Definition of ban from Cambridge Dictionary: “to say officially that something is not allowed, or that someone is not allowed to do something.”
US Senator – NO Fracking Ban! by Bob Donnan, Nov 9, 2019, Bob’s Blog
Pat ‘Drill Baby Drill’ Toomey, the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, is spearheading a resolution aimed at keeping future presidents from banning fracking. He also wants to block governors from using the Clean Water Act to stop pipelines.
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Senator Toomey’s family lives in Zionsville, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, which is a two hour drive from the nearest fracked well in Lycoming County. Do you think if his three kids lived in Washington County, where a Ewing sarcoma cancer cluster has emerged in youth living close to fracking, that he’d still be “all-in” promoting fracking?
Pa. Sen. Pat Toomey introduces bill to prevent fracking ban by wfmz.com, Nov 9, 2019
Pa. Senator Pat Toomey is backing a measure to prevent a president from banning fracking.
Toomey takes preventative measures as Dems call for fracking bans by Katie Meyer, Nov 8, 2019, WITF
Pennsylvania’s Republican U.S. Senator, Pat Toomey, is trying to head off some of the big environmental promises that a few Democratic Presidential candidates are making.
He’s spearheading a resolution aimed at keeping future presidents from banning fracking.
Toomey announced the measure in Harrisburg Friday, standing next to a poster-sized tweet from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.
She and other leading candidates, like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, say if elected they’ll impose a total fracking ban in the name of meeting ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals. In addition, Sanders, on his campaign website, says his plan to ban fracking is because it makes “surrounding communities less healthy and less safe.” Drilling for shale gas is a major industry in western and north-central Pennsylvania.
“I fear they might declare a national emergency of some sort and pretend that that gives them the authority to do this,” Toomey said. “I don’t believe for a minute that it does.”
Toomey said his proposal doesn’t exactly prohibit future presidents from banning fracking—it’s intended to set a precedent that Congress can use to challenge a ban in court.
He said his concerns about a potential ban to a major Pennsylvania industry have grown in recent months. [A country-wide frac ban would save the USA and states from going bankrupt, if they arent already because of frac’ing’s endless liabilities and harms, and ugly economics.]
“Now we have the leading Democratic presidential candidates competing with each other over who can be most hostile—hostile—to this tremendous source of economic renaissance,” he said.
Axios reported Friday on a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Cook Political Report that showed lukewarm support for a fracking ban in several battleground states.
Researchers asked people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota — key states in the 2020 presidential election — whether they thought a fracking ban was a good idea. Support for a ban was between 50 and 56 percent among Democrats, but between 39 and 42 percent among “swing voters,” which the pollsters defined as those who don’t know who they’ll vote for, or are leaning toward a candidate but aren’t sure. The poll’s margin of error was 4 percent for Democrats and 3 percent for swing voters.
Toomey is also backing a bill that would amend the Clean Water Act to keep governors—like New York Democrat Andrew Cuomo—from using one of its provisions to block interstate pipelines.
He conceded that neither is likely to get brought up in the Democratic-controlled House.
Toomey goes to bat for fracking amid 2020 talk of ban by Marc Levy, Associated Press, Nov 8, 2019, Mcall.com
Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said Friday that he is seeking passage of a measure that’s squarely aimed at several Democratic presidential candidates and designed to prevent a president from banning hydraulic fracturing.
At a news conference in Harrisburg, Toomey said his newly introduced resolution makes it clear that Congress believes that a president doesn’t have the authority to ban hydraulic fracturing, called fracking for short.
The resolution, should it pass, would be a bulwark in a legal fight against a president who tries to use the levers of executive branch power to ban the natural gas extraction process.
“What I’m trying to do is put a spotlight and encourage senators and House members to underscore that the president does not have the legal authority to do this and that would then contribute to forming the basis for a very, very aggressive pushback if a future president were to attempt to exercise powers that he or she doesn’t legally have,” Toomey said.
Toomey’s resolution is in response to an all-out prohibition that’s backed by two leading Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The prospect of banning fracking is dividing Democrats and their traditional allies in organized labor in what’s shaping up as a premier battleground state in next year’s presidential election.
… President Donald Trump has promoted his support for the natural gas industry on two visits to Pennsylvania in the past three months, making clear that he sees his pro-industry policies as a boost to his chances of winning the state in 2020’s election.
In a statement Friday, Warren’s campaign said she would fight for legislation to ban fracking nationwide, build on the Obama administration’s methane rule and use executive authorities to regulate air and water contaminants from fracking and natural gas operations.
Warren’s campaign also said she is committed to providing job training to workers in the fossil fuel industry, and guaranteed wage and benefit parity for workers transitioning into new industries, or pensions and early retirement benefits for those who want to retire.
Sanders’ campaign didn’t respond to the question of how he would go about banning fracking, but took a shot at Toomey, saying Toomey “wants us to believe his wealthy donors from the fossil fuel industry instead of Pennsylvanians currently being poisoned by fracking.”
“In a Sanders administration, we will transition to 100% clean energy, support rural America and take care of workers who are transitioning to new job opportunities, instead of allowing them to be exploited by the greed and corruption of the fossil fuel industry,” Sanders’ campaign said in a statement.
… Toomey said he is confident his measure would draw bipartisan support in both chambers, although he acknowledges that chances of a floor vote in the Democratic-controlled House are “not great.”
The resolution, he said, isn’t a reflection of who he believes will win next year’s presidential race.
“I’m not in the business of predicting what that outcome is going to be,” Toomey said, “but someday we’ll have a Democratic president and there seems to be this growing idea on the left that we have to even ban natural gas.”
Toomey introduced his resolution days after Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, a Democrat, told a convention of climate change activists that he opposed the potential arrival of a second petrochemical refinery in the area.
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