Pennsylvania's (and New York's) Corrupt Gentry Class Go After Shapiro THOMAS J SHEPSTONE
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a leftist liberal Democrat and the chosen candidate of the environmental left, appeared at a Philadelphia union hall for a speech last week to tout a hydrogen hub
Pennsylvania's (and New York's) Corrupt Gentry Class Go After Shapiro
MAR 19
Guest post by Jim Willis of Marcellus Drilling News.
This one is too funny.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a leftist liberal Democrat and the chosen candidate of the environmental left, appeared at a Philadelphia union hall for a speech last week to tout a hydrogen hub that is supposedly coming to the area, called the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub (MACH2).
The MACH2 project is actually centered in Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware but will give a few economic table scraps to the Philly area, which excites and titillates PA politicians.
Early in Shapiro’s “ain’t hydrogen just great” speech, Maya van Rossum, THE Delaware Riverkeeper (that’s what she calls herself), got up and began to shout down Shapiro. That’s right! The guy she voted for and helped elect! You see, Miss Maya (hereinafter to be called Mouthy Maya) doesn’t like hydrogen hubs, even “clean” hubs like the MACH2 project.
Natgas is bad, and hydrogen is bad, too. Those are the “click-whir” scripts that run in Maya’s head, and she just could not help herself at the union event.
Just a brief aside: MACH2 is one of two hubs that will potentially help PA economically. MACH2 is a consortium of Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. It’s supposed to use electricity generated by so-called renewable sources like wind and solar to split water and make hydrogen (green) or use nuclear energy to split water and make hydrogen (pink). The project is getting $750 million from the Bidenistas and is supposed to create over 20,000 jobs. Hence, the keen interest from labor unions (can’t blame them).
Yet, van Rossum is against MACH2, even though it will produce 100% “clean” hydrogen. Go figure.
After Maya began shouting and demanding “answers” from Shapiro, other environuts joined in. And then the union guys spoke up and told Maya and the other environuts to sit down and shut their pie holes. It appears the situation almost got out of control. Security “surrounded” Mouthy Maya and got her under control (as near as we can tell from media reports). However, the atmosphere from that point on was raucous, and Shapiro hurried through his speech and hightailed it out of there like a scalded dog.
This all could have been avoided. Apparently, Joshy didn’t get the memo that leftist Democrats have now turned against hydrogen energy, too (see Skeptical PA Dems Turning Against Hydrogen Hubs & Blue Hydrogen). He obviously doesn’t read MDN, or he would have known. Here is how WHYY reported it:
Cheers and jeers erupted during a speech by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro Monday, who was in town to promote hydrogen energy at a public meeting at the Steamfitters Local 420 union hall in Northeast Philadelphia.
Shapiro began by praising Steamfitters’ president, Jim Snell, for “creating clean energy opportunities.” Snell is part of a group that includes business leaders and academics behind the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen, or MACH2 hydrogen hub plan, one of seven proposals the Department of Energy chose to curb climate emissions from heavy industry such as steelmaking, cement and fertilizer. Hydrogen only emits water vapor when burned as fuel, but the bulk of it is currently produced using fossil fuels.
“We are all in when it comes to the hydrogen hubs here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” said Shapiro, which generated applause from the crowd of more than 100 union members and fossil fuel executives.
But moments into Shapiro’s speech, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network’s Maya van Rossum stood and began shouting. Van Rossum objected to the public meeting’s location at the union hall in the far Northeast, saying it was difficult to reach. The Riverkeeper and a list of other environmental groups sent a letter to the MACH2 organizers last month asking to change the venue to a place that would be more accessible to the public and more welcoming to those who opposed the plan.
“If they are going to try to show the Department of Energy that MACH2 is engaging the public they’re going in the opposite direction,” said the Riverkeeper’s Tracy Carluccio ahead of the meeting. “We need information first. We need to be informed to ask an informed question. Where are these components? Are there new pipelines, a compressor station, hydrogen storage?”
During the meeting, van Rossum said public meetings should be held in a neutral location, like a library, rather than a union headquarters that stands to gain federal funds.
As security began to surround Van Rossum, she continued, “I’d like the Governor to please answer the question.” Union members shouted back to “sit down” and “shut up.” Soon, both environmentalists and union members were shouting “shame, shame, shame.”
