Energy

Governor Tom Wolf vetoed funding approved by the General Assembly last week to rescue social services, school funding, and other programs stranded by Wolf’s state government shutdown. Three months into the fiscal year, the governor clings to his position that he will sign nothing but a complete, final budget plan. Anything short of that is a “stunt”, he says. Upon vetoing, he said that he could not approve the stopgap plan in order to “keep the pressure up,” essentially holding hostages for now 91 days and counting.

As lawmakers hold firm against the Wolf tax increase proposals they are also warding off some bad actors that go along with them. A proposed increase in the tax on Marcellus Shale drilling would fund a retread of a failed Rendell Administration attempt to muscle green energy into the marketplace.

The evidence keeps piling up that government subsidies, state or federal, of green energy projects deliver nothing but empty promises – on jobs, affordable energy, and claims of spectacular innovations.

Sixteen states, with many more on the way, have already banded together to pursue legal action to stop the implementation of Barack Obama’s “Clean Power Plan”. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania won’t be joining the party.

Tom Steyer’s money can be enormously influential. The billionaire environmental activist is the single most powerful force behind the stymieing of the Keystone XL pipeline project.

An ordinary air permit process for a pump station to an underground natural gas line in Lebanon County is getting extraordinary attention. Nearly 500 people asked the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to hold a public airing on the impact of the project; only 40 of those requests came from local residents.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the leading bad actor in what American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Scholar, Benjamin Zycher, calls the, “metastasis of the executive branch.”

Zycher, and other policy experts, say that the agency is accelerating a power grab through an aggressive regulatory agenda with dubious or scant benefits to the environment. Thousands of jobs will be jettisoned as businesses, especially manufacturers, try to cope with billions more in compliance costs.