Tom Pike: Shapiro needs to step up his environmental game

As attorney general, in 2020, Josh Shapiro made a name for himself by publishing a grand jury report that called for 2,500-foot protective buffers between residents’ homes and fracking well pads. It cited reams of evidence that living near fracking infrastructure is dangerous to Pennsylvanians’ health.

Shapiro’s track record as attorney general led to environmentally concerned Pennsylvanians overwhelmingly voting for him for Pennsylvania governor in 2022. But, even by 2022, there were signs his support for environmental causes might be conditional: he refused to say at the time whether he supported the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-invest program that has been shown to save lives and reduce air pollution.

Since becoming governor, Shapiro has been conspicuously silent on the protective buffers he once recommended. Pennsylvanians haven’t seen any movement from him on protections from fracking, aside from a toothless, voluntary agreement with CNX, a fracking company not known for keeping its word.

Shapiro has also left the role of secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) vacant. Former DEP Secretary Rich Negrin, who served for four months last year, was a genuinely empathetic and dynamic DEP secretary. But, shortly after Negrin promised members of the public that he would advise the governor to institute setbacks, he departed the agency for unclear reasons. In the power vacuum following Negrin’s departure, there has been little appetite at the DEP for making big changes. Shapiro’s inaction in filling the power vacuum for the past nine months is hard to read charitably; one must conclude a leaderless DEP is the arrangement Shapiro prefers.

On legislation, Shapiro has proposed PRESS and PACER, each solidly OK climate and pollution bills, but they seem destined to be tabled in the Senate — an outcome the politically astute Shapiro would not have been surprised by. These are messaging bills he knew would not pass.

In the meantime, the bills Shapiro has actually signed into law include SB 831, which opened the ground beneath our feet to an entirely new kind of carbon pollution, and the lovely Solar for Schools bill. But these two bills do not cancel each other out: Schools are not a major source of carbon emissions, whereas carbon capture and storage will do real and significant harm to Pennsylvanians.

Shapiro’s track record is of ambitious proposals that stall or die, while destructive policies get passed into law, tempered only slightly by bills that have great optics, but fundamentally do not challenge the fossil fuel industry.

Shapiro’s climate and environmental track record, therefore, contains more losses than wins for the people of Pennsylvania. If he wants that to change, there is still time left in his term, and the first thing he should do is appoint a new, permanent DEP secretary — one who is committed to the same protective buffers Shapiro once supported as attorney general.

Tom Pike is an environmental policy advocate for Protect PT, a Westmoreland County nonprofit dedicated to protecting the clean air and water to which Pennsylvanians are entitled under Article 1, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.