Doomed Sea Isle City

So, I am in Sea Isle City, New Jersey on a family vacation. I am getting too much sun, eating too much food, drinking too much wine and spending too much money. Definition of a vacation. I am here with four generations – my mother, my sister, my daughter and my granddaughters. We’ve been coming down here to the Jersey Shore for 40 years.

Sea Isle City sits on Ludlam Island, a barrier island – elevation seven feet. It is the narrowest of the Jersey barrier islands and has a low elevation beach. It already regularly experiences dune breaches and storm overwash during intense nor’easters and hurricanes. Sea Isle deals with moderate chronic flooding during summer thunderstorms.

Yesterday, I read that because our warming planet is melting glaciers and polar ice, sea level on the Atlantic coast is rising much faster than predicted. Along a 600-mile stretch of Atlantic coast from Boston to North Carolina the sea is rising much faster than the global sea level rise. Scientists predict that by 2100, global sea levels will rise two to three feet. The faster rise along the Atlantic coast will add another foot to sea level rise here. That will put Ludlam Island a scant three feet above sea level.

There is a lot of expensive real estate on this island. Vacation houses are crammed cheek by jowl on the beach front and along the blocks between the beach and the bay. Now people deal with the flooding by building living spaces above ground level garages and making repairs after each event. Earlier this year, Sea Isle City completed a $9 million beach replenishment project; 75 percent of the cost will be covered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

As the sea rises, Sea Isle will be fighting a losing battle against the water. There just will not be enough money to keep the tides at bay. To buy real estate here as a long-term investment requires a state of denial about the inevitable fate of any structures built on this island. 

My eldest granddaughter, Lindsey, is 10 years old. If she has a child when she is 30 years old and her child has a child when she is 30 years old, it will be 2072 when her granddaughter is 10. The Sea Isle beach houses will be sinking derelicts, wrecked by wind and waves and undermined by the relentless rise of the sea. She will tell her granddaughter of those long ago summers on Sea Isle’s beaches and explain that her grandmother’s generation did not act in time to save those summers for her.

Forgotten families over the longwalls

Dimock – One name, one place emblematic of the impact of natural gas extraction on people’s homes and lives. Since the families in Dimock lost their water supplies to Cabot’s shoddy drilling practices, there have been several more instances where bad well casings have freed up methane that found its way into family drinking water wells. As a first response to lost water, drillers typically deliver a large plastic container called a water buffalo to replace the lost water supply. Each incident garners the attention of the press and elicits outrage from anti-drilling activists. 

But the destruction of property and water supplies that has been ongoing since 1994 from longwall coal mining receives scant media attention. That year the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed Act 54 which allows coal mining companies to use longwall mining, a technology that leaves no support beneath the land being undermined. The land above longwall mines drops damaging homes, roads, utilities, water wells and streams. Coal companies are required to replace water supplies and fix damaged structures, but years can pass before the coal companies provide adequate repairs or fully replace lost water supplies. Coal companies have eight longwall mines in Washington and Green counties, and water buffaloes are a common feature of the coal country landscape.

Act 54 requires the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to report on the impacts of longwall mining and the success of coal company repairs to property and water every five years. The latest report, released in 2011, covers 2003 to 2008. The Citizens Advisory Council (CAC) to DEP is one organization that has never forgotten the victims of longwall mining, and since the release of the report, the council’s members have delved into the details interviewing DEP and coal company staff and affected property owners and others. In its comments on the report, delivered to DEP earlier this month, the CAC raises serious issues about the length of time it takes for coal companies to make complete repairs to damaged homes and businesses, to replace water supplies and to repair damaged streams. 

An analysis of the DEP report done by Schmid and Company, an ecological consulting company, notes that as longwall mining has expanded and now removes wider panels of coal, more damage has resulted. They also point out that some of the damage reported on in the 1997 to 2002 report was not resolved by 2008 – 23 percent of damage to water supplies had not been resolved. About two-thirds of damage to streams that occurred during the 2003 to 2008 period were not repaired. Worse, when longwall mining damaged homes or other structures, coal companies fully repaired or fully compensated only 29 percent of the property owners.

