PA State Sen. Intros Meaningless Resolution Urging Natgas Exports
In our daily trawl of the news, we came across the text of a resolution by Pennsylvania State Senator Stewart J. Greenleaf. Sen. Greenleaf is looking for co-sponsors of the resolution, which urges PA natural gas producers to export natural gas to European countries in order to curtail a Russian natgas monopoly. Greenleaf said, “Copies of this resolution will be transmitted to the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, the President of the United States, the presiding officers of each house of Congress and to each member of Congress from Pennsylvania.” We thought: Nice sentiment…raise the natgas flag…rah rah and all that jazz. But at the end of the day, a resolution is meaningless. It has no force of law. It does nothing. It’s purely public relations bupkis. We wondered, why would Sen. Greenleaf, from Montgomery County (near Philadelphia) introduce this now? We revisited the list of traitorous Republican Senators who voted for the state budget that includes a severance tax (see Traitorous PA Senate Republicans Pass Severance Tax Bill). And yes, we discovered Sen. Greenleaf is one of the traitorous Republicans who voted for the horrible severance tax (and horrible gross receipts tax on natural gas, phones and electricity). The light went on. Greenleaf is using this resolution as a sleazy political ploy to try and curry favor with the natural gas industry–after he stabbed it in the back…
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Dominion Energy and Duke Energy hopes lightening will strike twice. In August, DTE Energy and Spectra Energy (now part of Enbridge), sent a letter to the new FERC quorum urging fast action to approve NEXUS Pipeline, a $2 billion, 255-mile interstate pipeline that will run from Ohio through Michigan and eventually to the Dawn Hub in Ontario, Canada (see
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FirstEnergy, based in Akron, OH, is one of the nation’s largest investor-owned electric systems, serving customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York. FirstEnergy owns a variety of regulated and non-regulated power generation plants. Last November the company announced it wants to sell five power generating plants, four of them natural gas-fired plants in Pennsylvania, plus a hydroelectric plant in Virginia (see
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The Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives have done the hard work that PA Senate Republicans failed (or refused) to do: they have just introduced a budget bill that doesn’t raise a single tax, including no horrible severance tax–and yet they will balance a wildly overspent budget. How will they accomplish this feat of Houdini magic? By tapping into the bloated extra money budgeted but not spent by numerous state agencies. For example: mass transit, ports, rails and infrastructure accounts have a cumulative extra $507 million sitting in bank, unused. Why not reallocate it? Hazardous waste and industrial cleanups, agriculture, environmental, conservation and recycling programs have an extra $440.5 million laying around. Why not reallocate it? Etc. House Republicans, unlike their traitorous Senate counterparts, have “found” $2.4 billion in money laying around, unused in other accounts, that they plan to reallocate to the state budget. Genius! This is why House Speaker Mike Turzai should be PA’s next governor, not the inept Tom Wolf…
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