“Yelling and shouting accomplishes nothing,” said Shapiro, who went on to finish his speech during the commotion and then quickly left…
But, the uproar points to the distrust that exists between community members forced to live with pollution and a history of poorly regulated industries…
Along with a distrust of the public process, opponents also question the viability of green hydrogen, which would be produced using solar and wind energy. “We don’t trust this will actually be green hydrogen,” said Tammy Murphy, with Physicians for a Social Responsibility, who attended the meeting…
Speaking after the meeting, Jim Snell said that after the closure of the PES refinery in 2019 due to an explosion, “manufacturing in this area just shut down.” He sees the hydrogen hub as a way to expand the union’s apprenticeship program, and open the door for many to reach the middle class. “This is about jobs,” he said. “Everyone has different opinions, we need to sit down at the table and roll up our sleeves … Shapiro didn’t deserve that.”
In a statement emailed later to WHYY, Shapiro’s spokesman Manuel Bonder criticized the protesters for ignoring the climate benefits of clean hydrogen production.
“Unfortunately, those who are more focused on making noise than making progress didn’t listen long enough to hear that — and in the process, showed incredible disrespect to their fellow Pennsylvanians who were there to learn and engage,” wrote Bonder…
From Inside Climate News, a publication that worships Mouthy Maya as a goddess:
As van Rossum yelled over the sound of the microphone, Shapiro tried to regain control of the room. “This is a meeting where we are here to listen,” he said. “I’m happy to have people voice their thoughts constructively through this process. Yelling and shouting does nothing other than disrespecting the people who are here to listen.”
…The details of how both projects would work and where they would be located have yet to be fully determined, but the ARCH2 project would use fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale to produce so-called “blue hydrogen.”
MACH2 will be “primarily” powered by nuclear and renewable sources, according to a website published by officials and leaders in Pennsylvania and Delaware who are advancing the project, which Shapiro says will create 20,000 jobs. Activists fear that MACH2 may use fracked natural gas, too, like the ARCH2 hub proposed in western Pennsylvania. MACH2 says it will “fuel the local energy economy while mitigating emissions” and create thousands of clean energy jobs in the region. If the MACH2 project continues to move forward, the construction phase of the hub is still years away.
Producing hydrogen from either fracked gas or water requires enormous amounts of energy. So far, there have been no commercial-scale projects that remove high enough levels of carbon emissions through the use of carbon capture technologies to make blue hydrogen truly qualify as “clean.”
Van Rossum’s organization, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, is one of 32 environmental groups, including Food and Water Watch and Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania, that signed a letter addressed to the Department of Energy on Feb.16 protesting the meeting and calling for the location and time to be changed so that more people could attend.
The meeting began at 8 on Monday morning at the Philadelphia Steamfitters Local Union 420, far from the areas of southeastern Pennsylvania that will potentially be impacted by the hub and largely inaccessible by public transit…
Despite these goals, environmental justice advocates and frontline community members in Pennsylvania say they have not been invited into the decision-making process for the project. They feel they’re being sidelined in favor of labor and energy interests, and they’re concerned about the environmental and public health implications for their neighborhoods, places that have suffered long-term harm from nearby industry and manufacturing facilities for decades.
Editor's Note: It's no surprise that Maya is opposing Shapiro and the MACH2 hydrogen hub. That’s because she's a shill for the William Penn Foundation and the Pennsylvania gentry class, just like the Clean Air Council, State Impact PA, and several other environmental groups. These folks want no development anywhere near themselves, would prefer half the population of Pennsylvania and New York just disappear and would be pleased to turn most of both states into wilderness. That's why we refer to Maya as the Delaware Povertykeeper. She is the voice of those who care not a whit for the impact of what they do on ordinary people.
And, let's understand this protest was almost certainly done with the full knowledge and cooperation of her gentry class funders, as WHYY is part of State Impact PA and is, therefore, also funded in part by these same gentry class outfits. Moreover, Inside Climate News is, for all intents and purposes, a subsidiary of the Rockefeller family. So, what we have is an orchestrated campaign by elites working in tamden to embarass Shapiro and put pressure on him, at a minimum, to drop the blue hydrogen part of the hydrogen hub plan. It's standard operating procedure for the funders and Maya is simply the mouthpiece they employ to set things in motion. They're reminding him of who has the power.
This is how it works in the Northeast, California and so many many other places. Everything is run by unseen elites operating from tax-exempt non-governmental organizations. It's a massive scandal no one wants to address because there is big money involved but that's a story for another day.
#Shapiro #Hydrogen #GentryClass #DelawareRiverkeeper #WHYY #InsideClimateNews #Philadelphia #MayaVanRossum
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