Free Republic

TUNKHANNOCK — A woman accused of dousing someone with gasoline during a fight at a gas station in Wyoming County has been sent to prison. Kimberly Brinton was sentenced to two to six years in prison after pleading guilty Tuesday to risking a catastrophe and drug charges from a separate incident.

If there were ever a time to increase the gas tax it would be NOW! A tax bill is in the works. The Democrats want it "paid for." Oil price is way down and not likelihood of an increase soon. High tech improvements to oil discovery and production have drastically reduced oil prices. I am happy to pay more for a gas tax that would improve road and bridge infrastructure. PA increased the gas tax and nobody fussed much. A federal gas tax hike is long overdue and Democrats would vote for it!

When the House passed the GOP’s ObamaCare replacement, the AHCA last Thursday, there was no shortage of angry celebrities attacking the GOP in profanity-laced tweets, claiming the GOP “will pay” for it come election time. Looks like the anger has not died down in Hollywood yet. Actress and singer Bette Midler followed the rest of her ilk’s partisan and vile lead, tweeting that the GOP was “gassing their own people” by repealing ObamaCare. So the #homegrownAssads in the #FreedomCaucus want employers to not have to offer health care to employees. Like gassing their own people! — Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) May...

•President Donald Trump will instruct the Interior Department to revise the Obama administration's five-year plan for developing federal waters. •His executive order will tell the Commerce Department to refrain from naming or expanding marine sanctuaries and review existing ones. •Trump will seek to overturn President Barack Obama's effort to indefinitely put much of U.S. Arctic waters and part of the Atlantic off limits to drillers. President Donald Trump on Friday will instruct his cabinet officials to take actions that will potentially open new areas of federally administered waters to energy development. The actions, to be spelled out in a new...

The U.S. Department of Energy has signed an order authorizing Golden Pass Products to export domestically produced LNG to countries that do not have a free trade agreement with the U.S. Golden Pass is jointly owned by Qatar Petroleum (70 percent) and ExxonMobil (30 percent). The authorization allows for the export of up to the equivalent of 2.21 billion cubic feet of LNG per day (Bcf/d) from the Golden Pass Terminal near Sabine Pass, in Jefferson County, Texas. Golden Pass estimates the construction of its facility will provide 45,000 direct and indirect jobs over five years, and the project will...

Yesterday, Monday, I took the Boulder Daily Camera to task for an indefensible letter it published last Wednesday, April 19 that unambiguously incited violence against oil and gas workers. A day later on the 20th, without retraction or apology, the Camera had modified the letter, but grossly inadequately. The letter still plainly supported violence against person and property. A friend later alerted me that a day before, on Sunday, April 23, the Camera’s editorial editor, Dave Krieger had penned a “full scale mea culpa.” Intrigued, I clicked to the Camera to see what this apology might say, and whether the...

A top adviser to President Donald Trump on Thursday appeared to throw the administration’s support behind a proposed controversial liquefied national gas terminal in Oregon that had been rejected by regulators during the Obama administration. “The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to permit an LNG export facility in the Northwest,” said Gary Cohn, chair of the White House National Economic Council. “Just think of the transport time from the Northwest to Japan versus anywhere else. Then we’ve got to put facilities on the East Coast to get from the East Coast to Germany.” “The one place...

Energy Transfer Partners, the developer behind the so-called DAPL, is scheduled to start delivering oil on May 14 to Illinois, according to filings from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The oil project is expected to transport more than 500,000 barrels of oil a year across the eastern section of the country. ... The Obama administration rejected the previously approved pipeline last December ... President Donald Trump eventually issued orders approving the DAPL in January ... many demonstrators have begun diverting their attention to the equally contentious Keystone XL Pipeline, another oil pipeline Trump approved through executive order. Obama originally rejected...

The Syrian military is prepared to use chemical weapons against its own people and is awaiting final orders from President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday. The military has loaded the precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, into aerial bombs that could be dropped onto the Syrian people from dozens of fighter-bombers, the officials said. As recently as Tuesday, officials had said there was as yet no evidence that the process of mixing the "precursor" chemicals had begun. But Wednesday, they said their worst fears had been confirmed: The nerve agents were locked and loaded...

Gotcha. Sean Spicer has surely had better days than the one in which he clumsily said Adolf Hitler “didn’t even sink” to using chemical weapons. I would imagine almost every day of his life was better than that one. I sure as hell hope so. As if it was necessary to cite a historical comparison to emphasize the seriousness of Bashar Assad using chemical weapons against his own people - it’s not, the action stands on its own as abjectly evil - Spicer somehow managed to stumble into a media trap of his own making. And once you’ve done that,...

Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) addressed the recent chemical weapons massacre in Syria’s Idlib province, denouncing the idleness of the international community in response to the Syrian crisis. Speaking to Yedioth Ahronoth, Lieberman said that “the two murderous chemical weapons attacks on civilians in the Idlib region in Syria and on the local hospital were carried out by direct and premeditated order of Syrian President Bashar Assad, with Syrian planes. I say this with 100 percent certainty.”

California’s governor and legislative leaders on Wednesday proposed raising $52 billion to fix the state’s roads through a big gasoline tax increase, higher car registration fees and a charge on emission-free vehicles. The 10-year plan would boost gasoline excise taxes for the first time in more than two decades, raising them 12 cents per gallon — a 43 percent increase. The tax would rise automatically with inflation. For the first time, owners of zero emission vehicles would pay a $100 annual fee because they use public roads but don’t pay gasoline taxes that fund highway maintenance. The plan also includes...

California’s governor and legislative leaders on Wednesday proposed raising $52 billion to fix the state’s roads through a big gasoline tax increase, higher car registration fees and a charge on emission-free vehicles. The 10-year plan would boost gasoline excise taxes for the first time in more than two decades, raising them 12 cents per gallon — a 43 percent increase. The tax would rise automatically with inflation. For the first time, owners of zero emission vehicles would pay a $100 annual fee because they use public roads but don’t pay gasoline taxes that fund highway maintenance. The plan also includes...

I have a buddy in rural Illinois who is living with and helping out his elderly mom, and he likes to cook. He cooks up a storm. They both enjoy the food. The house they are in has begun to display a very bad bedbug infestation. Both my buddy's mom and my buddy are freaking out. They don't have a lot of money but they are about to call Orkin. I stopped to think about the science of bedbugs. Both my buddy and I did a lot of online research after discovering the infestation. But I think I have a...

The House of Delegates has approved a bill to permanently ban natural gas fracking in Western Maryland. The bill passed by a vote of 97-40. The 97 votes is 12 more than the minimum of 85 needed to override a veto from Governor Larry Hogan. That majority was important to the chairman of the committee hearing the bill in the Senate. The chairman of the Senate Education Health and Environmental Affairs Committee, Joan Carter Conway of Baltimore City, says she won’t bring the bill to the Senate floor unless lawmakers have enough votes to override a possible veto from Governor...

I am a petroleum geologist/geophysicist with about 36 years of experience in oil & gas exploration mostly in the Gulf of Mexico. In light of Andy May’s recent post, Oil – Will we run out?, I thought I might post an essay on oil formation. Over the past six years, I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to write guest posts for Watts Up With That thanks to Anthony Watts. Many of my posts have been about issues related to oil production and each of these posts usually triggers comments from Abiogenic Oil advocates. So, this post’s main thrust...

It's Friday, and what better way to spend the day that starts with F than talking about Flatulence? Anyone who has accidentally let one rip in a social situation understands the immediate horror associated with getting caught passing gas. But instead of being ashamed when you fart in public, you should embrace your dirty deed with pride, as you may have just helped saved someone's life. Well, that's what a study currently getting some attention might suggest, but it's more complicated than that. The study out of the University of Exeter in the UK found that the hydrogen sulfide gas...

If the GOP-controlled Legislature goes along with Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf's renewed call for a severance tax, it would be a surefire way to debilitate Pennsylvania's shale-gas industry. Always a bad idea, a severance tax is an even worse idea this time around — because 2016 saw the industry “shed a third of its jobs” and gas prices are still rebounding “from record lows,” according to the Commonwealth Foundation. The state's own Independent Fiscal Office estimates that Pennsylvania's existing impact fee is the equivalent of a 6.9-percent severance tax — higher than severance taxes in Louisiana, Wyoming and West Virginia.

US President Donald Trump has pledged to unlock a $US50 trillion ($66 trillion) shale oil and gas revolution and boost development of low emissions coal technology for electricity. The Energy First plan was outlined as the top priority in President Trump’s first action statement after being sworn into office. The statement committed Trump to scrapping the Obama government’s Climate Action Plan but did not mention renewable energy or whether the US would remain in the Paris agreement. It was a full endorsement of the future use of fossil fuels. The Trump plan mirrors debate in Australia over energy security. The...

What if the Legislature and governor hike gas and vehicle registration taxes to fix the roads, but then hardly any extra money goes to fix the roads? Drivers started paying those higher taxes this month, though they were enacted near the end of 2015. But at least in the short term, the main effect of these tax increases appears to be higher spending on schools and Medicaid, not road repairs. The 7.3-cent-per-gallon tax increase motorists began paying on Jan. 1 and the 20 percent increase in the vehicle registration tax are expected to cost road users an additional $460 million...