As Inside Climate News reports it, the Shapiro administration has had secret meetings with “handpicked” representatives of “Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industries, labor unions and environmental organizations” to discuss the state’s prospective membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
More commonly referred to as RGGI, the program typically is described as “a multi-state market mechanism for addressing climate change.”
But it’s nothing more than the oxymoron of a government-created “market” – a scheme to tax our way to a nebulous environmental goal that would have negligible environmental benefits.
It is, at its base, the latest in a long line of government attempts to command the economy and to redistribute wealth. And that, at its base, is a disaster-in-the making (as such past nefarious exercises typically show) and immoral.
But that’s not the only issue here. In soliciting viewpoints from various “stakeholders” in the RGGI debate, the Shapiro administration has chosen a cloak instead of transparency.
It took Inside Climate News a Right to Know request to learn who has been involved in these secret meetings. And then only partially.
“Among those invited to participate were officials from power and energy companies including Shell, Constellation Energy, CNX Resources and Olympus Power; as well as from Penn Environment, Steamfitters Local Union 420, and Boilermakers Local 154,” the website reported. “The full list was redacted; it is unknown how many were invited.”
Adds Inside Climate News:
“The 157 pages of documents show the energy expended by the Shapiro administration in setting up the group early this year and in keeping the details of its deliberations from becoming public.”
And that can in no way be an acceptable public policy.
Of course, the Shapiro administration defends what we’ll derisively label as “Operation Opaqueness.”
In the spring, a deputy secretary for policy and planning said the governor “wants the work group to be independent and to have a real opportunity to reach a middle ground between the competing interests that are represented.”
But the public has the ultimate interest in knowing what’s transpiring – who’s saying what. And how they’re saying it. And now.
Said the governor’s press secretary to Inside Climate News, in the kind of convoluted statement that does not address the secrecy issue:
“Gov. Shapiro is focused on developing a comprehensive climate and energy policy that protects and creates energy jobs, takes real action to address climate change, protects consumers and ensures Pennsylvania has reliable, affordable, and clean power for the long term.”
But “developing a comprehensive climate and energy policy” in secrecy – such a massive thing — only invites credible speculation that secret deals are being cut, that backs are being scratched and that palms are being greased, either metaphorically or in reality.
Secrecy in developing any public policy is a nonstarter. That it isn’t in the ongoing debates over RGGI is putrid. These debates must occur in public, with full sunlight.
It’s past time to pull the plug on “Operation Opaqueness” and plug in the bright spotlight of the only way public policy should be made – in public.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org)
