PA Gas Drillers Ask NJ Guv to Veto Anti-Fracking Bill

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

July 18, 2011 | 12:39 PM

The Marcellus Shale Coalition sent a letter to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie urging him to veto Senate Bill 2576. The bill bans fracking in New Jersey, where, there’s no natural gas and therefore, no fracking. The letter, written by the Coalition’s president Kathryn Klaber, admits the bill has no teeth and is meant as a political statement. But Klaber worries about the precedent setting nature of the legislation. She also points out that 67 percent of New Jersey’s homes are heated by natural gas extracted via fracking in other states.
It is worth noting that the majority of landowners who sit on top of the Marcellus Shale in rural areas of Pennsylvania, do not actually use natural gas to light their homes. The major pipelines rolling beneath their forests and dairy farms serve the gaping needs of the urban east coast.