Tom Shepstone
Natural Gas NOW   

Is there a child anywhere who doesn’t know the meaning of the fable about the Golden Goose? I doubt it, but there is a columnist at the Scranton Times who apparently doesn’t and he wants to kill the Marcellus Shale version.

Chris Kelly is an anti-business, anti-fracking snark who writes for the Scranton Times. He put up a bizarre column today called “A Fracked Fairy Tale.” It is a nothing less than pitiful attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and a host of business leaders who correctly observed a severance tax could be disastrous for Pennsylvania because it would drive the total costs of doing natural gas business further out of step with other states. Our corporate income tax, combined with the existing impact fees, is already significantly higher than the severance tax Texas actually imposes.

What is galling is not that Kelly disagrees. That much could be expected. It’s that he’s incredibly ignorant or supposes his readers are. It’s not clear which is worse.

Here is the entire column, which I heartily encourage everyone to read in its entirety as it illustrates the vacuous nature of the support for a severance tax and the utter lack of credibility among the fractivist opposition:

and here are the lines that gall:

Under the lush hills and dales of Penn’s Woods lived a Golden Goose named Marcellus, who laid eggs so shiny the sun was jealous. The eggs could keep evenly soul in Penn’s Woods fat and happy till the end of time, but the king saw sharing the wealth as a Capitol crime. So he helped the giants hoard their gold at the expense of the poor, sick, young and old.

What is Kelly trying to say with this incoherent childish rant? Aesop’s fable is as follows (emphasis added):

A man had a hen [goose] that laid a golden egg for him each and every day. The man was not satisfied with this daily profit, and instead he foolishly grasped for more. Expecting to find a treasure inside, the man slaughtered the hen. When he found that the hen did not have a treasure inside her after all, he remarked to himself, ‘While chasing after hopes of a treasure, I lost the profit I held in my hands!‘

If there were ever an example of killing the Golden Goose, which is how Kelly actually refers to the Marcellus Shale, out of greed for more, it is to be found in his own call for sharing the wealth of landowners and companies risking their capital to produce the inexpensive clean job-producing energy he consumes. Kelly has, in fact, offered such a perfect illustration of what the fable is all about, one almost has to wonder if he isn’t working for us in offering this tirade.

The benefits of the Marcellus Shale are obvious to anyone living in the shale region:

• Lower gas prices (UGI again dropped its gas rate by 6.3% rate in December)
• Jobs (Bradford Co. up 3,650 jobs while adjoining Tioga, NY down 1,391)
• Cleaner air (NOx, SO2, VOCs all down more than 90% at Hunlock Creek)
• Impact fees (over $630 million in 3 years distributed to every county in the state)
• Taxes (some $2 billion paid by the industry to the Commonwealth since 2007)
• Lease payments and royalties ($731 million in 2012 alone)
• Higher wages (Marcellus Shale industry annual wages $35k+ above PA average)
• Job opportunities (90%+ industry placement rate out of Lackawanna College)
• Higher land values (PA land in gas region selling for 3x the NY price)
• Rebirth of manufacturing (Philadelphia on track to become new Houston)

Chris Kelly thinks these are but “crumbs” and there is a lot more gold to be had if we just act on our greed by killing the Golden Goose with a severance tax that will make Ohio, Texas and virtually everywhere else a better investment than Pennsylvania.

The rest of Kelly’s column is little more than trash talk revealing he has deep-seated problem with capitalism and private initiative, despite the fact he works with a very large capitalistic enterprise himself. He refers to taxing and cheating of “little people” but ignores the role of natural gas in reviving rural economies, providing real high-paying jobs and saving the farms of numerous ordinary Americans. He would have us believe natural gas companies somehow pay no taxes. He even throws this in:

The old woman’s kids attended underfunded public schools and graduated undereducated fools. The few who made it through college had to leave Penn’s Woods to work with jerks while facing decades as debt slaves.

While it’s debatable whether schools are underfunded, suggesting graduates of Lackawanna College, who just got $2.5 million from a gas company (their largest endowment ever) will have to leave and “work with jerks” as “debt slaves” is an appalling insult to the integrity of several colleges in the area who are training our kids for outstanding jobs right here in the region working for the gas industry; jobs paying way above average.

Is Kelly really this ignorant? Sadly, it appears he is. Perhaps the Scranton Times (which owns the Northeast Driller) ought to think about hiring a replacement. I can think of a few colleges where they might go to recruit. They’ll have to pay well to get someone away from the gas industry, though. So, maybe they’ll just want to get Kelly a copy of Aesop’s Fables so he can bone up the meaning of “killing the Golden Goose.” Hint, Chris: it’s about greed and envy destroying what you already have.