How are Pennsylvania’s lawmakers doing when it comes to the environment?
It won't just be the presidential election up for grabs in Pennsylvania this November. Voters will have the power to give one party control of the state legislature. Republicans now control the Pennsylvania Senate, and Democrats control the House.
So, how are legislators handling the environment? The Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania recently updated its environmental scorecard for all 253 members of the General Assembly. It's keeping a close eye on who wins this November to see what laws will be passed in the next two years.
Molly Parzen, the group's executive director, recently spoke with The Allegheny Front's Reid Frazier.
Molly Parzen: One of the most exciting pro-environment bills that has actually passed both chambers in a bipartisan manner, which is pretty rare these days, is a bill called Solar for Schools .
This is phenomenal legislation that we've been working really hard on the last year. What this bill does is it draws down on federal dollars from the Biden-Harris administration that are available to issue grants to school districts to cover up to 90% of the cost of installing solar panels.
It's a win for cash-strapped school districts who need to save on their energy bills. And it's a win for the taxpayers who will be paying less for the massive energy bills some of these large school districts are incurring.
A particularly insidious bill that we deemed anti-environmental this year was Senate Bill 819 . This bill would create felony penalties for trespassing on infrastructure facilities, including gas pipelines and gas compressor stations. We deem that it could count [the] protesting outside of a facility, or hanging a pro-environment sign on the fence outside of a fracked gas facility. And the intent of this bill is really clear to us, and it's to limit the public's right to free speech and assembly when it comes to polluting infrastructure.
One in particular, which I'll mention, is called PRESS, the Pennsylvania Reliable Energy Sustainability Standard. This is something that we're going to be working on to update our requirements statewide for the use of alternative energy sources to modernize Pennsylvania's energy portfolio.
We are really lagging behind a lot of states in many ways. And so there's a lot of legislation that we need in order to launch us into that clean energy economy. One of those things is this piece of legislation, PRESS, which will update the requirements for how much clean energy the state is generating and using. Our requirements are woefully low right now, and this would bring us into kind of the modern era and alongside other states.
