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Pennsylvania's Energy Sector Booms, Despite GOP Warnings

Bashing President Barack Obama’s energy policies has become a stable of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s stump speech. The Republican regularly calls Obama an “anti-energy president,” and warns the Democrats policies are stifling oil and gas extraction.
The New York Times traveled to western Pennsylvania, though, and didn’t find much evidence of federal guidelines slowing down Marcellus Shale drilling.

“We have these Big Government policies out of D. C. that are turning off the lights,” said Keith Rothfus, a Republican House candidate in a newly drawn Western Pennsylvania district he calls “America’s new energy capital.”
But to make that case, Republicans will have to convince voters in regions like Western Pennsylvania that the free-for-all they see all around them could somehow be even more, well, free. It is a tough sell.
“It’s the Wild West,” said C. J. Callahan, a 29-year-old banker in Point Marion, grabbing dinner with his wife and newborn baby at Apple Annie’s, just down the road from the Headleys. “There aren’t regulations. It’s just, get it out as quick as you can, because they’re going to do the regulations down the road.”

An update from the comment section. Governor Corbett’s energy executive, Patrick Henderson, weighs in, arguing Washington’s energy regulation could be better. ” [The} suc­cess of [state] efforts,” he writes “could be mag­ni­fied if we had a fed­eral energy pol­icy — and more impor­tantly a coop­er­a­tive fed­eral gov­ern­ment — that both respected the state’s pre­rog­a­tive to over­see and reg­u­late energy devel­op­ment and saw itself as a part­ner, rather than an adver­sary, to state gov­ern­ment and job creators.”
DEP Secretary Michael Krancer has made similar complaints about the EPA’s relationship with Pennsylvania.

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