Coal mining continues in full force in Greene and Washington counties. As the impacts of natural gas drilling on communities and natural resources take center stage, families above the longwalls continue their quiet, lonely struggle with our dirtiest, intentionally destructive source of energy. Fortunately, the CAC remembers them.

Waiting for the budget verdict

Waiting for the details of the budget to surface is a lot like waiting for a guilty or innocent pronouncement. The jury in this case is all Republican – leaders of the House and Senate and negotiators from the governor’s office. They will decide what gets cut and what survives. Keystone Research Center and the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center have pulled together bits and pieces that have been picked up by the various intrepid Capitol newsroom reporters. From what they have gleaned it looks like state colleges and universities will receive level funding, some money that would allow kindergarten to survive in distressed schools has been restored, but the poorest among us get thrown to the wolves. 

Few people, however, will really know what’s in and what’s out in the budget until the budget bill and the fiscal code are printed. Seasoned advocates working to preserve important programs know there can be some ugly surprises lurking there. If, for example, the budget deal includes anticipated revenue from leasing more state forestland for gas drilling, it will be buried in the fiscal code. If budget-makers have decided they must raid the Keystone Parks, Recreation and Conservation Fund, it will likewise be in the fiscal code language. 

While a deal has been struck among Republican leaders and the governor, they still need to sell the package to rank and file members – not always an easy sell. The late Rendell budgets were often the result of members balking at the deals their leaders had made. Both the Keystone Fund and the farmland preservation program have the strong support of Republican members.  After putting up a nasty vote for the dreadful drilling bill, many Republicans from moderate districts, especially in the southeast, cannot go home having voted to cut Keystone. And many Republicans who represent rural agricultural districts will have the same problem if the farmland preservation program gets cut. Advocates for both programs continue to wait nervously as neither of these has a friend in the governor’s office. 

Regardless of the details, one thing will is clear. There will be painful choices in this budget. All members who vote for this budget will need to explain why they had to make cuts to vital programs while at the same time handing over more than $1 billion to one of the richest corporations on earth for a cracker plant.

Staffers in the appropriations committees will earn their pay this weekend as they crank out the legislation that will produce the budget. All the Democrats in the General Assembly, rank and file Republican members and the public will be waiting for this year’s budget verdict due to come out next week.

Casey puts up courageous vote to protect clean air

Yesterday, Senator Casey joined 52 of his colleagues, including 5 Republicans, to beat back an irrational attack on clean air.  

The vote against a resolution to permanently stop the Environmental Protection Agency from implementing new regulations requiring coal-fired power plants to cut their emissions of mercury and other toxic substances shouldn’t have required courage. Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma is a right-wing extremist doing the bidding of the Koch brothers and the coal industry. He was the architect of the attempt to stop this needed regulation that provides long-overdue protection for public health, especially the health of women and babies. In more reasoned times, this kind of extreme anti-environmental jihad would have been dismissed out of hand. This resolution should never have gotten to the Senate floor. 

But these are not reasoned times.  Forty-six Senators, including Pennsylvania’s Senator Toomey, voted to rollback protections for women and babies and allow the industry to continue to spew out toxic mercury at will.  Climate Progress has a chart showing the amount of campaign contributions these senators received from the electric utility and mining companies. 

Senator Casey is up for re-election this year, and that makes the vote all the more important and courageous. His opponent, Tom Smith, is a former coal company owner, and he jumped all over Casey’s vote calling it part of the Obama-Casey war on coal. Casey currently enjoys a 51 to 32 advantage over Smith in recent polls. Fifty-one percent of voters also approve of the job Casey is doing as senator. 

But this is June, and November is a long way off. Senator Casey’s vote for clean air will draw the ire of the industry and will open the deep pockets of the Koch brothers who will likely pour campaign dollars into Smith’s campaign. We can expect a slew of negative campaign ads targeting Casey come the autumn. Senator Casey well knew that when he cast his vote. 

