In his first year as governor, Josh Shapiro forged alliances with the natural gas industry, angering environmentalists who once supported him

In his remarks, Shapiro emphasized the need for the government to hold powerful oil and gas companies to account. “We can’t rely on big corporations to police themselves,” he said. “After all, they report to their investors and their shareholders. That’s their job. It’s the government’s job to set and enforce the ground rules that protect the public interest. And through multiple administrations, they failed to do that.”

Three years later, and nearly a year into his first term as Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Shapiro announced a “first-of-its-kind collaboration on environmental monitoring and chemical disclosures” with CNX Resources, a natural gas company, that the administration said would “advance commonsense measures to defend public health and safety.” The deal is predicated on CNX’s willingness to be “radically transparent” with the public about its own operations.

For some activists in Pennsylvania, Shapiro’s embrace of CNX is indicative of the distance between the governor’s policies on climate and the environment in his first year in office and the priorities he pursued as attorney general. From a working group on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, whose members and agenda were kept secret for months, to the governor’s unequivocal support for building hydrogen hubs, even if they use natural gas, environmentalists who were once optimistic about Shapiro’s election are disappointed.

The governor’s 2024 budget address, delivered on Tuesday in Harrisburg, did little to dispel their concerns. There were few mentions of climate change or the environment, and the administration’s new 10-year strategic economic development plan, called “Pennsylvania Gets It Done,” unveiled last week and highlighted in the speech, relies in part on leveraging Pennsylvania’s natural gas resources.

“It’s really like a Jekyll and Hyde thing since he was attorney general and governor,” said Shannon Smith, the executive director of FracTracker Alliance, a nonprofit based in Johnstown that uses data and mapping tools to analyze and track the impacts of exposure to oil and gas development. “If you compare the two, they’re not even the same person.”

At the time of the grand jury announcement, environmentalists voiced support for its report’s eight policy recommendations for the state government “to minimize the hazards arising from unconventional drilling.” According to the Center for Coalfield Justice, an environmental and public health nonprofit in Southwestern Pennsylvania, the investigation’s findings “validated” residents’ doubts about the claims made by fracking companies drilling near their homes and their skepticism about DEP’s willingness—and ability—to regulate the industry.

In November, some of those same advocates were dismayed when Shapiro announced the partnership with CNX Resources, a natural gas company that Shapiro had charged with violating the Air Pollution Control Act in 2021 when he was attorney general. As part of the deal, CNX would “voluntarily expand its no-drill zones” in Pennsylvania from 500 to 600 feet and to 2,500 feet near vulnerable sites like schools and hospitals. It would also conduct “intensive” air and water quality monitoring, disclose chemicals used in drilling and fracking to the public and provide access to two future wells so that DEP could study air emissions at the sites and “make it possible for communities to understand the facts about natural gas development.”

“In place of endless speculation and dueling rhetoric, CNX seeks to change this paradigm by open-sourcing facts, science, and data to all stakeholders and creating mutual trust which can serve as the basis for cooperation and real environmental and economic progress in the Commonwealth,” said Nick Deiuliis, CNX’s CEO.

The Shapiro administration has not responded to requests for comment for this article.

To advocates who have studied and monitored the impacts of fracking on public health and the environment in Pennsylvania for the past two decades, the announcement felt like “a slap in the face to communities suffering from years of drilling,” as the Center for Coalfield Justice put it.

“We have enough research already,” Smith said, including a $3 million, three-year study conducted by the University of Pittsburgh and contracted by the Pennsylvania Department of Health that looked at the effects of fracking on asthma, birth outcomes and childhood cancer in Pennsylvania. “That was just such an insulting thing,” she said, “for him to put out that press release announcing this, as if we’re all going to applaud him.”

A Better Future

The Shapiro administration’s relationship with CNX Resources began with its transition team, when the governor chose CNX Vice President Brian Aiello as part of the subcommittee on energy and continued with the RGGI working group, which was convened to discuss whether Pennsylvania should join the multi-state cooperative that uses a cap and invest model to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power generation. Zach Smith, CNX’s director of government relations, was a member of the working group.

Another member of the RGGI group, David Masur, the executive director of PennEnvironment, said that he saw value in the governor’s bipartisan approach to the group, which included representatives from labor interests, fossil fuel companies like Shell and CNX and environmental groups.

“Just by bringing us all together, it did build some affinity,” Masur said. He said that participating in the group had introduced him to people he’d never met. Even if they didn’t agree, it was helpful to form relationships with political opponents—to see them as real, approachable people rather than caricatures. “I think we need more of that in politics,” he said.

Shapiro’s thinking in putting together the RGGI group was reflective of his governing philosophy as a whole, Masur said. “He’s willing to have the uncomfortable conversations. He wants to bring divergent constituencies together to hash it out versus keeping people in their silos.”

