Nicole Stewart says of Hodgkin lymphoma, “I expect it to come back, so if it does come I’ll be ready for it.” She is 19. Anya La Mar was 11 when she passed away after a recurrence of Ewing sarcoma in 2016. Theirs are among the stories shared in gut-wrenching must-read reporting by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette yesterday on the disproportionately large number of cases of childhood cancers being diagnosed in four Pennsylvania counties at the epicenter of the shale gas boom.
Today, Governor Tom Wolf staged a rally for his Restore Pennsylvania plan. It is version 5.0 of his severance tax plan. Pennsylvania is the only large gas-producing state that does not tax production of the greenhouse gases methane and ethane, something that has preoccupied Democrats since former Governor Ed Rendell first opened the state to fracking. What the tax would pay for has changed from proposal to proposal, but what it has never been intended to pay for are the health impacts of fracking. This year’s plan would pay for a laundry list of items including high-speed internet, flood recovery, and efforts to address blight. It would put some of the money back in the industry’s pockets to build more pipelines and grow the booming petrochemical business.
A statewide coalition of frontline and grassroots organizations fighting shale gas development called the Better Path Coalition has been critical of the Governor for campaigning for a plan that would ensure continued, and even expanded, greenhouse gas production when the rest of the world is trying to speed the transition to renewable energy and ban the single-use plastics produced from ethane fracked in the state. Today’s rally is just the latest of his campaign events. He has crisscrossed the state, making more than 50 appearances to sell his tax.
His disconnection from the facts is nothing new to opponents of shale gas development. He has maintained since his 2014 campaign that he believes fracking can be done safely despite at least 1,750 peer-reviewed studies that show, collectively, it can’t be. He has never produced any scientific evidence to support his belief.
Nor has Governor Wolf taken steps to address big problems at the state’s Department of Health. Back in 2014 when candidate Wolf was on the campaign trail, a series of breaking stories revealed that the handling of shale gas development was a regulatory Wild West scene. The Department of Environmental Protection was the agency implicated in most of the stories, but one storyline reported by StateImpact PA focused on the Department of Health. Two retired whistleblowers recalled, among other things, a buzzwords list that was distributed to staffers with verbal instructions to avoid engaging with people using any of the words and phrases in the course of filing health complaints.
Wolf never addressed the problem head on, but campaigned instead on starting a health-registry. The registry was never adequately funded nor taken seriously by Pennsylvanians who had come to realize that the state was not in the business of protecting them from the oil & gas industry.
Last May, almost four years after StateImpact PA broke the story, the Better Path Coalition helped launch a Pennsylvania Fracking Health Impacts campaign site with a protest at Wolf’s first reelection campaign fundraiser. Coalition members and supporters handed fliers to attendees as they entered asking them to ask Wolf to help the harmed. It’s May again. Wolf has done nothing.
In response to Wolf’s choice to rally for more fracking rather than rally to the aid of sick children, the Better Path Coalition issued a statement calling on him to give up his dream of a severance tax. Some things are more important than money.