Pennsylvania's Energy Sector Booms, Despite GOP Warnings

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

June 21, 2012 | 10:00 AM

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.