Martian Update: Principal Doesn’t want Rex Drilling Near his Home
Between Christmas and New Year, Middlesex Township (Butler County), PA held the second of what may be up to five hearings on the already-granted permits for Rex Energy to drill five wells on a single well pad in the township. You may recall that two agitating “environmental” groups–headquartered on the other side of the state, in the Philadelphia area–along with four parents from the Mars School District, filed an appeal of the legal and legitimate permits granted by the state Dept. of Environmental Protection to Rex in September (see Rex Drilling Operation Near Mars School Put on Hold). The first hearing was held in November and the antis (as they always do) droned on for more than four hours (see Martians & Enviro Groups Continue to Block Rex Drilling in W PA). They continued their whine-fest on Dec. 29th with another five hours of mind-numbing sameness–drilling will kill us, drilling will pollute Mother Earth, yada yada yada. The main excuse is that drilling 3/4 of a mile from a local school will harm the kiddies. No mention that at least two school districts in the state, one close to Mars, has allowed drilling ON SCHOOL PROPERTY with no harm to the kiddies in those districts. At the hearing on the 29th, we get the REAL story behind the (ab)using of children as an excuse. One of the Mars School District principals lives near the drill pad and he opposes drilling near his expensive new home…
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The Joint Landowners Coalition of New York (JLCNY) is a 70,000-member group of frustrated landowners who have had their Constitutional property rights stripped away by a spineless governor. In an effort to get the truth out about shale drilling and its affects–both good and bad–the JLCNY has taken to the airways with a periodic (every 3-4 weeks) radio program that airs Sunday evenings for an hour on Binghamton’s WNBF 1290 AM radio station. This past Sunday night the latest program aired and it was a must-listen program. The special guest was Dr. Theodore Them, MD, MS, PhD, MPH. Dr. Them is a specialist in environmental medicine working at Guthrie, the 19th largest health care system in the United States. Dr. Them lives in Bradford County, PA, within five miles of 100+ Marcellus Shale gas wells. Dr. Them was on the program to discuss the so-called “health impacts” report recently delivered by New York State Commissioner of Health Dr. Howard Zucker (see 
Time to follow the bouncing ball–this is a tad complicated, but we’ll do our best to explain it. In 2008, Chesapeake Energy (under then-CEO Aubrey McClendon) took on a “silent” investing partner for 600,000 net acres in the Marcellus of West Virginia and southwest Pennsylvania. The non-operating partner for the acreage was Norwegian company Statoil, with a 32.5% interest in the acreage. Statoil put up buckets of money and Chessy did the drilling. Fast forward to October of this year. Chesapeake cut a deal to sell most of that acreage–some 413,000 acres with 435 drilled wells (see