Pennsylvanians know that Senator Casey works for the public interest and will buck industry when it’s necessary. Every Pennsylvania voter should feel fortunate to have a reasoned, independent member in the Senate. 

Let Senator Casey know you appreciate his courage – go to his website and thank him.

The multi-state scrum for a cracker plant

The American Chemical Council (ACC), an industry trade organization made up of chemical manufacturers, has put out a report that projects manufacturing output, industry revenues, job creation and tax revenues resulting from construction and ongoing operation of ethane cracker plants in 9 states. The report, done in-house by ACC’s statistics and economics shop, uses a standard economic model to arrive at the numbers. Accompanying the report are fact sheets for the 9 states studied.

Comparing the fact sheets, the jobs and revenue numbers for the states are similar with the exception of Texas which does far better than any of the other states. Pennsylvania’s numbers are similar to our neighbors New York, New Jersey, and Ohio and also Michigan. Arkansas and West Virginia, while still doing well, would not benefit as much as the rest of the states. 

ACC is sharing its report in the various state houses to fuel the desire of lawmakers to attract one of the ethane crackers to locate within their borders. The report has been well received in the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the governor’s office. It shows that an ethane cracker would create 17,000 permanent jobs and generate $1.2 billion in wages and $140 million annually in state tax revenues.  

Whether or not it was meant to, the report has intensified the scrum among the states to get a cracker plant. The most intense competition has been among Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia for a plant that Royal Dutch Shell wants to build. Each state has tried to outdo the other by offering the giant oil company taxpayer-funded incentives in the form of tax credits, tax-free properties and income tax exemptions. For now, it looks like Pennsylvania has won if Governor Corbett can persuade the members of the General Assembly to give Shell the biggest tax subsidy ever offered to one company in state history - $66 million a year over 25 years. If the legislature balks, Shell might take its plant and the money and jobs across the border to Ohio. 

The Shell tax credit is not, however, based on the number of jobs that the plant would create. Permanent employment at the plant itself would only be about 400 jobs. The tax credit would be based on the amount of ethylene produced at the plant and would go only to Shell, not to other companies involved in the supply chain. The credit would eat up almost half of the total state revenues projected by the ACC report. 

Pennsylvania has not done its own economic impact analysis of a cracker plant. An analysis by the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center raises significant questions about the size and scope of the incentive package the governor has offered and pointed out the spotty track record of previous grandiose incentives based on grandiose jobs and revenue projections. 

The competitive fever that has set in at the governor’s office to win the Shell plant at all costs may cost Pennsylvania taxpayers more than they will get out of the deal. And Governor Corbett’s request for the members of the General Assembly to commit $66 million a year to one company and his request for them to further slash state funding for education and human services puts the legislators who have to face the voters this November into the middle of the multi-state scrum for the cracker plant.

Obama last line of defense for clean air

Oklahoma Senator Inhofe is continuing his war on clean air by introducing a binding resolution that if passed by the U.S. Congress would permanently kill new clean air rules. The new, long-overdue regulations would require coal-fired power plants to cut their emissions of mercury and other toxic air pollutants. 

When the Clean Air Act was passed coal-fired power plants were granted exemptions from many of its pollution limits. The industry persuaded legislators that the regulations were not needed because many of the power plants were old and would soon be retired. However, the old coal-fired plants, already paid off, were cash cows for the industry. Utilities just kept them chugging along without investing in modern pollution controls. 

Mercury is a potent toxic that can interfere with the normal development of babies’ brains. Mercury spewed out by coal-fired power plants in Pennsylvania has contaminated all of our waterways and is pervasively present in the flesh of fish. The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission has issued a blanket consumption advisory for all fish caught in our streams and rivers that recommends limits on eating that fish. 

