Mike Sauers
January 25, 2023
The following is an opinion piece that recently appeared in The Sunbury Daily Item. It was written by Karen Feridun who is a co-founder of the Better Path Coalition and an organizer of the Pennsylvania Climate Convergence.
Last summer, the Better Path Coalition and the Pennsylvania Climate Convergence Network installed the second biggest climate clock in the Americas in the Capitol Building in Harrisburg. When Gov. Shapiro took the oath of office, the clock read that we have six years and 185 days to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. History tells us that if Shapiro runs for a second term, he will likely be reelected. If he follows the lead of the shale gas governors, Rendell, Corbett and Wolf, the clock will count down to zero on his watch. Days before Shapiro’s inauguration, the Coalition sent him a letter detailing climate and environmental priorities to prevent that from happening.
The letter tells Shapiro, “You have publicly expressed support for continued fossil fuel and petrochemical development and false climate solutions like hydrogen hubs and carbon capture technologies. To date, your statements put you in league with your destructive predecessors. Rather than take on polluting industries, you have sought a comfortable middle ground that will make it appear as if the industries that are killing us can be reined in. You cannot regulate the unregulatable. You cannot save the planet by slapping wrists.”
Pennsylvania’s leaders have said little and done less about the climate crisis. Any focus, albeit limited, has been on fossil fuel consumption. However, the Better Path Coalition, a frontline and grassroots led statewide coalition focuses on fossil fuel and petrochemical production. Our focus was reflected in our eight top line and thirty specific priorities.
Calls for a fracking ban are often dismissed as impractical to impossible in Pennsylvania. However, condemning future generations to an increasingly inhospitable environment is impossible to conceive. We urged Shapiro to begin the drawdown of methane and ethane production including directing the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to stop issuing permits to any operators with violations.
Unfortunately, even an immediate ban on drilling would not address well abandonment, a legacy issue that Pennsylvanians will be dealing with for the foreseeable future. Drillers walk away from wells that have ceased production. Those wells are vulnerable to methane leaks and will need to be maintained in perpetuity on the taxpayer’s dime. At the DEP’s current rate, the massive backlog in plugging wells will take thousands of years to clear up. We called for aggressive action to address abandoned wells.
The fossil fuel industry’s most insidious attempt to continue doing business as usual during an existential crisis of its own making is the push for false solutions. Blue hydrogen would be produced from methane gas, guaranteeing continued drilling. They present carbon capture as a way to offset the climate impacts of CO2, but it doesn’t work. Shapiro must rescind his support of false solutions.
The Coalition urged Shapiro to address the unregulated management of drilling waste: operators who ignore or sidestep rules, and the tepid response of regulators to their actions. We also urged him to address potentially catastrophic gas storage leaks like the one found in a high risk Cambria County field last November. It has leaked an estimated 1.29 billion cubic feet of methane gas. A DEP official told the Technical Advisory Board that they “got lucky” because of the field’s remote location.
As the attorney general who convened a grand jury to investigate fracking, Shapiro knows that the government has failed to protect Pennsylvanians. His investigation focused on DEP and the Department of Health, merely scratching the surface of the issues at those agencies. Reforms should also be made at the Department of Community and Economic Development, which quietly brokers deals with the industry; and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, an enabler of false solutions.
As the governor who will serve during the only years we have left to protect the planet for future generations, Shapiro must reverse his position on petrochemicals and fossil fuels and lead the transition to a fossil free and sustainable Pennsylvania.
You can read the full text of the letter sent to Gov. Shapiro, including the thirty specific priorities recommended, and learn more about the Better Path Coalition at https://www.betterpathcoalition.org/pressinformation.