“State Department Keystone XL Study Done by Oil Industry-Connected Firms with Big Tobacco, Fracking Ties”

Philadelphia Connection: Katie McGinty

To begin at the end of this explosive expose, here is the story of Katie McGinty. From 2003 – 2008, McGinty served as head of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, helping to usher in the fracking industry which is now having its way with Pennsylvania. We haven’t heard a peep from McGinty objecting to the black water, methane migration, human illnesses, animal illnesses and deaths, blowouts, and other impacts Pennsylvanians are now experiencing as fracking dominates many rural counties.

To the contrary, McGinty’s industry connections have thickened. She is managing director of Weston Solutions, a firm that is part of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, according to Public Accountability in “Fracking and the Revolving Door in Pennsylvania,” February 2013.

And this week, in “State Department Keystone XL Study Done by Oil Industry-Connected Firm with Big Tobacco, Fracking Ties,” Steve Horn identifies the rest of her current ties:

So, she’s well set to benefit from all the fracking that’s devastating Pennsylvania and beyond right now, and she’s sure not living up to the label “environmentalist” which Wikipedia gives her, but what’s she got to do with this tar sands study?

Turns out that McGinty’s husband, Karl Hausker, happens to be vice president of ICF Consulting, one of the firms the State Department contracted to study the environmental impacts of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The State study concluded on March 1st that laying down the Keystone XL pipeline is environmentally sound, despite its massive carbon footprint and other well-documented environmental impacts.

When the State Department announced this scientifically unfounded conclusion, it failed to mention that the study was contracted out to three firms with industry ties, including ICF, according to InsideClimate News.

Investigative desmogblog reporter Steve Horn puts the final jigsaw puzzle piece together this way:

Yes, read that again. We’ve got a fracking fan, Katie McGlinty, now working in Philadelphia alongside the pro-fracking former governor Rendell, at a firm with investments in PA Marcellus Shale drilling; she’s on the board of NRG, which owns gas-fired power plants; she’s on the NY DEC Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel, she’s managing director of a Marcellus Shale Coalition member firm, and her husband is vice president of one of the firms that just concluded the KXL is environmentally sound.

The extreme energy extraction revolving door McGinty is spinning in seems to have a flashing neon “drill baby drill” sign on top of it.

Oh, and one more tidbit? That same husband of hers, Karl Hausker, used to work for the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, which takes a pro-fracking line and continues to accept gas industry funding. A few years back, in 2007, a PA ethics panel ruled that cabinet secretaries must completely divorce themselves from grants to entities where their spouses work after McGinty’s DEP administration gave $2.8 million in grants to the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, where Hausker was working.

All of this would be merely amusing if it weren’t for the serious harms fracking is doing. Frank Finan hasn’t been able to eat solid food since receiving a chemical burn to his throat from inhaling at a flare in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, on January 23rd 2013. On December 7th, 2012 an 80 year old man in Susquehanna County, PA had a nosebleed, apparently caused by a shale gas dehydrator close to his home, so severe that he had to go to the hospital in an ambulance to stop the bleeding. A Dimock resident passed out from inhaling fumes from his family’s contaminated water. And the List of the Harmed is just now topping 900. The situation is desperate for many who are having their lives turned upside down, while others profit and turn a blind eye.

So, what’s in a study? Whether it’s the now thoroughly debunked, infamously corrupted 2004 EPA study of coalbed methane which paved the way for the 2005 Halliburton Loophole that enabled the real fracking frenzy to take off in the Marcellus; or this new State Department Keystone XL “study” with industry ties, the devil’s in the details. Extreme energy extraction requires extreme pro-industry bias in the “studies” our government uses to facilitate climate-destroying fossil fuel development.

Please read the entire piece, reposted courtesy of Steve Horn, revealing industry ties with three firms — ICF, ERM, and EnSys Energy — hired to produce the conclusion the State Department wanted:

State Department Keystone XL Study Done by Oil Industry-Connected Firms with Big Tobacco, Fracking Ties