PA Gov Tom “Severance Tax” Wolf: America’s Most Liberal Governor
The non-partisan website InsideGov, a site built and maintained by technology company FindTheBest, used public statements, press releases, campaign platforms and voting records to score each state governor’s view on important issues. InsideGov then used the data they collected to assign values for the most conservative political philosophy, and the most liberal. No lie–the single most liberal state governor in the United States is not Andrew Cuomo–he’s #5 in the list of most liberal. Nope. The single most liberal governor in these United States is (trumpet fanfare): Tom Wolf, from Pennsylvania. Wolf is ahead of the whack-a-doos in New York, Vermont, Connecticut and even Minnesoooota. Yeah, the same Tom Wolf who wants to steal the profits from Marcellus drillers to give to teachers’ unions to pay them back for voting him into office. That Tom Wolf. Most liberal. And what do the libs at Philadelphia Magazine write? (This is hilarious.) They write that even though Wolf walks like a liberal duck, quacks like a liberal duck, swims like a liberal duck–he isn’t really all THAT liberal…
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Something really big is about to happen in the Marcellus/Utica region. Starting August 1, the Rockies Express Pipeline (REX), originally built from Colorado and Wyoming to Monroe County, OH to bring natural gas from west to east, will reverse the flow for a large and important section of the pipeline. On August 1, the section of REX from Monroe County, OH to Mexico, MO will reverse the flow and carry 1.8 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of Utica and Marcellus Shale gas to the Midwest, including to the greater Chicago area. This flow reversal has the power to a) increase prices northeast drillers receive for their natural gas, and b) lower the cost of natural gas for consumers (and industrial companies, and electric generating plants, etc.) in places like Chicago. It is a win/win scenario. It is so important, and will have such a profound affect on natgas prices in the Midwest, that our friends at NGI’s Daily Gas Price Index have created a “REX Tracker”–a free daily chart updating the price of natural gas along the REX’s Zone 3 section…
What could of been a valuable research project by a Stanford University researcher is, instead, just more “fracking maybe/might/could/possibly affect groundwater” headline grabber. Stanford environmental scientist Dr. Rob Jackson, a seasoned researcher, set out to determine at what depths is fracking safe and does not affect groundwater (“The Depths of Hydraulic Fracturing and Accompanying Water Use Across the United States” — abstract below). The press release describing the research attempts to redefine any shale well drilled and fracked at less than one mile down as a “shallow” well. This is an inaccurate characterization. From the release: “The most recent such study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, finds that at least 6,900 oil and gas wells in the U.S. were fracked less than a mile (5,280 feet) from the surface, and at least 2,600 wells were fracked at depths shallower than 3,000 feet, some as shallow as 100 feet. This occurs despite many reports that describe fracking as safe for drinking water only if it occurs at least thousands of feet to a mile underground, according to Jackson.” If a well was drilled at 3,000 feet down, that’s still 2,000-2,500 feet below water aquifers–a quarter of a mile of solid rock between the two! Not to mention that 2,600 wells out of 44,000 wells Dr. Jackson studied is a puny 6% of the total–a very small percentage. In other words, the vast majority of shale wells drilled are a mile or more under the surface. Interestingly, for all of the talk about “shallow” wells and the potential dangers of fracking, Dr. Jackson’s study “has not found evidence that frack water contaminants seep upward to drinking-water aquifers from deep underground”…