Allegheny County Council has voted unanimously – 15-0 – to develop a “climate action plan” by next July to combat “greenhouse gas” emissions.
The county’s Department of Sustainability will be tasked with drafting the plan by July 1, 2024.
As the Tribune-Review reports it:
“Allegheny County’s plan would be akin to the City of Pittsburgh’s and the state of Pennsylvania’s, which both lay out strategies and goals to lower greenhouse gas emissions … by using electric vehicles, increasing buildings’ efficiency through land-use changes, boosting alternative transportation like bikes and public transit and more.”
Ohhhh-kay… . Lots of unanswered questions here in these specifics-lacking goals. But there’s a hint.
What strikes us about this ordinance, expected to be signed into law by lame-duck Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald, is this quote from the legislation’s sponsor, Anita Prizio, an O’Hara Democrat:
“We have to be bold, and we have to be actionable,” she said.
Which certainly gives the impression that these ecocrats are ready to hold the cudgel of court action high above the heads of anyone who has the temerity to challenge prescriptions for maladies that largely are being proffered by psychosomatic “progressives,” does it not?
The Public Source news website offers a rather detailed story about “postindustrial sites” having been turned “into opportunities for local employment and environmental restoration.”
“More than 4,000 regional job openings are expected in the remediation field by 2027, a number driven by Allegheny County’s high density of brownfield sites,” reporter Quinn Glabicki writes.
Further notes Glabicki:
“In 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which allocated an unprecedented $1.5 billion to brownfield-related programs nationwide. It was a significant boon to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s brownfield grant funding. Two local recipients — social services agency Auberle and Landforce, which focuses on land stewardship and workforce development — each received $500,000 in 2022 to train a new generation of professionals who will work to cleanse the region’s industrial messes.”
But the reality is that this is another form of corporate wealthfare, forcing taxpayers to pay for something that those who left the messes should have paid for.
Simply put, they should have been held accountable then and now, through any successor entities. Period.
Meanwhile, back at the bidding wars for Pittsburgh’s erstwhile steel giant U.S. Steel, the company has told shareholders that it is weighing offers from “multiple, credible bidders.”
And those offers range from a complete takeover to offers for parts of U.S. Steel.
But as The Wall Street Journal notes, the company that could not be saved by government “industrial policy” now is beholden to organized labor and politicians in any sale.
That is, not only does the United Steelworkers Union essentially hold the contractual right to scuttle any deal it does not like, the government could scuttle a sale invoking anti-trust concerns.
The irony is not lost on Journal editorial writers:
“Unions and politicians are trying to steer the company’s sale after tariffs fail to make it more competitive,” goes the secondary headline on an opinion piece headlined “The political battle for U.S. Steel”:
“The irony is that U.S. Steel reached the point of selling despite years of help from industrial policy. President Trump slapped a 25 percent tariff on steel imports in 2018 to aid domestic producers. That padded U.S. Steel’s profits but it hasn’t revived the company’s competitiveness.
“U.S. Steel is seeking private capital after government failed, and its shareholders deserve a competitive bidding process. But today’s nexus of political and union power may not let that happen. This is how it goes when politicians seek to run the U.S. economy.”
As we are wont to say in times such as these: “You might live a nanosecond longer by government-commanded industrial policy but you still die just the same.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
