Gas industry must learn Pennsylvania not for sale
http://tribune-democrat.com/editorials/x1511088498/Gas-industry-must-learn-Pennsylvania-not-for-sale
Edward Smith-Editorial June 29, 2011
Gov. Tom Corbett accepted more than $1 million from the gas industry, got elected, appointed a gas driller to head his transition team, appointed his man to run the Department of Environmental Protection (and regulate the gas industry), and has steadfastly refused to tax the gas industry even though Pennsylvania is the only state without a severance tax.
Drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale is a historic, one-time opportunity to produce a big enough source of new revenue for the state to solve some real problems and reduce the growing property tax burden on homeowners and businesses.
The biggest problem facing the state is the miserable quality of public education.
Former Gov. Tom Ridge said his biggest regret was his inability to improve public education.
Pennsylvania has the opportunity to enact a tax on the still-emerging gas drilling industry and earmark the revenue for education and environmental protection.
Earmarking this new revenue to fund education would reduce state spending and go far to balance current and future state budgets. Property taxes should be rolled back to a base year and further increases prohibited.
Pennsylvania’s Environmental Bill of Rights makes its citizens (not the gas companies) beneficiaries and the governor and Legislature trustees.
As a trustee, the governor has a fiduciary responsibility to protect the beneficiaries, not to favor the gas industry.
Legislators have the same responsibility. It’s time they act like trustees.
Corbett has chosen, instead, to make deep cuts in the funding of all public education and avoid taxing the gas industry. The result is likely to be further slippage in the quality of education, higher costs for higher education (already unaffordable for many) and higher property taxes.
An impact fee is not the same as a severance tax, but there should be impact fees on every gas well and there should be an environmental impact statement tied to regulation because the geology on every well is different.
The revenue from impact fees should go to local governments to offset the costs of infrastructure and services.
The revenue from the severance tax should go to the state (but not into the General Fund) and be earmarked for education and environmental protection.
Ridge, now a consultant to the natural gas industry, says that drillers need to improve their image. He might have said that the industry needs to clean up its act and its image.
The oil and gas industry is the only one in America allowed to inject – unchecked – known hazardous, rock-dissolving chemicals into the earth, thus risking contamination of drinking water.
The “Halliburton Loophole” is the name given to the exemption in the Clean Drinking Water Act that exempts the industry from federal regulation.
Halliburton patented the toxic cocktail of chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing technique to extract natural gas.
John Hanger, former secretary of the state Department of Environmental Protection, said that frak fluid is “one of the most hazardous materials on earth.”
The New York Times says, “If hydraulic fracturing is as safe as the industry says it is, why should it fear regulation?”
Governmental regulation is all that stands between environmental destruction and an industry that has shown a total disregard for the environment (dumping frak waste into rivers and streams is one example).
As The New York Times pointed out in a series of investigative reports, Pennsylvania was unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the Marcellus Shale gas drilling dilemma.
When the gas industry gives millions of dollars to candidates, they expect favors in return. They are trying to buy Pennsylvania.
Recently, the industry tried to stack a public hearing held by the U.S. Department of Energy by offering all-expense-paid trips to pro-drilling landowners in northeast Pennsylvania to attend and testify at a public hearing held in Washington, Pa.
Citizens with poisoned wells and those who care about poisoned streams and water tables had to pay their own way.
The gas industry has funded university studies and opinion polls to mold public opinion.
When the gas industry invites regulation, behaves ethically, does not try to buy votes and favors from public officials, avoids half-truths and untruths, accepts responsibility for disasters and protects the environment, it will deserve respect.
Money talks, as it did 100 years ago when mining companies polluted our streams.
But I believe that most Pennsylvanians agree that our state is not for sale.
Edward Smith of Jackson Township is a retired city and county manager.