Do you think Corbett’s fracking companies are fracking the PA countryside so Pennsylvanians can cook with gas?

Ukraine crisis: Europe’s stored gas high as prices soar

By Simon Tulett

Business reporter, BBC News

Those pipelines running through your backyard in Chester County will be carrying PA fracking gas to Cove Point, Maryland to be supercooled into liquid natural gas and shipped on LNG tankers to wherever they can get the highest price on earth. That price, set on the international market, will be the price that Pennsylvania homeowners pay for gas. 

 “Dominion, an American energy company long focused on U.S. markets, hopes to begin an expansion worth billions of dollars at its Cove Point complex on Chesapeake Bay later this year. As part of the plan, compressors fired by a new power plant would cool gas to -260 degrees F (-162 C) until it becomes the hot global commodity known as liquefied natural gas, or LNG.”

FROM:

FEATURE-Liquefied natural gas foes go to the mat in Maryland

BY TIMOTHY GARDNER

LUSBY, Md., March 2 Sun Mar 2, 2014 10:00am EST

Once Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale gas is converted to liquid natural gas and shipped on the world market your gas-heating bill will soar.

There is one major obstacle to be reckoned with before Dominion can get their LNG super cooling and shipping dock in operation.

LNG storage tanks and LNG tankers are prime terrorist targets. They have the explosive power of an atomic bomb.

The people living near Cove Point Maryland may need to be moved before Dominion can operate their dock.

When he was Governor of Massachusetts Governor Romney had this to say about a different LNG site:

"There is simply no way that it makes sense to site an LNG facility in this location in the post-911 world," Romney wrote. "A thorough review would confirm this conclusion."

FROM:

Lloyd's executive likens LNG attack to nuclear explosion

by Mark Reynolds, originally published by Providence Journal  | SEP 20, 2004

U.S. regulators don't share the concerns of the top official at the world's second-largest commercial insurer. A terrorist attack on an LNG tanker "would have the force of a small nuclear explosion," according to the chairman of Lloyd's, a British insurer of natural gas port facilities like the ones being proposed in Fall River and Providence… 

A triumph of democracy over Governor Tom Corbett, PA Republicans and big gas company corporate power

"Letter: Fracking ruling restores power to locals

February 27, 2014 | 0 Comment

To The Editor,

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rejected Tom Corbett’s request to reverse the Act 13 decision, which struck down key provisions in the natural gas drilling laws as unconstitutional.  

Locally, Newlin Township, the little township that could, stood up, fought back and won in 2012 when these provisions of Act 13 were first struck down. Now all of Pennsylvania has won because of the decision not to reverse the previous decision.

Under Tom Corbett and the Majority Leadership, Act 13 would have undermined local democracy and taken away local government’s zoning authority.  Communities would have been mandated to allow drilling in all sections of a town; near schools, playgrounds and hospitals. Unfortunately we’re not done yet with Act 13.  Although this ruling means this decision is final, the matter will return to the Commonwealth court as they try to hash out what will happen with other controversial provisions, including the physician’s gag rule regarding fracking chemicals."

MORE AT:

http://chescotimes.com/?p=4493

Now if  "We The People" could only fight an even larger corporate lobby, the meat production industry, and allow local communities to regulate the amount of pig shit coming into their local water supplies from factory farm manure lagoons:

"These factory farms expose the public to dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria, generate enormous amounts of manure, create foul, unhealthy air pollution, pollute ground and surface water and drive smaller farms out of business. Local governments are severely limited in how they can respond, and local property owners can't take action to protect their health and property values."

MORE AT:

http://www.pennfuture.org/content.aspx?SectionID=113&MenuID=

“Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane intelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.“ One of my pet peeves.

As in, why on earth is stormwater management encased in arcane language.

Water runs off waterproof stuff, eventually to the ocean.

Water soaks into water absorbing stuff eventually into well water.

Trees, bushes and long grasses direct water into the ground.

Concrete, asphalt and short grass over compacted soil direct water to storm drains, streams and eventually the ocean.

If you want drinking water you need as much trees, bushes and long grass as possible.

Parking lots can be surfaced with water absorbing asphalt & concrete or water-resistant asphalt & concrete.

If you build too many waterproof surfaces you get small stream flooding downstream. As in Downingtown, PA.

I was "The stormwater guy" on the City of Coatesville Planning Commission. The architectural engineers couldn't understand stormwater management. They knew the regs. but didn't understand them.

That's ENGINEERS that don't understand stormwater management.

How on earth are elected municipal officials supposed to understand and explain stormwater management while they listen to constituents complaining that there isn't short mowed grass to the stream bank edge?

Stormwater management is not astrophysics but it reads like astrophysics.

READ:

"Professors, We Need You!

 Nicholas Kristof

 The New York Times

SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don't matter in today’s great debates.

The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.

One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind that led Rick Santorum to scold President Obama as “a snob” for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. Yet it’s not just that America has marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They have also marginalized themselves.

'All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public,' notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New America Foundation."

MORE AT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-professors-we-need-you.html?_r=0