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by Walter Brasch

Royal Dutch Shell, which owns or leases about 900,000 acres in the Marcellus Shale, had a great idea.

It wanted to frack the Ukraine. But, there was opposition. So, Royal Dutch Shell decided to create a junket for some of the Ukrainians opposed to fracking to show them just how wonderful fracking is.

They were going to bring the Ukrainians to northeastern Pennsylvania, and give them an all-expenses-paid four day tour. The tour was to begin at the end of July. Other shale gas corporations have created press junkets, where they lay out a nice day or two of activities, complete with handouts, trinkets, meals, and lodging. Members of the establishment press often go on these junkets. Some take what they're told, rework it, and put it into print or on the air.

Now, the people of the Ukraine anti-fracking movement aren't idiots. They weren't just going to take whatever they were shown and told. So, they contacted the state's leading fractivists and anti-fracking organizations. They wanted to learn all the facts--not just what was spoon-fed to them. They were willing to talk to anti-fracking activists when there were no other scheduled activities.

But Royal Dutch Shell was monitoring FaceBook and the Internet, and saw that the Ukrainians were trying to talk to the grassroots movement in Pennsylvania to get all sides of the issue.

What a company with solid PR would do would be to just deal with it--and hope that its side could be presented, and the people would make reasonable decisions. But, Royal Dutch Shell, apparently, has some rather lame six-figure income PR people and administrators.

Royal Dutch Shell decided it didn't want to deal with having any opposition to its PR tour. So, the company that has about $360 billion in assets--and made about a $27 billion profit last year, placing it No. 1 on the Fortune 500 list--cancelled the tour less than a week before it was to begin.

But the story doesn't end with a cancelled press junket. Royal Dutch Shell is embedded into Pennsylvania politics.

The foreign-owned company was thinking about building an ethane cracker plant about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. A cracker plant takes natural gas and breaks it up to create ethylene, primarily used in plastics. Royal Dutch Shell considered placing the plant beside the Ohio River in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or West Virginia. All three states were interested, but Pennsylvania held out the most lucrative corporate welfare check for the company, which had spent $14.5 million in lobbying during 2012, about 10 percent of all lobbying costs for all gas and oil corporations.

The Pennsylvania legislature handed over a 15 year exemption from local and state taxes, apparently without consulting local officials in Beaver County's Potter and Center townships. Tom Corbett, who never met a gas driller he didn't like, then approved a $1.65 billion tax credit over 25 years, tweeting, "A crackerplant would create up to 20,000 permanent jobs in Southwest PA." The reality is considerably lower.

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