Trump Nominates 2 New FERC Members – One an NRDC Lemon
Yesterday the White House announced its intent to nominate the final two members needed to comprise a full five-member Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. One of them, Mark Christie, is the Chairman of the Virginia State Corporation Commission. He is one of the country’s longest-serving state utility regulators, having served for 16 years. Great credentials. Smart guy. The other nominee, Allison Clements, spent 10 years as a rabid radical working for the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). She is uniquely UNQUALIFIED for the job. A lemon.
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On Friday the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) announced it has fined CNX Resources and its subsidiary CNX Midstream $310,000 for two incidents in which 65 barrels (2,730 gallons) of non-toxic brine (salty water) leaked into the ground and 43 gallons of non-toxic drilling mud leaked into a creek. The DEP says CNX did “not adequately maintain erosion and sedimentation best management practices.”
In May the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) held a virtual public hearing on the issue of the DRBC’s prior decision to approve construction of a dock in the Delaware River that will allow New Fortress Energy to load LNG tanker ships with LNG transported to the dock from a new liquefaction plant being built in northeastern Pennsylvania (see 
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has a number of committees under its umbrella. Volunteers from business, non-profit groups and other sectors sit on these committees in an effort to provide helpful feedback to the department from the people who must live under the regulations (sometimes onerous) the DEP cooks up. The Small Business Compliance Advisory Committee (SBCAC) is one such committee. SBCAC has just voted against Gov. Wolf’s cockamamie plan to tax “carbon” from gas-fired electric plants.
It’s time for a victory lap. Pennsylvania Republicans, with the help of some brave Democrats (and former Democrats), passed and convinced Gov. Wolf to sign a bill into law that will grant tax breaks to companies willing to build brand new petrochemical plants in the Keystone State–plants that use huge quantities of Marcellus Shale gas. Wolf signed the bill yesterday, after vetoing a similar bill earlier this year. The normally chatty Wolf press operation barely mentioned his signature on the bill.
We’re pretty certain Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (RINO) doesn’t read MDN, but we’re glad to see he took our advice from yesterday when we said he’s “stupid if he vetoes the bill to repeal House Bill (HB) 6. Does he not realize he will be given the political equivalent of an anal exam to see if his palms were greased by FirstEnergy too?! The only reason the bill passed was bribery. It’s poisoned. It must be overturned.” A day after DeWine expressed support for the bribe-ridden HB 6 that became law when he signed it last year, DeWine reversed course and now says he supports repeal of that terrible law.
New Fortress Energy, which likes to build and own as much of the LNG supply chain as possible, built and recently finished an LNG import terminal in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently dinged the company, asking for an explanation as to why they built it without FERC permission (see 
“Be sure your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23). That phrase needs to be tattooed on the side of FirstEnergy’s headquarters because their sin of (allegedly) bribing Ohio lawmakers to pass a highly unpopular bailout of the company’s economically failing nuclear power plants has certainly found them out (see 
Each day New York State becomes more like a third world, tinhorn dictatorship. High and Supreme Lord Andrew Cuomo (governor and dictator of NY) has issued edicts to *permanently* ban all fracking in the state. The suckup legislature dutifully obliged (see 
TC Energy’s Columbia Gas Transmission subsidiary has not given up on building a 3.37-mile, 8-inch pipeline under the Potomac River. The pipeline, from Maryland on one side of the river to West Virginia on the other side, will be built to feed a larger pipeline project from Mountaineer Gas called the Eastern Panhandle Expansion. The crazy anti-fossil fuel loons who run Maryland are trying to block the project. Columbia is asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for more time to get it built because of Maryland’s interference.
In December 2018 Williams announced a new project to increase capacity along the Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line (Transco) in PA by an extra 582,400 dekatherms (582 million cubic feet) per day. Williams officially filed a request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to build the “Leidy South Project” in August 2019 (see 
The wackos at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have convinced, bullied and coopted 14 far-left-leaning states plus the District of Columbia to sign a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) that pledges their states will force tractor-trailers, buses and other large and medium-sized vehicles to be all-electric by 2050–in thirty short years. It’s crackers. It’s cuckoo. It’s not even possible! And it will never happen. But just the threat is enough to inflict economic harm and hardship on working-class folks. We’d even call the NRDC MOU racist.
In January President Trump announced a list of proposed changes to the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in an effort to strip away some of the governmental red tape that has built up over the years like plaque in an artery, preventing important infrastructure projects like pipelines, dams, bridges, and roads from getting built (see 
In April 2019, President Trump signed an Executive Order (EO) instructing the Environmental Protection Agency to review Section 401 of the Clean Water Act–the section that grants states (and tribes) the right to have a say in pipeline projects (see 
Yesterday MDN told you the full Pennsylvania State Senate, with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, voted on and passed a bill to grant tax break incentives to huge petrochemical plants willing to build new facilities in PA–facilities that will use Marcellus Shale methane (see 
Wow! That was fast! Last week we brought you the rumor that a bill to allow incentives for petrochemical plants willing to build new facilities in Pennsylvania (generating hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of investment in the state) appears to be back on after the bill was previously vetoed by Gov. Tom Wolf earlier this year (see