Energy

Governor Wolf recently joined a regional compact of eight other states and Washington D.C. to reduce carbon from motor vehicle emissions. The newly formed “Transportation and Climate Initiative” has a hopeful government promo line: cap-and-invest. But if this latest top-down market meddling follows the same path as the program it’s modeled on, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) that targets power plants - and nothing suggests it won’t - it should be more aptly tagged tax-and-impoverish.

President Donald Trump, in a bold claim echoed by economists and business leaders, said his tax reform plan will be “like rocket fuel” for the economy. Last week, the U.S. House set the stage to approve that plan.

To get it to the President’s desk by end of the calendar year, Republican Leaders will have to reinforce some in their ranks against the tired litany that pro-growth tax relief is a “giveaway to the rich.”  

Early last week, Environmental Protection Administrator Scott Pruitt announced the start of the repeal of an Obama energy mandate for power plants. The true goal of the mandate wasn’t lower global temperatures, as trumpeted by the Obama administration, but the crippling of the coal industry through manipulation of the fuel supply mix for power plants.

Senator Scott Martin (R-Lancaster) has cleverly taken a well-established principle in the retail business and applied it to protestors who corrupt the right to free speech: you break it, you bought it.

The Commonwealth Cost Reimbursement Act Legislation (SB 743), which Martin introduced with five other Senate Republicans, including Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R-Jefferson), would allow the local police or a local or state government to petition the courts to require protestors to cover the damages, including the costs of arrests, they leave behind.

It’s more than just the weather driving people South and West. North Carolina has enjoyed budget surpluses for five straight years. Over the same time, manufacturers there have created hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, and business and personal income taxes have been slashed.

Late last week, a federal judge in Illinois dismissed a lawsuit filed against a one-year-old state law that subsidizes nuclear power through higher bills on residential and business customers. On Monday, the Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA), the lead plaintiff seeking an injunction, appealed the ruling to the 7^th Circuit in Illinois, but the judge’s dismissal of the suit serves as a cautionary tale for a coalition of business and consumer interests in Pennsylvania working against such a law here: stop it from ever getting enacted in the first place.

The General Assembly returns to Harrisburg this week in search of more than $2 billion to fully fund, as required by law, the $32 billion spending plan that was sent to the governor last Friday. The available options are all unwelcome: borrowing; more gambling; increasing taxes; shifting money between funds.