In 2007, Pennsylvania enacted its own regulation requiring coal-fired power plants to cut their mercury emissions by 80 percent by 2010 and 90 percent by 2015. Unfortunately, the regulation was overturned by the courts on a technicality having to do with the definition of toxics in the Clean Air Act. 

This year, the Obama administration finally issued new regulations to require the coal-fired power plants to meet the same pollution standards as other industries. Senator Inhofe is trying to pass a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to kill the rules. To pass, a CRA resolution needs to gain a simple majority in the Senate making it filibuster-proof. A vote in the Senate is expected tomorrow. Pennsylvania’s Senator Bob Casey is under extreme pressure from the coal industry and coal unions to vote for the resolution, and he has not said how he will vote. 

President Obama has indicated that he will veto it if it reaches his desk. The mercury toxics regulation is one of the most significant environmental achievements of the Obama administration. The president’s veto is the last line of defense in the Republican attack on clean air.

A tale of two subsidies

When it comes to subsidies, it’s the best of times for Royal Dutch Shell but the worst of times for Pennsylvania’s solar companies.

Governor Corbett wants the General Assembly to quickly pass a massive subsidy for one company – Royal Dutch Shell – to ensure that Shell locates an ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, Pennsylvania instead of Ohio or West Virginia. Already two Beaver County Republicans, Rep. Jim Christiana and Senator Elder Vogel, have put forward legislation to give Shell a $66 million a year tax break on each gallon of ethylene it makes out of ethane, a by-product of natural gas. Saying that there’s an urgent need to ensure Pennsylvania wins the bidding war with Ohio and West Virginia for the cracker plant, the governor wants this tax break passed with the budget by the end of June.

Last fall, Rep. Chris Ross of Chester County introduced a bill HB 1580 that would help Pennsylvania’s solar industry over a rough spot. A burst in installations of solar power systems spurred by federal tax credits and the successful Pennsylvania Sunshine Program created more solar generated electricity than is needed for Pennsylvania utilities to meet the solar standard set in the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards Act (AEPS). As a result, the price of the credit solar generators receive crashed making it difficult to finance new solar systems and large solar projects. Rep. Ross’ modest bill would slightly increase the solar energy standard for three years to bring supply in balance with demand. The bill would cause a temporary slight increase consumer electricity bills by about 4 cents a month.  The bill has more than 100 co-sponsors from both parties. 

The solar industry in Pennsylvania is comprised of more 750 businesses employing more than 4,000 workers. These are good jobs already created. They are here now, but the low solar credit price threatens to put some companies out of business or send them to other states. Despite the jobs at risk and the negligible cost, the Corbett administration opposes the Ross bill.   

Incredibly, the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry also opposes this bill which would protect 750 businesses. The Chamber says it like solar energy, “But taxpayers should not be expected to foot the bill for a specific energy sector that must be able to compete and thrive on its own.” However, the Chamber sings a different tune when it comes to the tax break for the ethane cracker. Gene Barr, the Chamber president said that he understands why the governor offers incentives. 

The governor says Pennsylvania needs to offer the tax break to Shell to attract the 20,000 jobs the cracker plant will create. However, the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center points out that a bill passed in March exempting Shell’s cracker plant from corporate income and property taxes for 15 years requires Shell to create only 400 permanent jobs – a number consistent with employment at similar plants elsewhere.  

The governor’s economic tunnel vision sees only natural gas driving growth and prosperity in Pennsylvania. And that narrow vision has him putting 4,000 existing jobs at 750 Pennsylvania businesses at risk while chasing 400 permanent jobs at one company with lavish tax breaks.

Keystone Fund may be safe - state parks not so much

Today, Representative Bill Adolph (R-Delaware) came out in strong support for keeping the Keystone Parks, Recreation and Conservation Fund whole. It doesn’t get much better than that as Rep. Adolph is chair of the House Appropriations Committee and has a big say in what the final state budget will look like. He was joined at a press conference announcing his support on the capitol steps by Rep. Kate Harper (R-Montgomery), a long time champion of land conservation and the Keystone Fund, and David Masur of PennEnvironment and Andy Loza of the Pennsylvania Land Trust Association. 

