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Hoax

JON BOGLE

Williamsport

In 2009, the gas industry paid two professors at Penn State’s mining school $100,000 to write a report wildly exaggerating fracking’s economic potential. The Penn State Reports, brought out in 2009, 2010, 2011, were falsely portrayed as legitimate academic research. They were used to defeat the severance tax and to create a gold rush mentality around fracked gas. Without a severance tax, the Rendell Administration compelled DCNR to lease public lands.

The gas industry is in our forests and on our public lands because they perpetrated a hoax. The 2011 Penn State Report predicted that the fracking industry would create 256,420 jobs by 2020. They knew, from their own history, that those jobs would never happen but the Marcellus Shale Coalition disseminated the prediction widely.

The gas industry never created more than 20,000 direct jobs in Pennsylvania and presently has only 8.000 to 10,000.

There are, however, 300,000 jobs in Pennsylvania’s travel and tourism industry. Tourism pays eleven times more in taxes than the gas industry’s total royalties and impact fees.

Nevertheless, DCNR and other environmental agencies are required to accommodate the ruining of Pennsylvania’s wilderness areas, a major tourism asset, with wells, pipelines, and roads. We could save our economic future by not honoring gas leases that were obtained by deception.

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