Thanks to the good work of Pennsylvania’s Senate Republicans, residents and ratepayers across the Commonwealth have been spared a spike in their electricity rates for a seventh time. The state just missed the latest so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) “auction” that forces coal- and gas-fired power plants to pay obscenely high taxes to continue…
The transient workers in the Ohio Utica Shale field must stay somewhere. That somewhere is typically a hotel or motel. Belmont County, one of the hotbeds of Utica drilling, has many such transient workers. Their overnight stays at area hotels and motels create a big pile of lodging tax revenue, which is used to help…
Last Friday, MDN told you about a new Cambridge University study published in the journal Science exposing the sale of carbon credits as a scam (see Cambridge Study Finds Carbon Offsets Using Trees is a Scam). Now that the carbon credit scam has been exposed, big companies like Shell, Nestle, and Gucci are exiting the…
Carbon offsets are the same thing as carbon taxes. A carbon offset refers to reducing so-called greenhouse gas emissions by buying a credit from someone who plants trees or agrees not to cut down trees. A company gets to keep on polluting as long as it pays a tax to do it–pretending they are helping…
We have U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (lib Dem from WV) to thank for passing the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) one year ago (see Tragedy: Joe Manchin Caves & Agrees to Big Green Build Back Better). The IRA is a huge pork barrel of government spending on so-called green energy schemes. (The IRA also targets…
West Virginia’s state budget runs from July 1 through the following year’s June 30. WV’s General Revenue collections for July 2023, the first month of Fiscal Year 2024, came in at a respectable $7.7 million above estimates, with total collections of $335 million. However, that $335 million collected is 12% lower than the $381 million…
Newly-elected Gov. Josh Shapiro, who appears to be completely ineffective since taking office (which is not necessarily a bad thing), appointed a working group in April to help guide him on what he should do concerning the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax and the broader issue of global warming (see PA Gov Appoints…
The West Virginia State Legislature passed House Bill (HB) 2581 on the last day of the annual WV legislative session in April 2021. HB 2581 required the State Tax Commissioner to develop a revised methodology to value oil and natural gas properties for the purpose of assessing property taxes. The State Tax Department submitted an…
In 2021 as he was running for the office of Governor in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin pledged if he won, he would remove the state from the onerous carbon tax on coal- and gas-fired power plants called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Following his recent review of a new regulation to remove the state from…
West Virginia’s budget year runs from July 1 in one year to June 30 of the next year. The most recent “2023” fiscal budget year ended on June 30. WV is rolling in the dough. The state ended the 2023 fiscal year with more than $1.8 billion in surplus funds, driven mainly by increased personal…
Pennsylvania’s Democrat Party is hellbent on driving the Marcellus Shale industry out of the state. They have been for years. That’s just a truthful observation and beyond dispute. The latest evidence is the party’s insistence on adding a severance tax on top of the existing impact fee, PA’s version of a severance tax. The Dems…
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) posted detailed information about this year’s distribution of last year’s impact fees generated by natural gas producers. Great news! PA raised $278.8 million from Act 13 impact fees (PA’s version of a severance tax). That is the HIGHEST amount raised and distributed by impact fees since the beginning…
Last year after the shocking news that U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (from West Virginia) had sold out his state and the entire country by agreeing to support the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) bill, the details began to come out about just how bad this law really is for the oil and gas industry. First
In 2021 as he was running for the office of Governor in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin pledged if he won, he would remove the state from the onerous carbon tax on coal- and gas-fired power plants called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). True to his word, after winning, Younkin pledged to ax RGGI with an
A radicalized left-wing organization hellbent on forcing the end of fossil energy called Evergreen Action, along with another radical nonprofit called Ceres, partnered and paid a for-profit company called Synapse Energy Economics (that works exclusively for left-wing groups) to produce a completely sham and false “report” that (try not to laugh) claims Pennsylvania residents will