find amusing. The lawyer said “we need global peace,” meaning both lawsuits must be settled. His comment reminds us of the recent song blaring on the radio over the holidays called, “My Grown-Up Christmas List.” Yeah, don’t we all want “global peace.” Chesapeake’s proffered deal will give the average PA leaseholder (some 14,000 of them) a one-time $2,140 payment–adjusted up or down for the size of their acreage. Frankly, it’s chump change. The big concession by Chesapeake in the proposed deal is that it gives landowners the right to clarify the terms of their leases: “Every Chesapeake lessor will get to pick how their royalties are paid going forward.” Landowners can choose to continue letting Chesapeake market the gas outside of the region (theoretically for a higher price) but requiring the landowner to share in post-production expenses with Chessy as has been the case, OR landowners can rework the lease so there are no post-production expenses deducted. In the second case royalties will be based on the local price of gas in that landowner’s area (typically in the basement). It’s a tough decision. So, landowners got shafted in the past, but the past is the past. Going forward, let’s not get shafted any more. That’s what this proposed deal seems to boil down to. Oh, and throw in a few grand as the cherry on top. The billion dollar question is whether or not the AG’s office will go for it. The AG’s office is signaling it may settle, IF Chesapeake picks a number higher than $30 million as a settlement number…
Yesterday a Pennsylvania federal judge denied a group of 600+ Marcellus Shale landowners’ request to form a class action in arbitrating a royalty case against Chesapeake Energy. Although the judge’s decision is a disappointment for landowners, his decision should come as a surprise. In April, the same judge, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann for the Middle District of PA, telegraphed that the landowners, under the law (and under the leases they signed) did not have a right to form a class action (see 
In July, West Goshen Township, in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester County, won a temporary victory in their efforts to stop Sunoco Logistics’ Mariner East 2 (ME2) NGL pipeline in their community (see 
In 2015 MDN told you about an Allegany County, NY attorney who had filed a lawsuit against the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) over their infamous frack ban. It was the first such lawsuit to be filed against the DEC since the frack ban was officially declared (see 
Two African-American Marcellus Shale natural gas workers in the Williamsport, PA area claim they were fired, twice, based in part on their race. The two filed a lawsuit against STI Group (a staffing agency) and Chesapeake Energy. The case was thrown out by U.S. Middle District of Pennsylvania Court, but later reinstated on appeal by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. Rather than let the case drag out endlessly, STI and Chesapeake have just settled it. The amount of money they had to pay to make it go away was not disclosed. Workers are hired and fired all the time. Ours is a boom/bust industry. Was this really a case of racism? Or just a case of boom and bust? You read the details and decide for yourself…
A Bradford County, PA judge has turned down Chesapeake Energy’s attempt to wiggle out of a royalty lawsuit on a technicality. However, the judge also punted the case to a higher court to settle what he calls “novel questions of law”–rather than spending more time and money on such issues at the county court level. This is good news for landowners in Bradford County who have been shafted by Chesapeake’s royalty scheme to shift the cost of piping and processing to landowners by using inflated values for those services. In December 2015, Pennsylvania’s felony-indicted Attorney General, Kathleen Kane (now gone), brought a lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy, Anadarko and Williams accusing them of, among other things, royalty fraud (see 
A group of landowners in Ohio calling themselves the Coalition to Reroute Nexus (CORN), whom we affectionately call CORNballs, filed a lawsuit in federal court in May against the NEXUS pipeline project (see 