The comedian Henny Youngman was famous for his one-liner "Take my wife - please!" Gov. Corbett is saying the same thing about Pennsylvania to natural gas drillers, and he's not joking.
The Corbett administration's over-the-top routine is to act like a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the natural gas industry. The governor has rejected a reasonable severance tax, preferring instead to inflict massive cuts on public education and other government services. He insists on a laughably anemic local impact fee that would not begin to compensate Pennsylvanians for the environmental and other damage done by drilling. He has bent over backwards to give drillers favorable regulatory treatment, even running afoul of the U.S. EPA on air pollution standards. He would deny the right of communities to have some say in regulating drilling within their borders. Even the state's official drilling records are a joke, leaving the public and the governor's own regulatory staff in the dark about the true level of activity of the gas industry.
The governor's website claims that he will "provide an open, transparent, accountable, and trustworthy government for all." But that's another gag. The Corbett administration is being completely opaque when it comes to the management of our precious public lands.
PennFuture has filed repeated requests with Department of Conservation and Natural Resources under Pennsylvania's Right to Know Law for its professional projections of future royalty income, and we have been repeatedly denied. If the projections don't exist, it would be an example of gross mismanagement. And if they do exist, even if DCNR has a right under the law to withhold this information, how is it not the public's right to know the amount of revenue that a public agency estimates will be generated by the sale of public resources? How is that open, transparent, and trustworthy? It has to be a joke, but we're not laughing.
There are serious rumblings that the governor is about to lift the moratorium on leasing more state forestland for drilling to raise money for the state budget. This is despite the fact that the DCNR has already concluded that additional leasing would have devastating consequences. Meanwhile, the money that the Commonwealth has received and will receive from leasing of state forest land for gas drilling is being used to fund government operations and there is little or no reinvestment in the public lands that are being damaged by drilling. All that will do is create an immense budgetary hole when the gas stops flowing and the royalty payments subside. And the governor fired the director of DCNR's citizens' advisory council, the members of which are raising concerns and questions about the impact of drilling on public land. Accountability? Don't make me laugh!
Gov. Corbett's favorite one-liner is that his Marcellus Shale drilling policy is based on science and facts, but it was revealed this week that the joke is on us. He has in fact rejected science in his myopic, "see-no-evil" view of drilling.
In a stunning punch line, DCNR leadership has slashed dedicated funding for conservation research by 70 percent and pulled a fast one, removing from a recommended funding list projects examining the impact of natural gas drilling and climate change -- all without consulting the agency's professional scientific staff or the special committee that advises DCNR on research priorities. In fact, the handful of projects that were approved didn't include even one of the conservation program's publicly announced priorities.
The governor's act now includes contortions worthy of Cirque du Soleil. He has put his head firmly into the sand, refusing to study the impacts of gas drilling on Pennsylvania's environment and natural resources, despite the fact that the scale of drilling that will occur in Pennsylvania and the ecological disruption it will cause is unprecedented in the state's history. He will not reveal to the public projections of the scale of drilling on the public's land and the income it will yield, and he may be considering leasing more state land. He has handed Pennsylvania over to the drillers -- "Take my state -- please!"
The governor's standup routine is delivered at our peril. It is no laughing matter.
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