Governor Corbett proposed eliminating the Keystone Fund, which has its own dedicated funding stream – a percentage of the real estate transfer tax – that was approved by the voters in 1993. Since then this popular program has conserved thousands of acres of open space, funded trail and greenway projects, expanded and improved local parks and provided funding for maintenance and improvements at state parks. The Senate proposed restoring half the money and the House wants to keep the fund whole. 

Rep. Adolph’s support for the Keystone Fund will be vital in the ongoing budget negotiations. His advocacy for the program makes it more likely that the fund will survive the process.  

PennEnvironment collected thousands of postcards from visitors to state parks as part of its campaign to save the Keystone Fund. And while the fund is important to maintaining our state parks, they face a far more serious threat – gas drilling. It turns out that the Commonwealth does not own the mineral rights beneath 85 percent of our state parks. That means they have no legal way to keep drillers out of the 61 parks located over the Marcellus. A court ruling even removed the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ ability to impose surface use agreements on the drillers to provide extra protection for these special places. 

So the Keystone Fund may be safe, but our state parks remain at risk. The General Assembly should provide extra protection for them by creating special environmental safeguards for drilling in state parks and imposing an extra, substantial impact fee for any drilling that deprives Pennsylvanians of the use of their parks.

The three things wrong with Corbett's Shell cracker deal

Governor Corbett is asking members of the General Assembly to pass legislation giving the Royal Dutch Shell Company a massive 25-year tax break even as they wrestle with a state budget that will further slash funding for education and basic human services. Tax credits, used judiciously, can be effective economic development tools. They are usually used to provide support for early stage industries, to incentivize investment in financially distressed communities, to increase employment and to encourage the adoption of beneficial technologies and practices among other things.

So, offering tax incentives to Shell to entice it to locate its cracker plant in Pennsylvania is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. That corporations have created an arena game where states are played off against each other with the winner being the one that opens its treasury to deliver the most taxpayer dollars to corporate coffers is an unfortunate fact of economic life in this country.  

The problems the governor has with this tax deal are its excess, its timing and his inability to develop a vision and strategy for overall economic development for Pennsylvania’s future. 

The governor seems to have been caught up in the bidding in this high stakes auction for the cracker plant jobs that Shell orchestrated among Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. He offered 15 years of relief on state and local taxes, but that wasn’t enough. The over-the-top bid is the $66 million a year for 25 years tax credit on the manufacture of ethane. And even with that, the governor says this is not a done deal. If the cracker plant creates all 20,000 jobs that the governor says it will, Pennsylvania taxpayers will be handing over $85,000 to Shell for each job it creates. This is, by far, the largest tax break for any company in Pennsylvania history. 

And the governor says he needs the legislature to give him this $1.7 billion deal now. He wants it passed with the budget. Members of the General Assembly are facing voters in their districts who are livid over the teacher layoffs, education program eliminations and higher property taxes that are the result of drastic cutbacks in state support for basic education. While this tax credit will not start to drain the treasury for several years, school districts will be facing years of budget woes brought about primarily by structural issues like pensions and health care costs. Taxpayers hear the governor’s call for shared sacrifice in hard times. They look at what’s happening in their school districts.  And then they witness the governor’s excessive generosity to one of the richest corporations on the planet. Taxpayers conclude that they get to make the sacrifices while Shell rides the limo.

Governor Corbett has a one-trick pony for his economic development strategy – shale gas. He counts on the drillers to create jobs, revitalize communities, produce revenues. Other than that, he is apparently content to allow existing industries to wither on the vine. He opposes a minor fix to Pennsylvania’s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards act which would help the solar industry over a rough spot. He removed his name from a letter from the Governor’s Wind Energy Coalition supporting the extension of the production tax credit for wind power. The wind industry currently employs about 4,000 people in Pennsylvania in the construction of wind projects and manufacture of wind turbine components. So, the governor will place a huge bet on 20,000 future jobs, but ignore the potential loss of 4,000 existing jobs. 

