This editorial by Stacy Long appeared in The Hawk Eye on June 20, 2019.

GRANT TOWNSHIP — This missive addresses Mike Butler, author of a May 28 letter to the editor of The Indiana Gazette. Mr. Butler, mid-Atlantic executive director of Consumer Energy Alliance, made a wildly condescending attempt to sound frightening to Indiana County residents and to those of us in Grant Township.  We know of scarier, Mr. Butler.

Speaking of scared, that came through in your writing.  Your industry is scared.  That’s why CEA — a huge energy-industry-funded PR group founded by a leading proponent of the Keystone XL Pipelineand the Canadian tar-sands industry and whose members include giants like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell — made its stated goal for 2019 “to counter the message of anti-fracking and anti-pipeline protesters.”

CEA has been investigated in three states (Wisconsin, South Carolina and Ohio)  for illegally “comment stuffing” local legislators’ inboxes, in order to push through unwanted, enormous energy projects and mergers in communities that don’t want them.

In Ohio in 2016, CEA was accused of submitting fake letters to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission shortly before the public comment period closed on the Nexus Gas Transmission Pipeline. An attorney representing groups opposing the pipeline had tracked the letters, and noted one came from a man who had died in 1998.

And that’s only one example from one state in one year.  Mr. Butler refers to us as “extremists.”  I think using dead people to coerce legislators into approving unwanted projects is pretty extreme.

And what’s “extreme” about democratically stopping a project (the proposed injection well that Mr. Butler calls “a much-needed energy project”) that has caused human and environmental harms in other places and is being proposed by Pennsylvania General Energy,  a permit-violator?

Mr. Butler writes that we are “misguided.”  Were the suffragettes misguided?  Were the civil rights activists in Alabama misguided?  “Misguided” is a small rural community being sued by a corporation, punished by a court, and sued by a Department of Environmental Protection, just for voting to democratically protect its health and safety.  Fighting for inalienable rights is not “misguided.”

(Read the rest of this missive at its original source HERE.)