What’s Preventing PA from Becoming Northeast Energy Hub? Pipelines
Charlie Melançon is a former U.S. Congressman from Louisiana who played an integral role in rebuilding Louisiana’s infrastructure following the devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Melançon served on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which oversaw energy policy and environmental quality among other issues. He sees a lot of parallels between his home state of Louisiana and Pennsylvania. Melançon has written an editorial appearing in a major PA newspaper hoping to inform and encourage Pennsylvanians to wake up to the fact that pipelines are the key to PA becoming the energy hub of the northeast. Conversely, without (more) pipelines, PA will not realize its potential. Pipelines are the key. Melançon is uniquely qualified to know.
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The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has just published its 2020 Oil and Gas Annual Report. This is the fifth year in a row the DEP has published the report in an interactive, electronic (i.e.online) format ONLY. Don’t worry, we’ve turned it into a convenient PDF for MDN readers. What does the 2020 report show? While permits issued and the number of new wells drilled have both gone down (again), gas production has gone up (again)–to a new record high.
Politicians derive their power from touching *your* money. They love to take money out of one of your pockets, handle it (siphon some of it off for themselves and their favorite cronies), and then put some (not all) of it back into another of your pockets–all while telling you that you should enjoy the violation you’ve just received. This is the elaborate hoax Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and those who want to slap an insane, regressive carbon tax on all Pennsylvanians are attempting with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI)–a carbon tax aimed at eliminating coal-fired power plants and vastly reducing the number of Marcellus-fired power plants.
A federal court in Pennsylvania upheld the findings of a U.S. Dept. of Labor investigation that oil and gas contract worker Henkels & McCoy Inc. owes big money in back wages and overtime to 362 workers at 11 worksites in five states, including Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Connecticut, Georgia, and (yes) even in New York too. The company must now pay $1,085,830 in back wages and damages.
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.” (See below for the full quote.) Yesterday Pennsylvania Democrats unveiled their latest “generous gifts” they’re promising to bestow on Pennsylvanians from the public treasury if Gov. Wolf gets his way and imposes a Marcellus-killing carbon tax on electric power generation. The Dems figure they can raise about $300 million a year via a carbon tax and they have a wish list bigger than your wildest dreams for where they’ll spend it. One tiny problem for the Dems…
Pennsylvania’s Democrats are having trouble selling the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a carbon tax aimed at shutting down PA’s coal and natural gas-fired power plants, and by extension shutting down many shale-related jobs in the state. The Dems can’t paper over the fact that RGGI will spell massive layoffs. So what do they propose? Government handouts to those who get laid off, paying them literally pennies on the dollar in government welfare checks in return for “saving the planet” by shuttering coal and gas-fired plants (and putting people out of work). That’s the brilliant solution proposed in a bill offered up by southeast PA state Senator Carolyn Comitta (D-Chester County).
The state treasurers from all three actively producing Marcellus/Utica states, including Stacy Garrity (PA), Robert Sprague (OH), and Riley Moore (WV), along with the state treasurers from 11 other oil and gas producing states, sent a letter to John Kerry, Biden’s so-called Climate Envoy, telling Kerry and other Biden officials to stop pressuring banks and other financial institutions to divest from fossil fuel companies. The treasurers also issued a warning to those banks and financial institutions letting them know their states (all 14 of them) will collectively pull their money out of those banks and financial institutions–BILLIONS of dollars–if the banks and financial institutions persist in divesting from fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel haters: BACK OFF!
Gordon Tomb, a senior fellow at the Commonwealth Foundation (Pennsylvania’s free-market think tank) has some strong words for those want to put all of PA’s energy eggs into the so-called renewables basket: “‘Green’ energy proposals are no economic therapeutic for Pennsylvania. They’re snake oil miracle cures that ignore the realities of physics–and people’s needs.” So begins a column by Tomb. It’s a verbal slap across the face to get the attention of people who either won’t, or can’t, think for themselves about the glaring failures of a policy to convert to all-renewable energy, and what a total conversion would mean for the state (a complete disaster).
In theater of the absurd, yesterday a bunch of sleazy politicians, headed by the grandmaster sleazoloa himself, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, unveiled proposed new anti-Marcellus legislation based on a ginned-up, fake anti-shale grand jury report that Shapiro manipulated and orchestrated last year (see 
Back in March MDN told you about supposed violations by Chesapeake Energy of the federal Clean Water Act and the Pennsylvania Clean Streams Law and Dam Safety and Encroachments Act by failing to identify and protect swamps (i.e. wetlands) at a number of oil and gas well sites in Pennsylvania (see 
In March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to enter the public consciousness, some 500 people from labor unions and industry met in Pittsburgh to launch an organization called Pittsburgh Works Together (PWT), dedicated to fighting back against those who want to end southwest PA industries including steel, natural gas, and petrochemicals (see