Spotlight PA reports:

SINK HOLES: Chester County commissioners want Pennsylvania regulators to shut down a portion of the Mariner East pipeline, saying at least seven sinkholes have developed since January in one township, per WHYY. The push comes days after Pennsylvania’s Public Utility Commission unveiled a raft of proposed pipeline safety regulations, some inspired by ongoing issues along the Mariner East route.

Your legislators are constantly being pressed by lobbyists to let the industry get by with less regulatory scrutiny, or to cut funding for inspection and enforcement. Utilities are supposed to operate for the public convenience and necessity, not to make it easy for private interests to cut corners.

Drillers and those who supply the chemicals they use are secretive about the magic sauce they inject to open the fissures and free the gas. Spotlight PA in Harrisburg and WHYY in Philadelphia are investigating reports that those chemicals may include toxic PFAS.

Nothing that fracking companies do improves the quality of air and water, or the health of Pennsylvanians, NOTHING!

Fracking is not in the public interest, it produces economic benefits to companies that buy political influence and corrupt the legislative process.

Political winds change. As unprecidented weather extremes become the rule, and other events make climate change real for most rational people, those who fostered disinformation and propaganda in a effort to delay action may be held accountable.

Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price

With an unprecedented wave of lawsuits, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels

The abandonment of the project by its developer is good news. But the economic environment that made it attractive to big oil hasn’t changed much. Because the cost of oil is low thanks to many hidden subsidies and costs born by the public at large, there is still plenty of incentive to burn the fuel and delay switching to renewable non-polluting sources. So don’t go to sleep.

US Taxpayers provide more than twenty billion dollars ($20B) is direct subsidies to the Fossil Fuel Industry year in and year out. That does not include an estimated six trillion ($6T) in indirect subsidies that represent the externalized costs of our use of fossil fuel products. Damage to property, people’s health, and the environment is permitted explicitly or implicitly by our failure to hold the industry accountable.

We may have grown accoustomed to this and accepted it in service of cheap gas, and “disposable” plastic items, but the reality of the impact isn’t mitigated by acceptance.

Renewable energy is competitively handicapped by these direct and indirect subsidies to the detriment of the public good and the wellbeing of all. Shouldn’t they end?

Pennsylvania collects very little when it permits private companies to tap the commonwealth’s fossil fuels. If the well owner goes bankrupt, who pays to close the well?

It must be mighty tempting to those energy moguls to drain away all the liquid assets and then declare bankruptcy.

Nothing good comes of fracking.

There are serious consequences to climate change. Looks like they are finally getting the attention of the financial world.

Wildfires Could Signal Coming Climate Change Financial Crisis

California’s August Complex is now the biggest wildfire event in state history

Legislators are still serving private interests over public well-being. Spotlight PA is accountable high-integrity investigative reporting – I trust them to be honest and forthright. Our public servants, on the other hand, are too vulnerable to political winds, and the blandishments of the fossil energy lobby to be trusted, as these pages amply document. When your paycheck depends on not speaking with candor, nothing good happens.

“After all the evidence was heard … this was [the grand jury’s] conclusion — the giant fracking companies were given free passes by unprepared agencies, and the public was harmed,” said Jacklin Rhoads, a spokesperson for Shapiro.

– Spotlight PA

Damning report on Pa.’s failure to protect residents from fracking unlikely to result in major reform | Spotlight PA

State agencies implicated in the report dismissed it outright, calling the recommendations outdated and ill-informed.