It never ends well for taxpayers when politicians in Harrisburg pick winners and losers. We should take a lesson from the long-forgotten debacle of the Pennsylvania Canal when politicians took $25 million of taxpayer money to build a 395-mile Pennsylvania Canal and Portage Railroad. Opened in 1834, the canal never made money and was abandoned in 1860 when the Pennsylvania Railroad cut the travel time from four days to one day. From the very beginning, the canal was a boondoggle entirely paid for by state taxpayers.t

This history is relevant because Pennsylvania lawmakers are again picking winners and losers using taxpayer money to subsidize their political contributors. House Speaker Mike Turzai recently held a press event overlooking the Shell petrochemical plant that taxpayers will have invested $1.6 billion to highlight the latest boondoggle he is calling “Energize PA.” Energize PA builds on our history of failed environmental and health protections, and subsidized capital investments in the natural gas and plastics industries. It is a package of eight Republican-sponsored bills financing more frack-gas development by:

• Stripping all permitting authority from the Department of Environmental Protection and handing critical environmental decision-making to a politically appointed and unaccountable commission to run roughshod over communities and neighbors;

We have a sad history with politically appointed commissions ending in 1970 when the Legislature finally abolished the Sanitary Water Board and created the Department of Environmental Resources. The water board was a politically appointed group that was notorious for issuing hundreds of flawed mining permits that caused enormous and permanent damage to 10,000 miles of Pennsylvania waterways.

• Providing a generous tax credit of 5 cents per gallon frack gas purchased for certain petrochemicals or fertilizers;

At a time when we should be moving away from fossil fuels and plastic pollution, this is crony capitalism and corporate socialism at its best. The incumbent fracking industries are struggling against the price-competitive insurgent clean energy industry. The incumbents win this by making substantial political contributions to politicians that do their bidding. If the Legislature wants to subsidize energy projects, it should be supporting wind, solar or other clean energy projects. Otherwise, it’s time to end all subsidies to fossil fuels.

• Creating 20 Keystone Energy Enhancement Zones where fossil fuel-based businesses will be exempt from state and local taxes and granted credits for 10 years;

This forces local governments and taxpayers to pick up the tab for infrastructure to serve these energy projects, including polluting and noisy compressor stations, cryogenic facilities, and other gas-handling infrastructure while the gas industry is exempt from paying even modest severance taxes.

As the third-largest carbon polluter, Pennsylvania is on the wrong energy path. With its methane leakage rates, gas is little better or perhaps much worse on the short term when compared to coal. At a time when the climate crisis becomes more apparent every day even to the casual observer, it is easy to see that betting our future with tax subsidies on frack gas is a big mistake.

Homeowners who rely on frack gas will be in for a surprise when the five planned gas-to-plastics plants are running and shipping gas overseas, where the price of gas in Europe is about $8 per million Btu’s compared to about $3 here.

Pennsylvanians, and others, who bought the lies, will be indebted to frack gas as a sole source of high priced energy for home heat, hot water and electricity when LNG exports and plastics push demand through the roof. Investors will make a fortune, while taxpayers and consumers pick up the tab. More single-use plastics will be created, and we will all have a higher body burden of micro-plastics. Our children will live with the added carbon dioxide and methane pollution, making the climate crisis worse.

That is what is going on behind the curtain in Harrisburg. The politicians know it too. When gas prices skyrocket, the same lawmakers who have been funded by the fracking industry will hold farcical hearings in Harrisburg and elsewhere to express their phony outrage over cost increases. Voters who have a short memory and little interest in history need to take a brief walk down memory lane to see our future.

Larry J. Schweiger served as president of the National Wildlife Federation, PennFuture and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

First Published: June 26, 2019, 4:00 a.m.