JIM LO SCALZO /Fracking, a method to
extract gas or oil from underground shale rock, has been tied to earthquakes
and pollution. Maryland just banned it, but Pennsylvania is the nation's No. 2
natural gas-producing state.
Philly.com
By Will Bunch , Daily News Columnist
MARCH 30, 2017
A mighty cheer rose from the Senate gallery when
lawmakers gave final passage to a bill that environmentalists had been seeking
for years. Some citizens even held up their cell phones to record the happy
moment on video.
All that remained for the bill that would permanently
ban fracking would be the signature of the measure's stunning 11th-hour
supporter, the governor.
But the governor of what? I'll tell you later in this
column. Just kidding, I'll tell you now. But first I'll tell you who it wasn't:
It wasn't Gov. Tom Wolf, the leader of the frack-happy commonwealth of
Pennsylvania. Nope, this was Maryland, our friendly neighbor on the other side
of the Mason-Dixon Line. And here's the most surprising part: The governor next
door who's banning fracking is a pro-business Republican, Larry Hogan.
It wasn't long ago that the GOP's Hogan talked just
like Pennsylvania's political leaders -- Democrat and Republican -- in that his
pupils turned into giant dollar signs over the notion of extracting millions of
barrels of natural gas from the mountainous western sliver of Maryland. When
Hogan successfully ran for that state's top job in 2014, he called its
underground energy reserves "an economic gold mine."
But Larry Hogan is a very smart politician -- as you'd
expect from a Republican who somehow won a high-profile statewide election in
deep-blue Maryland. Over the next three years, he saw the headlines on
fracking: That wastewater disposal has been linked to swarms of earthquakes in
Oklahoma and elsewhere, that a growing number of studies showed water pollution
and health concerns for people living near drilling pads, and that methane
leaks meant that fracking wasn't even helping on the climate change front.
A couple of weeks ago, Hogan shocked everyone by
announcing that he would sign a total statewide ban on fracking if the bill
wending its way through the Maryland legislature reached his desk: Said the
governor: "The possible environmental risks of fracking simply outweigh
any potential benefits…. I’ve decided that we must take the next step and move
from virtually banning fracking (Maryland has had a moratorium in place) to
actually banning fracking.”
You probably know that it's been a different story
here in Pennsylvania, which over the last decade has become one of the nation's
top natural-gas-producing states while allowing the big energy companies to run
roughshod over the political process. Most voters here in the Keystone State
expected major changes in environmental policy when Tom Wolf was elected
governor in 2014, the same time that Hogan rolled to victory on our southern
border; indeed, a severance tax on fracking that had been taken off the table
by the stridently pro-gas GOP Gov. Tom Corbett was a cornerstone of the Wolf
agenda.
Since Wolf's election, at least one survey named him
America's most liberal governor -- but it hasn't really played out that way on
the issue of fracking. To Wolf's credit, he initially moved to step up
regulation of the industry that had sagged under Corbett. But his plan to pay
for a major boost in school funding with the fracking tax also meant that Wolf
would be economically wedded to the continued exploitation of fossil fuels in
Pennsylvania, even as studies laid out the risky public health impacts and as
concern rose over the role those fuels play in climate change….
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