Amity and Prosperity by Eliza Griswold

Author:Eliza Griswold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Science
Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux
Published: 2018-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

20 | POLICING THE STATE

While Kendra clashed with opposing lawyers, John found himself engaged in a fresh battle against the state. In 2011, Pennsylvania’s new Republican governor, Tom Corbett, was bidding to change its Oil and Gas Act in favor of Act 13, a new law that the state and fossil fuel industry largely drafted together. Although Corbett had received $1.17 million in campaign donations from the industry, his interest was more than political. It was ideological: he opposed environmental regulation. Upon entering office, he’d ordered a state environmental website scrubbed of any mention of climate change.

Despite the unprecedented profits associated with fracking, Pennsylvania charged oil and gas operators next to nothing in taxes or fees for the right to drill. As part of the new give-and-take under Act 13, industry would pay an impact fee to local governments, a flat fee per well. In exchange, companies would be able to bypass old arrangements that required approval from small municipalities. If a driller wanted to dig a frack pond next to a school, say, or in a church parking lot, under the new law, the town would have no right to say no, as long as the pond was at least three hundred feet away. In practical terms, if the new law went into effect, a frack pond could sit five times closer to someone’s house than the one uphill from Stacey.

John Smith’s concerns about the new law went beyond health and environmental issues. It could spell financial ruin for the small communities he’d been helping to protect by drafting local ordinances. This new law would negate every one of them, and if a town decided to challenge the industry by taking a company to court and lost, the town would have to pay the company’s legal fees. As a solicitor, Smith knew what that meant. His client Robinson Township, for instance, had an annual operating budget of four hundred thousand dollars. If Robinson tried to challenge an oil and gas company that hired corporate lawyers billing at four hundred or five hundred dollars an hour, then a ten-day trial could easily bankrupt the small town.

The proposed law had other problematic aspects, including one that foes called the physician gag rule: it stipulated that doctors sign a nondisclosure agreement in order to learn what chemicals might have sickened their patients. Under the gag rule, a doctor wouldn’t be able to tell other doctors or even his or her patients the toxic contents found in their bodies. To Smith, this constituted a clear violation of the Hippocratic Oath.

Just as chilling to Smith was a privacy clause: if a neighbor’s private water source was contaminated by drilling, and he settled with the oil and gas company, the people living next door had no right to know, as long as they relied on private wells instead of public water. In a case like Stacey’s, if Ron Yeager settled privately with Range, he wouldn’t have to say a word.

Smith wasn’t the only one who saw problems with the new law.

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