Why in the world would Pennsylvania wish to give away money to the natural gas and petrochemical industry? Sadly, that’s exactly what happened on Tuesday, July 14, 2020 as the House concurred with the Senate-amended HB 732 that gives away $26,666,668 per year in tax breaks for new petrochemical plants in Pennsylvania that use locally fracked natural gas.

Why are we throwing our tax dollars away on a dirty, polluting industry that harms our children instead of investing in a brighter, cleaner, and healthy future for all of us? Pennsylvanians want a strong, healthy vision for our future – not a vision that keeps us living in the past. This vote doesn’t reflect our citizens beliefs, it simply ignores them. In the past few weeks, almost 4,000 Pennsylvania pro-life Christians signed onto a national petition declaring:

Our God transforms bad into good. We must do the same for our country. So, during this coronavirus crisis, I join with thousands of other pro-life Christians calling on Congress to come together around bipartisan solutions for a cleaner, brighter, and healthier future. We ask that once it is safe to resume normal economic activity, America put people back to work in ways that support healthy lives and more prosperous livelihoods by:

• Making our transportation, energy, manufacturing, and building industries more efficient and less harmful to our health. 
• Helping our farmers practice good stewardship that locks carbon away in the ground while enriching the soil and providing financial support to the men and women who put food on America's table.
• Putting millions of Americans to work to build this economy of the future.

It’s just not my community calling for a safe, clean future. In a recent Pennsylvania poll, when asked to prioritize which industries should get assistance from the government in the energy sector, 72% of voters picked the clean energy industry while only 28% chose the fossil fuel industry. 

HB 732 “throws good money after bad,” as my mother used to say. The good jobs of today and tomorrow are not in fossil fuels. If Pennsylvania keeps investing in the past instead of the future, there won’t be any family-sustaining employment for Pennsylvanians.

Governor Wolf, both parties in the General Assembly, labor unions, manufacturing industries, and all of us need to come together and invest in a clean, healthy vision for Pennsylvania. Otherwise, the words of the Bible will surely be prophetic for our Commonwealth.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Proverbs 29:18a (KJV)