Aug 29, 2022 2 min read

Scranton Times-Tribune

It’s often difficult to put a price on the pandering to narrow special interests that is endemic in the state Legislature. Now an appalling example can be measured not only in dollars but in air pollution.

The narrow interest in this case is the natural gas industry. Legislators’ zeal to please their master is so great that it exceeds the demonstrated wishes of the industry itself.

Recently, the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee voted to reject a Department of Environmental Protection regulation requiring the newer part of the natural gas industry to better control methane and other emissions.

The federal Clean Air Act requires the regulation, and requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to penalize states that do not comply. The federal agency has informed the state DEP that the federal government will withhold between $500 million and $750 million in federal highway funds from Pennsylvania if it does not adopt the regulation by Dec. 16.

Initially, gas-industry advocates in the Legislature objected because the original DEP rule applied to the modern deep-well gas industry and the original state gas industry that employed small, shallow wells.

The DEP then applied the rule only to the newer part of the industry, and said it would issue a separate regulation in September tailored to the older wells. But the House committee still voted to kill the rule.

Remarkably, it did so even after the state Environmental Quality Board, including a representative of the industry trade group, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, voted to approve it. Later, the Independent Regulatory Commission found that the proposed regulation is in the public interest.

A spokesman for Republicans who voted against the rule scoffed at the notion that the federal government would withhold the state’s highway funds. It is, however, a dangerous game of chicken. And faced with the same sanctions, California, Connecticut, New York and Texas all adopted the appropriate regulations.

Technology to reduce methane and other required emissions exists and already is employed by much of the industry. The new regulations would make it universal. Lawmakers should approve the rule on its own merits, much less add more bad roads to the existing costs of unchecked methane emissions.