Today’s Quinnipiac poll shows that only 36 percent of voters approve of the Governor’s handling of his job. Only 33 percent approve of the way he is handling the state budget. Sweet deals for rich corporations juxtaposed with cuts to schools and human services will likely not improve those numbers soon. The governor doesn’t care about the polling. He will not face voters for 2 more years. But all the members of the Pennsylvania House and half the members of the Senate will this November. Casting a vote to seal the cracker deal will not be an easy one.

Bucknell tells the story of the Susquehanna

The Department of the Interior has officially recognized the Susquehanna River’s central place in Pennsylvania’s history by adding it to the John Smith Chesapeake NationalHistoric Trail. The work of Bucknell professor, Katie Faull, whose research on early Moravians who settled along the river’s banks and their interaction with the native people living there helped earn the designation. 

 

Professor Faull’s work is part of Bucknell’s Susquehanna River Initiative, a comprehensive program looking at the history, culture, geology and ecology of the river. One of the projects, Stories from the Marcellus Shale: To the Seventh Generation is chronicling the impact of the latest extractive boom to hit the watershed.  

Bucknell is collaborating with the Susquehanna River Heartland Coalition for Environmental Studies to conduct research into the river’s health. Taken together, these efforts are producing a wealth of information that documents the central role the river plays in the economy, culture and environment of central Pennsylvania. The researchers are showing why a healthy Susquehanna is vital to river towns, businesses, agriculture and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay.  

Their work also reminds us that the river is worth saving for its own sake. To save the Bay, we first must save the river.

The day Larry Schweiger told me we hit 400

That would be May 31, 2012. John Quigley, former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and I were having lunch with Larry who is the CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. Our conversation turned to our shared concern about the increasingly partisan and polarized political environment in Washington and the state capitals. As we see it, there is posturing but no problem solving.  

Then Larry said, “Carbon dioxide concentrations hit 400 parts per million over the Arctic.”   

I think I will remember where I was when I heard that in the way I remember where I was the day John Kennedy got shot or where I was when the planes hit the twin towers. That is a milestone that humanity should never have gone past.

Even most denier “scientists” will concede that increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the earth’s atmosphere have always been directly associated with higher temperatures. The deniers go off the rails when they insist that the current warming that we are undeniably experiencing is part of a natural cycle that we humans have no influence over. When you consider that we pumped more than 34.8 billion tons of CO₂ into the air last year, a 3.2 percent over 2011, you have to wonder how denier scientists reach that illogical conclusion. 

Most reputable climate scientists agree that in order to slow the warming and stabilize our increasingly erratic climate, we need to get atmospheric CO₂ concentrations down to 350 parts per million. At that level, climate models predict that the earth would warm, but only by 2 degrees Celsius. But our increasing CO₂ emissions are putting us on track for a 6 degree Celsius increase or 11 degrees Fahrenheit.  

That would be dangerous. Look what’s happening now. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just released its report on spring weather. The period between March and May was the hottest on record – a whopping 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit above the average. 

This is an emergency plain and simple. But the world just fiddles. In the US climate policy has been stalled since Congress failed to enact climate legislation in 2009. Anti-science climate denial is the official position of the Republican Party. Their majority in the House of Representatives and their stranglehold on Senate deliberations prevent any clean energy legislation, let alone pro-active climate policy, from advancing. Their only stated priority is defeat of the president regardless of how urgent other public business may be. They are held in line by the iron discipline of Koch brother money and the threat of primary challenges should they violate Grover Norquist’s no-tax dogma. 

So, by design, nothing is getting done to address the biggest environmental, economic and social challenge of our generation. Tragically, Republican leaders are bringing their faithful along on this blind plunge into climate chaos. There used to be a bi-partisan consensus about the need for tough environmental regulations. Now the Pew Research Center finds that consensus has been broken along partisan lines with Republican support for strict environmental regulations falling by 40 points since 1992.  

