Taxpayer $ from Biden Bills Funneled to Anti-Shale Groups in PA
As we reported back in February, the Biden EPA plans to allow private citizens to police oil wells and pipelines for methane leaks–meaning Big Green groups actually do the “policing” (see Biden EPA Program Empowers Anti Groups to be Methane Snitches). Money is now beginning to flow to PA-based anti-fossil fuel groups under the guise of testing and monitoring air quality, to “protect” local residents. It’s a scam. Big Money is flowing from Big Government into the coffers of Big Green. And you, dear taxpayer, are paying the bill.
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One of MDN’s favorite organizations is the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Landowner Alliance (POGLA), an organization representing oil, gas, mineral, and royalty owners throughout the Commonwealth of PA. POGLA will host a conference titled 
The Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC) owns and manages more than 1.5 million acres of state game lands throughout the Commonwealth. The primary purpose of these lands is the management of habitat for wildlife and providing opportunities for lawful hunting and trapping. You might think PGC gets most of its revenue from hunting and trapping licenses and fees. You would be wrong. PGC allows shale drilling on some of its vast holdings, and leases and royalties generate about 7X the income for PGC than all other sources combined.
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) published notice in the April 1 Pennsylvania Bulletin that it has denied a request by the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association (PIOGA) to reconsider the agency’s plan to regulate small, completely safe natural gas gathering pipelines. We have the news of the PUC’s rejection, and what it means, along with an exclusive–the official response from PIOGA.
We have new evidence that so-called environmental groups, including a long list of anti-fracking groups in Pennsylvania, don’t really care about the environmental at all. They only care about the power to dictate to you what energy sources you can and cannot use–as a way of controlling you. Great strides have been made in capturing and sequestering (storing underground) carbon dioxide (CO2). These so-called environmental groups all say that CO2 is killing Mom Earth. Yet when real science is employed to control CO2 (to sequester it), they attempt to block it. Why is that?
If you support the Marcellus gas industry in Pennsylvania and you voted for Josh Shapiro for Governor last November, believing he doesn’t *really* want to kill the Marcellus industry via an obscene carbon tax (known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI), you were wrong. He does want to kill the industry. And a group of far-left groups are telling him he darned well better stay on the straight-and-narrow and keep RGGI alive. Or else…
There is a revolving door in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, between PennFuture and Democrat governors. Pat McDonnell, the former Secretary of the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), charged with overseeing shale drilling in the state, was a closet radical working against the shale industry in the Gov. Tom Wolf administration. How do we know? As soon as he left the DEP last year, McDonnell became president of the uber-left, anti-shale PennFuture organization (see 
An environmental group purporting to be run by political conservatives, calling itself Conservatives For Responsible Stewardship (CRS), is pushing for Pennsylvania to adopt the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI)–an obscene carbon tax that will kill the Marcellus shale industry in the state. In what has to be the ultimate example of chutzpah, the president of CRS, Dave Jenkins, argues in a column appearing in the Erie Times-News, that RGGI is (don’t laugh) a “market-based program” and the type of thing old Ron Reagan would have liked. HOGWASH!
We continue to be majorly disappointed with the new “Acting” Secretary of the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection, Rich Negrin. Last Friday, we told you that Negrin is hewing to the far-left, promoting the concept that all wells and pipelines in poor communities and communities of color are automatically racist (see 
So-called “environmental justice” is a buzzword used by the left over the past decade or so. It is a euphemism, a code word for “any well pad or pipeline or any kind of oil and gas infrastructure that gets built anywhere near a community with a large population of poor folks or black/brown folks is automatically considered racist.” Environmental justice is the antithesis of American freedom and the American sense of equal justice for all under our laws. The left screams “racist” when they can’t compete on the basis of ideas, a tactic they use to shut down arguments. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania’s new “Acting” Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection, Rich Negrin, spouted environmental justice nonsense yesterday at a House hearing on the budget.
For more than a year, we have covered the topic of the Bidenistas’ Hunger Games contest to award $7 billion to some 6-10 “hydrogen hubs” across the country. Each winning hub will receive $500 million to $1 billion of government largesse to help build a hub in a particular region. The money for the hub projects was allocated as part of the so-called Infrastructure bill, passed in November 2021. Some 79 “concept papers,” which is a pre-application, were received by the Dept. of Energy. Of the 79, only 33 were given “encouragement” (i.e. permission) by the DOE to advance to the next stage of the Hydrogen Hunger Games (see 
Newly-elected Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro nominated Rich Negrin, a former top official (and Deputy Mayor) of Philadelphia, to become the next Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection (see 
On March 14, eight business groups across five states (including PA and WV) sent a letter to the federal EPA urging the EPA to expedite approvals for well permits for carbon sequestration, including allowing primacy for states. Businesses and consortia are actively pursuing significant investments in projects related to the so-called energy transition. Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is an important piece of the “transition,” both for capturing direct emissions and enabling clean hydrogen production from promised regional hydrogen hubs. CCS investments can accelerate a region’s energy transition and grow jobs. But the feds are dragging their feet. States want to take control of approving CCS projects for themselves, to speed things along–to become the primary regulatory authority. But the dysfunctional EPA is not responding. Hence the letter.