- Marcellus Shale Series Introduction
- PA Budget Toads salivate over the Marcellus Shale goose
- Will EPA strangle the Marcellus Shale golden goose with red tape?
- Environmental justice and the EPA’s “new look” at regulating Marcellus Shale
- A Management and Process Look at PEC’s Marcellus Shale Report
- Forget Marcellus Shale; let’s turn Pennsylvania into a wildlife preserve
- Marcellus Shale; Pooling and Property Rights
- PA DEP acts swiftly to protect citizens from potential Marcellus Shale disaster
If you thought having the EPA’s pent up progressive “regulate them till they bleed” agenda unleashed on Pennsylvania’s infant Marcellus Shale natural gas potential was bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I have not had time to review this entire document yet but the new EPA best seller Interim Guidance on Considering Environmental Justice During the Development of an Action is sure to be a major league eye bleeder. Better lay in a good supply of antacid before you start with this. Click here to access a PDF copy of the document at the EPA Web site.
Disclaimer: Our Founder’s Compass is not responsible for any side effects the reader may suffer as a result of reading this and/or other EPA documents such as, but not limited to, bleeding from the eyes, gastric distress, uncontrolled vomiting, sudden rage syndrome, or the urge to leap into a vat of acid.
As mentioned in the article in this series, “Will EPA strangle the Marcellus Shale golden goose with red tape?” the reader of the referenced AP article was expected to assume that a “new look” by the EPA under the current administration was not politically motivated. Said “new look” would not be tainted like the 2004 EPA review that found no reason to regulate the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) recovery methodology. If you had any doubts about the blatant political, progressive agenda being unleashed on American businesses and taxpayers, this should remove any that remain. An apparently little known, and unfortunately not forgotten, 1994 Executive Order signed by none other than President William Jefferson Clinton, Federal Actions To Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations, has been exhumed.
From the first paragraph of the cover letter announcing the guidance…
This step-by-step Guide will help EPA staff determine whether actions raise possible environmental justice concerns and will encourage public participation in the rulemaking process. Further, the Guide will support us in meeting our responsibilities under Executive Order 12898, Federal Actions To Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-lncome Populations, and EPA’s regulatory authorities to consider the needs of minority, low-income, and indigenous populations overburdened by pollution.
… and then the driving force behind the initiative – a progressive agenda performance objective commitment by the Administrator to President? (emphasis added)…
This Guide is also an important and positive step toward meeting EPA Administrator Jackson’s priority to work for environmental justice by explicitly integrating environmental justice considerations into the fabric of EPA’s process for developing actions under our Action Development Process.
… and then just a little something from the opening paragraphs of Administrator Lisa P. Jackson’s message exhorting the troops to go forth and deliver some environmental justice (emphasis added).
Far too often and for far too long, environmentalism has been viewed as a distant issue for low-income and minority communities. That view has persisted despite the fact that these same communities often carry the greatest environmental burdens. Dirty air, polluted water, and contaminated lands have significant impacts on the health and economic possibilities of the people who live in overburdened communities.
I have called on this U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to change both the perception and the situation on the ground, by broadly expanding our conversation on environmentalism and developing policies that have a measurable effect on environmental justice challenges.
If that first sentence doesn’t make you feel like you are about to receive one of those Chris Matthews tingling up the leg moments like when President Obama launches into one of his brilliant oratories, I don’t know what could.
The effect on Pennsylvania and the development of Marcellus Shale
Not only will EPA’s current mission to find “reason” not “fact” to regulate fracking introduce added uncertainty and added risk into investment calculations, at best this can do nothing other than impede progress on the development of a resource vital to the economic well being of Pennsylvania and the entire nation. At worst it can (1) cause an entire domestic clean energy resource to be abandoned for economic reasons or (2) cause it to proceed with economy destroying costs added by causing the natural gas industry to seek development concessions in the form of government subsidies to continue with development. When the time and cost of dithering, dallying and additional regulation in the name of “environmental justice” is added to the likely undesirable outcomes of a politically motivated EPA regulation witch hunt, the Marcellus Shale goose is sure to be cooked.
Let’s look at a few items of in the administrators comments and a few other points about environmental activism; reserving the right to comment further at a later date.
Facts and overburdened communities
It’s interesting how so often a progressive says something and it is declared to be fact simply because they said it. Weren’t the Great Society and its predecessor progressive social engineering initiatives intended to rescue the poor from rural areas where they had no running water, indoor plumbing, quality schools, or opportunities and put them into wonderful urban settings? Those of high rise apartments or individual cottages or garden apartments, with the convenience of modern utilities and access to quality urban schools that would eliminate poverty and such things as low income communities. Maybe a fact is that these initiatives flushed unconscionable amounts of taxpayer dollars down the toilet, substituting one undesirable setting for another one that ended up being far worse. Maybe another fact is that they created “overburdened communities” as an unintended but predictable outcome of their “feel good about themselves” progressive “do good” with other people’s money programs. Perhaps the facts are closer to the following:
In dozens of studies, researchers identified Kuznets curves for a variety of environmental problems. There are exceptions to the trend, especially in countries with inept governments and poor systems of property rights, but in general, richer is eventually greener. As incomes go up, people often focus first on cleaning up their drinking water, and then later on air pollutants like sulfur dioxide.
Maybe, just maybe, if so much of the nation’s wealth had not been wasted on ill conceived, doomed to fail social engineering, the free market system and American ingenuity, know how, and exceptionalism would have lifted even more people even further out of poverty and despair by now.
What is an over burdened community anyway and when did it become part of the EPA’s mission to solved community problems?
Measurable effects
Now this is a joke. First they fail to heed warning after warning that their social engineering experiments were failing miserably and now they want taxpayers to believe that they are going to measure and report honestly on their next generation of social experiments and pointless science projects?
Environmental justice
Is this like art, they will know it when they see it? Isn’t justice supposed to be something that applies to all equally under the Constitution and the laws of this country? How is it that environmental justice only applies to “overburdened” low-income and minority communities?
The wrap up of the article “Will EPA strangle the Marcellus Shale golden goose with red tape?” from earlier in this series bears repeating here.
The EPA “new look” is a “relook” that is not necessary. It is politically motivated and highly likely to be tainted. When the economy is trying to recover from the hole we are in a progressive agenda EPA witch hunt is the last thing we need. Fracking is a mature technology. What is needed is proper execution on the part of the oil and gas industry and those in the government that have oversight responsibilities. Whining that more regulations are needed before it has been demonstrated that existing regulations are inadequate is absolute nonsense.
Progressives left to pursue a misguided and economically destructive energy agenda will strangle the Marcellus Shale golden goose with red tape before the first golden natural gas egg is laid.
