GOOD: In Pennsylvania, natural gas industry prepares for battle.
After years of ideologues and elites using the natural gas industry as a punching bag for politics and climate change activism, Nick DeIuliis, the CEO of CNX Resources, one of the largest natural gas producers in Western Pennsylvania, has had enough.
In remarks at a Rotary Club speech at the storied William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh last week, the blue-collar man who earned degrees in engineering and law, and his job at the top, decided to speak out to defend an industry that has become a regional economic game-changer.
“Natural gas and manufacturing have been demonized and ridiculed on a consistent and regular basis by a cabal of misguided, insulated elites,” DeIuliis stated in his speech in front of 80 of the region’s top business and professional leaders.
The usually reserved DeIuliis said in an interview with the Washington Examiner after the event that he had decided to speak out because he was tired of the natural gas and manufacturing industries being held to a completely different standard than other industries, tired of being used a political wedge issue, and tired of the people working with him being portrayed as the enemy of the well-being of our climate.
It is a stand in this lead-up to the presidential contest in the fall that a variety of local Democrats and Republicans will consider a blueprint for how to stand up to elites.
In the speech, the well-respected business leader took umbrage with how the mayor of Pittsburgh, William Peduto, has used the industry as a personal weapon. He was referring to Peduto’s speech last fall to environmental groups, in which he advocated a ban on further petrochemical development in the region.
DeIuliis also took aim at some of the public pension managers and foundations that are divesting their fossil fuel investments, as well as tech giants who, on the one hand, say they are doing this to save the climate even as they help China — far and away the world’s largest carbon polluter — silence its pro-democracy youth.
Punch back twice as hard.