LETTER: Natural gas a blessing to region
Throughout my 18-year career as a Pittsburgh firefighter, I have learned some undeniable truths. First, very few places get hit as hard as Western Pennsylvania does and gets back up. It wasn’t that long ago that our region was facing dire economic news. Thanks to a variety of factors, including a thriving natural gas industry, decades of higher-than-average unemployment rates have given way to a robust economy and dramatically better employment numbers. What would have sounded like fiction 15 years ago is now reality. With major projects like the Shell cracker plant, Western Pennsylvania is now faced with how to deal with labor shortages – a much better problem to have.
Second, the industry has been a great friend to the first-responder community. This is true both directly and indirectly. Talk to a fire chief in your community. Chances are major grants or portions of the $1.4-plus billion in impact fees collected since 2012 have contributed to new facilities, vehicles or life-saving equipment. You’ll also probably hear that pipeline companies are provided valuable fire service trainings. Not to mention, natural gas derivatives are essential to the protective equipment we use daily.
Finally, while not perfect, natural gas is a step in the right direction for our environment. When factoring challenges that face current alternative energy technologies, it’s the cleanest energy source we have to meet energy demands on a national scale. Someday we’ll develop alternative forms of energy that can eclipse natural gas, but that may not happen for a while. Wind and solar always sound enticing, but Harvard researchers recently found that the transition to these sources of power in the U.S. would require five to 20 times more land than previously thought. Additionally, they found if such large-scale wind farms were built, average surface temperatures over the continental U.S. would increase significantly.
The more people actually look at the facts, the more they will realize natural gas has been a blessing to Western Pennsylvania.
Darrin Kelly
Pittsburgh
The letter writer is president of the Allegheny-Fayette Central Labor Council.