To Masur, Shapiro is doing the best he can under difficult political circumstances. “He needs partnership with the legislature, and they don’t seem like they’re wanting to come to the table on much of anything,” Masur said.

While Democrats gained control of the House for the first time in more than a decade in 2023, Republicans still control the Senate, limiting Shapiro’s ability to tackle the ambitious climate goals he set as a candidate for Pennsylvania reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and generating 30 percent of the state’s energy from renewable sources by 2030.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 3 percent of Pennsylvania’s electricity generation comes from renewable energy sources, putting the state at 45th in the country for that metric. A 2023 report from PennEnvironment ranked Pennsylvania as 50th for growth in renewable energy since 2013, lagging far behind states like Texas. Pennsylvania also ranked 50th for energy savings from efficiency improvements.

In his budget address, the governor said that his economic development plan’s focus on site redevelopment for businesses and start-ups would help with “combating climate change” by investing in clean energy. “I know there are bills to pass and work to do to combat climate change, but one of the most important things we can do right now is invest in our clean energy economy and the jobs it supports,” he said.

“He’s got his work cut out for him because sadly, we are in a world now where there’s more political value in being obstructionist than there is in compromising and making incremental change for the greater good,” Masur said.

Like the CNX partnership, the RGGI group angered environmentalists, who saw the inclusion of stakeholders from the oil and gas industry as dangerous capitulation rather than pragmatic politicking. In a letter to Shapiro about the group, 15 environmental organizations in Pennsylvania said that the administration was “offering the corporations who would be regulated by RGGI an additional chance to kill the program.”

The Shapiro administration recently appealed two court decisions that had ruled against Pennsylvania’s participation in RGGI, but the governor declined to fully endorse the program.

Shapiro’s support for hydrogen hubs—which also dates back to his campaign—is another worry for environmentalists, who view the approved projects in Pennsylvania as a way for gas companies to keep drilling, fracking and building pipelines. In October, the administration touted the two hydrogen projects coming to Pennsylvania as a “transformational federal investment” that would create thousands of jobs, “harness Pennsylvania’s position as an energy leader, and make the Commonwealth the center of a growing industry.”

Nicknamed ARCH2 and located in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania, the Appalachian Hydrogen Hub will rely on natural gas to make hydrogen, and CNX Resources is one of its project development partners. In 2023, CNX spent $790,000 on lobbying efforts, according to Open Secrets, and one of the debates that they hoped to influence concerns rules that will determine what kind of hydrogen projects qualify for tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act. The industry fears that proposed rules requiring that projects use renewable energy sources would “negatively impact” hydrogen hubs that use natural gas.

In a statement reviewing the governor’s first year in office, Dave Callahan, the president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a trade group for the natural gas industry that counts CNX among its members, was largely complimentary. He highlighted reform for DEP’s permitting process and “opportunities to expand natural gas transportation and use, particularly in manufacturing and emerging hydrogen economies” as two “areas of focus” for Shapiro as he begins his second year.

“Natural gas is fundamental to Pennsylvania’s economy and we appreciate the broad group of business, labor and bipartisan legislative leaders who continue to advocate for commonsense energy policies,” he said. “We remain committed to promoting a flexible regulatory environment that keeps Pennsylvania open for business.”

Energy is one of five priority sectors in the administration’s new economic development plan. The plan underscores Pennsylvania’s energy industry’s “competitive specializations” in natural gas and hydrogen as well as the state’s “wealth of natural resources” in oil and gas, petrochemical and coal manufacturing, and pipeline transportation.

The two hydrogen hubs, the plan says, are “poised to collectively receive $1.7 billion in federal infrastructure and workforce development investment and create over 40,000 family sustaining jobs.” The plan calls for combining the hydrogen hubs with Pennsylvania’s “vast natural gas reserves” and goals for renewable energy to “take an all-of-the-above approach to energy production.”

In January, PennFuture and Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania called the economic plan “a repackaging of the fossil fuel industry’s playbook in Pennsylvania” that relies on “dirty fossil fuels” and will lead to “an unstable boom-bust economy that harms our workers, our environment, and our quality of life.”

“We can do better,” the groups wrote. Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania endorsed Shapiro’s candidacy in April 2022.

No False Solutions PA, an alliance of environmentalists in Pennsylvania who aim to “educate and inform legislators and decision-makers about emerging technologies that claim to be solutions to the climate crisis,” is one of the groups concerned about the governor’s choice to champion hydrogen hubs.

“What we are seeing in Pennsylvania is a concerted effort from the oil and gas industry to maintain business as usual by coming up with new ways to continue to use fracked gas,” one of the authors of a new report from the group, Sandy Field, said in a press release in January. “The health and environment of Pennsylvanian communities have been sacrificed for energy production by the fossil fuel industry for 150 years. Pennsylvanians deserve a better future.”