Public Testimony of Patrick Walker, 243 Riverside Dr., P.O. Box 128, Factoryville, PA 18419
Phone: (570) xxxxxxxxx E-mail: petportraitscody@yahoo.com
The issue we face today is whether Laser Northeast Gathering LLC, a gas-piping company, should be granted utility status, with the accompanying right to declare eminent domain. As I understand eminent domain, it involves the claim that the activity it enables is so important a public good that it trumps individual property rights, normally sacred in our nation.
Now Laser’s argument that its gas-piping activity is a vital public good depends entirely on the claim that gas drilling by fracking is itself a vital public good. In a democracy (if we still wish to have one), that question should be decided by a duly informed public which has been given time to reflect on the matter, not by profit-hungry industry reps or extensively lobbied legislators who’ve heard only their side of the story. I submit that the gas-drilling industry holds such a huge advantage in information and legislative influence over PA’s general public that without an extensive moratorium, a vast public education effort, and statewide public hearings, no decision that respects democratic values or the common good is even remotely possible.
Further, ample prima facie evidence shows that the gas-drilling industry lives in virtual contempt of the common good. Simply their rush to start drilling is a slap in democracy’s face. And who, after all, lobbied for the Halliburton loophole to the Safe Drinking Water Act, which virtually grants gas-drilling companies license to perform unsupervised chemical experiments on the public water supply? Indeed, this insane, irresponsible loophole—along with similar exemptions from the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Superfund Law—shows just how little disposed our legislators are to protect us from a dangerously powerful and under-regulated industry. The same industry, by the way, that gave us the Gulf oil spill. If our judiciary can afford us no last-ditch protection of our basic rights, where lawmakers have perpetually failed us, many lifelong law-abiding taxpayers will be forced against our wills into the desperate crapshoot of civil disobedience.
The gas-drilling industry talks of wondrous economic benefits, but even the benefits it claims are based on discredited economics. Nobel Prize-winning economists like Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz now assure us that mere growth in jobs or GDP is no measure of public welfare; growth must be of the right kind. Every new dollar we squander on Big Gas and Oil carries a huge opportunity cost: the time and resources lost for developing safer, more planet-friendly energy technologies before it’s too late. If gas drillers claim to offer us ample energy at minimal cost, this is only because governments irresponsibly fail to make their costs reflect the untold harm they do to innocent third parties and local communities. My wife and I will soon watch our property value plummet and the rural Pennsylvania we love ravaged by the cancer of rapid, unplanned development—hideous strip-mall architecture, endless noise and traffic congestion, broken roads, polluted air and water, the end of recreational fishing and bird watching, meth labs catering to overworked hard-drinking “nomads” with no stake in our area—who’ll operate dangerous equipment, by the way. Will the gas drillers—or Mr. Karam—buy our unsellable homes, or find us suitable jobs in a region as lovely as the one they callously stole from us?
The worldwide recession wrought by Big Finance, acting hand-in-glove with big government, should make us deeply suspicious of outright grabs for corporate welfare, like Mr. Karam’s today. Companies like his need to clear a high bar of proof that they’ve even heard of the common good, let alone be allowed to seize our homes in its name. Mr. Karam betrayed his barely concealed contempt for his fellow citizens’ real interests by saying in our papers that we’d probably come here to “vent”—yes, “vent” about the very substance of our lives! No, Mr. Karam, I am not venting; I am speaking truth to power—a power whose money screams so loud that the voice of its innocent victims rarely gets heard. I pray to God it gets heard here today.
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