Harrisburg should figure a lot in progressive politics in 2010... since we need to win there in order for things to get better in Philly.

That makes the governor's race priority #1.

Philly For Change is voting to endorse a gubernatorial candidate tonight at 7 at Meetup.

You know the players: local former Congressman Joe Hoeffel, former Philly mayoral hopeful Tom Knox, Pittsburgh's presumed frontrunner Dan Onorato, big vote-getter Auditor General Jack Wagner, and Scranton Mayor Chris Doherty.

Come out tonight and help set a progressive agenda for the next governor. For the price of admission (free), you also get Brady talking about Marcellus Shale, Friends of the Free Library's Amy Dougherty with a Libraries Update, and a big talk about that other big 2010 race, the one for U.S. Senate.

On Wednesday, a Halliburton subcontractor hired by Cabot Oil & Gas spilled over 8000 gallons of an as yet undisclosed substance (known only as a "drilling gel") into a wetland and a creek in Dimock, Pennsylvania. Efforts by environmentalists to figure out just what's been dropped in the backyards of Pennsylvanians have turned out no real answers.

I woke up Monday morning to hear on WHYY that Governor Rendell had abandoned the idea of imposing a tax on the extraction of natural gas from our state's massive but deeply buried reserves of natural gas. If he'd given a better explanation for his decision, I might be able to keep quiet about it, but the reason he said we shouldn't do it because it would kill a fledgling industry. Hogwash. Everywhere else the industry operates has a severance tax already and we've got more gas here than all of them combined (well, okay, we have the most, hands down -- no one knows exactly).

Besides, it's not a new industry at all. It's the same rigs, same teams, same operations already operating in Texas and Wyoming and Colorado. Moving to a new state doesn't make it a new industry. In fact, moving those rigs around to tap new gas plays is just how the business works. They already know how to do it. That's the essence of what they do.

So, the Inquirer did an editorial today spelling this out with numbers. Why, they ask, should we believe that a modest tax would quash this operation when the revenue forecast of the main players are so rosy? It seems like there is plenty of money there.

Some context the Inquirer didn't mention. Did you know that we don't tax the extraction of any natural resource from our state? Not coal. Not gas. Not wood. Not freaking gravel. Why? Because the coal industry is so powerful here that they have time to argue about any severance tax because they believe that as soon as one resource gets taxed that would take us that much closer to taxing coal. And they don't want that to be taxed ever. So they fight them all.

Awesome.

But we had a Governor who had said he would back taxing gas and Democrats who said they would, too. We had that, but now we don't anymore. It's too bad. Fortunately, the House Dems seem to be standing pat on Severance Tax, and that's the right call. Rep. George told PA Environmental Digest that he's standing firm on the Severance Tax and that Speaker McCall is with him.
Clean Water Action Pennsylvania

believes that the severance tax is so important that we canvassed part of McCall's district on it recently and delivered a stack of letters to him from locals who agreed: tax the shale and make it pay for environmental protection.

In fact, we specifically argue that a piece of the tax should be used for hiring and training enough DEP inspectors that one can be on site for each well bore at the stage of siting, drilling, cementing, stimulating and the closing of waste pits.

Times are tough and the economy is hurting. Areas of our state, such as the northern and central parts, have been suffering a longterm economic malaise. In recent years, technology and commodity prices have harmoniously met to create would could be a gigantic economic boon for our state: natural gas.

It turns out that Pennsylvania is sitting on some gigantic reserves in natural gas trapped inside a huge geological system known as The Marcellus Shale. Shale gas has been too expensive and too difficult to tap profitably for years. That seems to be changing, unfortunately, harvesting that gas could be devastating for our streams, rivers and air quality.

I'm not using the word devastating lightly. To get it, companies will have to tear down a lot of trees, run thousands and thousands of diesel trucks, use millions of gallons of water, polluting it horribly and leave mountains of petroleum products sitting and fuming in the sun for who knows how long. It won't be pretty.

Recently, organizations under the umbrella of the Campaign for Clean Water wrote to the Action Secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection about this issue in hopes that they could find a way for us to harvest the resource right. These are just a few of the problems we could see in our first look at the issue.

PENNSYLVANIA CAMPAIGN FOR CLEAN WATER
215-545-0250

December 18, 2008

John Hanger
Acting Secretary
Department of Environmental Protection
Rachel Carson State Office Building
Harrisburg, PA 17105

Dear Secretary Hanger:

Thank you for convening the briefing for the environmental community by DEP officials, the Susquehanna & Delaware River Basin Commissions on October 9th. We appreciated the opportunity to hear what the agencies are doing to address the challenges presented by the many new gas drilling projects proposed and underway in the Marcellus shale fields.

We understand that natural gas drilling could potentially be a major new source of revenue and business development in Pennsylvania. At the same time, however, the undersigned organizations are concerned that this drilling must be done in a manner that does not damage our state’s natural resources, particularly our water resources and the plants and animals that they support. If the rush to drill is allowed to go forward without adequate permit conditions and oversight, it could irreparably and unnecessarily harm habitat and water sources, de-watering streams, damaging water and air quality, fragmenting forests and impacting threatened and endangered species in some of the most pristine parts of our state.