We have the tools to begin to aggressively rein in our CO₂ emissions – wind and solar energy backed up by nimble gas-fired power plants, electric cars, smart meters, ever more energy efficient technologies, but we need the policies to scale these alternatives up. Getting to 450 parts per million is not an option. The longer we wait to walk that road, the harder it will be to get our grandchildren home to a safe, stable planet.

You’re just confused about Susquehanna pollution

That’s what Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) secretary Krancer essentially told 22 retired DEP water quality experts who wrote to him asking for 90 miles of the Susquehanna River to be officially designated as polluted. In a patronizing letter denying the request, Krancer attacked the credentials of the signatories to the request and said that putting the river on the official list of polluted waterways would be a “publicity stunt.”   

Something in the water is killing off young bass and causing disease in adult bass. The problem has gotten to the point where the Fish and Boat Commission has put new restrictions on bass fishing. Anglers can catch bass, but they must release them. Many of the bass in the river also now have both male and female characteristics. 

Putting the Susquehanna on the official list of polluted waters would trigger an all-out effort to discover what exactly is causing the fish to die and then to write a plan called a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) to legally limit that pollution. In fact, Krancer says in his letter, “Consider that just the watershed from Sunbury to Holtwood encompasses 5,500 square miles, five major tributaries, and a multitude of smaller tributaries. All potential sources within all tributaries, as well as upstream sources in the main stem must be identified, sampled and modeled in one massive TMDL. It would take many years to complete any TMDL.” 

Exactly. That’s why the river should be put on the list of polluted waters now so the work can get underway to clean up the pollution. According to Krancer’s letter, more studies are underway and that information will help shed light on the river’s problems. Getting the river on the polluted waters list would hold DEP’s feet to the fire as the department would have a legal obligation under the Clean Water Act to bring the river back to health. 

What won’t work is shutting out expert voices when they don’t agree with you.

Wow! Did Governor Corbett win the lottery?

Pennsylvania’s broke. That’s what Governor Corbett and his surrogates have been saying for months. Last Wednesday he said this in response to a question about education funding, “So if I’m going to propose increasing money for education, who do we take it from?” he asked. 

Last Sunday, the governor’s budget secretary, Charles Zogby was quoted as saying, “The governor’s philosophy going into the budget negotiations is we can spend no more than we have and we must budget and save for the future so that we’re not continually running structural deficits year after year,” Harley said. 

And this morning Lt. Gov. Cawley said, “It might be a family with an autistic child, or a person struggling with addiction,” he said. “We need to be there for them. But that harsh reality is coupled with another harsh reality. And it is simply this: we can no longer spend money we don’t have.” 

So I’m figuring that the governor must have won the lottery in order to be able to afford to give the Shell Oil Company, one of the richest corporations on earth, $67 million a year for 25 years for a grand total of $1.7 billion.  $67 million a year - that’s more than this year’s proposed state funding for the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Aging. It’s only about $10 million less than state funding for the Department of Health. 

I know how the governor feels when he doesn’t have the money to spend on things. I’d really like to go to Wales to visit the village my mother’s ancestors came from, but I just can’t – I don’t have the money. I’d really like a new granite countertop, a new cooktop and a new sink with a garbage disposal. And my deck needs to be replaced. But I just can’t spend money I don’t have and I don’t want to load myself down with debt. 

So I buy lottery tickets from time to time and entertain myself with fantasies of what I’d do with limitless resources. And in the meantime, I pay the mortgage – it’s an investment in my quality of life and an asset for my future old age.  

The governor said that he wants to make sure that shiny new cracker plant gets built in Pennsylvania and creates 20,000 jobs. At $1.7 billion, he wants to give Shell $85,000 per job to come here.

The governor has already decided to cut back investments in education which enhances the quality of our society and ensures an educated workforce for the future. So he must have won the lottery or something that has given him the unlimited resources to splurge on a cracker plant.   

Powerball is at $177 million. Think I’ll buy a ticket.