NY Resident (& Lawyer) Sues DEC in Federal Court re Frack Ban
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 It’s Official: Cuomo Bans Economic Opportunity & Prosperity in NY). The lawsuit was filed in state Supreme Court in Allegany County. Don’t be fooled by the Supreme Court label. In screwed-up NY, Supreme Court is one level up from county court. The judge tossed the case saying the attorney/landowner didn’t have standing to file the lawsuit in the first place because he never had a permit to drill on his property. The Appellate Division upheld the decision against the attorney/landowner earlier this year. You see, in NY, everything is rigged–even our judicial system, where the judges want to protect their cushy jobs (appointed by our corrupt governor, Andrew Cuomo). The attorney/landowner from Allegany is back. This time he filed the same lawsuit in federal court–bypassing Cuomo-appointed judges. We have a copy of the 95-page complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York…
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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 
It’s full speed ahead for Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP)–a $3.5 billion, 303-mile pipeline that will run from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA. In October, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave final approval for the project (see 
A little-known (outside of northeast Pennsylvania) anti-driller, Vera Scroggins, was fined $1,000 in April 2015 in Susquehanna County court (see 
Somebody needs to sue the New York University (NYU) School of Law and 10 state Attorneys General to stop a grievous practice–a bastardization of our justice system. We are floored to learn that NYU is paying to hire attorneys to work inside the offices of the Attorneys General in 10 different states–Pennsylvania being the latest. The aim of hiring these new assistants to work alongside AGs is to launch lawsuits to “protect” the environment–i.e. sue fossil fuel companies. It is a gross perversion of our legal system meant to challenge policies the very liberal NYU doesn’t like. Our legal system is now, apparently, for sale–at least it is in PA and nine other blue Democrat-controlled states. THIS MUST STOP. NOW. Since when does private money get to buy state workers? Since when does private money with VERY long strings attached get to determine how and what state workers will work on? This is wrong in so many ways. And probably illegal, which the NYU School of Law should know. If it’s not illegal (big if), at a minimum it’s grossly unethical. Paging U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions: You need to stop this–now!…
In October the radical group Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) published a “report” that makes the preposterous claim that New England customers have overpaid utility bills by $3.6 billion due to collusion between the natural gas and electricity industries (see 
Cabot Oil & Gas is tired of being sued, and slandered, by people like Dimock resident Ray Kemble and his ambulance-chasing lawyers. So in August Cabot sued back–for $5 million (see 
Yesterday the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California (sometimes referred to as the Ninth Circus) heard arguments from the Trump Administration, representing the federal government, and from lawyers representing children they are mentally abusing and who have filed a lawsuit that aims to force the end of the use of all fossil fuels in the United States–in the name of so-called man-made global warming (see yesterday’s post for background: 
Last Thursday the the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) request to block of construction of Millennium Pipeline’s Valley Lateral Project (see 
We have a couple of important signs that Dominion and Duke Energy, the main sponsors of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, are getting ready to begin building the pipeline. Atlantic Coast Pipeline is a $5 billion, 594-mile natural gas pipeline that will stretch from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina. Years after the project filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), it was finally approved by FERC in October (see 
The legal beagles at the Vorys energy law firm have been keeping a close eye on court cases in Ohio that affect the oil and gas industry. Two of those cases caught our attention as being worthy of mention because they have the potential to affect Utica Shale rights owners, and conversely drillers, in the Buckeye State. In one case, a landowner thought she could terminate a lease by not picking up her mail and depositing royalty checks in the mail. Just ignore the mail and claim the driller wasn’t paying up. Oops. Nice try, but that didn’t fly in court. In another case, a landowner with an old oil & gas lease (dating back to the 1970s) tried to break the lease because the driller is happy as a clam to simply get gas out of conventional/vertical/shallow wells, and not go after (or allow someone else to go after) the deeper shale layers. The landowner tried to get the court to at least agree to free up the deeper layers so he could lease those–but no dice. The court found the existing lease is producing in “paying quantities” and under the terms of the lease, the landowner does not have the right to sever the lower layers from the upper layers. Here’s the details, with copies of the respective court decisions…
This is sick. Grab your barf bag before you read it. A group of radical adults have brainwashed (we’d call it mentally abused) a group of children to the point the children are allowing their abusers to use them in a lawsuit against the United States government–to force the government to turn over its sovereignty to other nations in the name of man-made global warming. In August 2015, MDN told you about a lawsuit brought by a group of left coast radicalized children who want to force the federal government to become communist and “force action” on mythical climate change (see 
Yesterday the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation’s request to slap an ongoing block of construction for Millennium Pipeline’s Valley Lateral Project. As a quick reminder, Valley Lateral is a tiny, 7.8 mile pipeline that will connect the main Millennium line to the CPV Valley Energy Center gas-fired electric plant, currently under construction, due to be completed in the first quarter of next year. The DEC doesn’t like the power plant project (approved by the State of New York), and is using the pipeline as a political football to try and keep the plant from opening–no doubt at the direction of our corrupt governor, Andrew Cuomo. The DEC arbitrarily, after more than one year of review, ruled against issuing a federal water crossing permit for the pipeline. In an historic decision, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) overruled the DEC in September (see