PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER EDITORIAL: A salient feature of the natural gas embedded beneath Pennsylvania is that it is, well, embedded beneath Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, though, since novel drilling techniques began to enable the extraction of methane from the Marcellus Shale formation, the state’s leadership has coddled the industry as if it might easily go the way of the steel mills. Instead of properly taxing and regulating the companies benefiting from an endemic resource, they have pointlessly showered them with giveaways.
Last week, the state Supreme Court corrected one of the most questionable such sops to the industry, striking down a state law that would have exempted gas drillers from local zoning. The court ruled 4-2 that this “drill-everywhere provision,” as one lawyer called it, violates the state constitution’s environmental safeguards….
Even in the wake of a ruling that should have chastened them, the governor, legislative leaders, and gas lobbyists persisted in mouthing dire warnings about insufficient friendliness to business. Nonsense. Energy companies are certainly important to the economy, but they don’t have to be wooed into taking advantage of rich natural resources. They have to be regulated by the appointed guardians of those resources, our representatives in Harrisburg… (more)
