PA House Passes Bill to Block RGGI Carbon Tax – What Next?
On Wednesday, Pennsylvania House Bill (HB) 637, which would block the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) authority to limit carbon dioxide emissions (thereby blocking PA’s entrance into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI) passed by a vote of 126 to 72. Some 10 Democrats crossed the aisle to vote in favor of the bill. HB 637 now goes to the PA Senate for a vote. What then?
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Two northeastern Pennsylvania State Senators, Gene Yaw and Lisa Baker, along with members of the PA Senate Republican Caucus (27 Senators in all, filed a lawsuit in January 2021 against the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) over its illegal ban on fracking (see PA 
Democrats are SO predictable. They use the same playbook they’ve used for the past 50+ years. The minute they can’t defend their indefensible, nonsensical ideologies, they resort to calling their opponents bigots and sexists. It happened again Tuesday when northeastern Pennsylvania State Senator John Yukichak, an Independent who used to be a Democrat (but couldn’t stomach the extremism in the party anymore), called out PA Democrats and their environmental “hysteria” for defeating both the PennEast Pipeline project and the New Fortress Energy LNG export plant (both located in northeastern PA). Two PA Senators who happen to be women from the Philadelphia area trotted out the “he’s attacking the girls, he’s a misogynist and sexist” false claim. Typical.
It’s about to get a lot harder to drill a well or build any kind of pipeline in Pennsylvania, if the swamp dwellers at the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) get their way. The DEP recently released a draft Environmental Justice Policy set of regulations that will empower the radical left to block new drilling and new pipelines by using claims of racism.
Last Thursday 
Pennsylvania is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the country. A new poll from Pittsburgh Works Together, a coalition of business and labor groups in Western PA, says Pennsylvanians want to keep PA at the top of the natural gas heap. A poll conducted of 600 PA voters in February finds 73% strongly or somewhat supported the idea that Pennsylvania should ensure that natural gas remains a part of the state’s energy use. That is an overwhelming majority of PA citizens who think natural gas (and natural gas drilling) should continue in the Keystone State.
Bitcoin “mining” is a rapidly expanding new customer for natural gas across the country, including in Pennsylvania. Gigantic computer server farms run complex mathematical computations and the result of those computations is a blockchain. When a blockchain is formed, the server farm doing the computations gets compensated with bitcoins, a form of digital money. Bitcoin (the generic term is cryptocurrency) mining uses huge amounts of electricity to run all of those computers. That’s where natural gas comes in. In PA the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has applied different standards to different requests from bitcoin miners to set up shop. A new bill aims to fix the problem of inconsistent treatment of these requests.
It’s always a sad day when radical Big Green groups win a victory over American energy. Such has happened with the New Fortress Energy (NFE) LNG plant proposed for Wyalusing in Bradford County, PA. Three Big Green groups challenged an extension for a permit previously issued for a new liquefaction facility proposed by NFE located in northeastern PA. NFE has caved and agreed that should it proceed with the project, it will need to file all over again and get a new permit–which doesn’t look likely.
Since the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, we’ve read a number of articles about how American energy can reduce the impact of Putin’s war by supplying Europe with oil and natural gas. However, one such article appearing on Fox Business stands above all the rest. It’s well written and makes a strong case that Pennsylvania, specifically, has a critical role to play in helping to defeat Putin’s war on Ukraine. That role is ramping up Marcellus Shale gas production.
MDN friend Mark Caskey, president and founder of Steel Nation, a company that builds steel buildings used for natural gas compressor and transmission stations, penned an op-ed for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review to respond to lies being published by the leftist group Earthworks. On March 8 a paid anti-fossil fuel “petrochemicals campaigner” published a column in the Tribune-Review regurgitating Big Green lies that fossil fuels are evil and that calls by PA shale drillers to increase domestic energy output is somehow bad. The answer for lefties is always the same–renewable nirvana will ride in to save the day. (See our post today about fossil energy providing 4X more of our energy than renewables from now until 2050 and beyond–according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.)