BCT Editorial – 9/15/10

Look around; Editorial; Beaver County Times; September 15, 2010.

It would be easy to take these editorials at face value if you didn’t know the Times history on this topic.  For example, in late July an editorial misrepresented an accident near a producing gas well.  As I noted in my critique of that editorial, the Times is a believer in the religion of manmade global warming and - though it won’t admit it in so many words - opposes exploration for and production of natural gas in the Marcellus shale formation.  I believe the Times position on Marcellus gas is similar to that by those who claim to support “clean coal,” and then you find their definition of “clean coal” is economically and/or technologically impossible to achieve.

As I’ve written before, companies harvesting our natural resources must do so in a responsible manner and must have the financial and technological wherewithal to handle worst-case scenarios and post-production cleanup.  It is government’s responsibility to enforce these rules and to make sure everyone involved [businesses and government (local, state, federal)] is prepared (via drills, for example) to execute disaster plans.

For reference, Texas taxes natural gas production at 7.5% of market value plus a regulatory fee of $0.000667 per thousand cubic feet, with variances for natural gas that’s expensive to produce.  I’m not an expert, but a lower tax rate than Texas and some other states may be appropriate due to the higher costs of producing from formations like the Marcellus shale.  The editorial says, “the tax would be a new revenue stream, something that is getting harder to find (and to implement politically).”  We don’t need “new revenue stream[s].”  Excessive spending is the problem, not a lack of tax revenue.