Demand DRBC Action Now and Restore Justice on the Delaware!

Poetry, like memes, has the power to tell a story with flare by appealing to our consciences and emotions. It’s not easy to do poetry, though. Coming up with just the right words and fitting them into the metered structure of a poem requires a special talent. Artificial intelligence, though, is the answer for someone like me who cannot carry a tune, write a poem, or produce any art worth looking at it.

Although I am a big fan of the Grok AI feature on X and use it every day, I hadn’t thought about applying it to the writing of a poem until I read a post on CFact this morning about a poem it asked Grok to prepare. This immediately jumped out to me as a manner of properly explaining the dark injustice of the Delaware River Basin Commission (and the State of New York) in denying citizens the right to drill for natural gas, even though the same governing majority, acting as the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, allows drilling there with no pretense as to it creating water quality issues.

I asked Grok for a poem expressing how the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) stole the rights of citizens to drill for natural gas, which action was clearly taken to please Philadelphia, New York City, and Hudson Valley elites with no regard for the impacts on the lives of upper basin farmers, landowners, and businesses owners and employees. This is what I got back:

I’d say that’s pretty darned good. The Haas family’s William Penn Foundation funded both the Delaware Riverkeeper a/k/a Povertykeeper and the DRBC at the same time even though the latter was being sued by the former. The Foundation, a private one supposedly not permitted by IRS rules to engage in any politics whatsoever, manipulated and effectively controlled the debate over gas drilling as the Rockefellers and the Park Foundation also poured money into the campaign of deceit against natural gas development.

Three families of elitist trust funders pressured the DRBC to enact rules unlike any applied to any other industry. They simply said no to it, whereas in every other case they set standards that had to be met by any industry. It was blatant in-your-face politics by the same folks it knew there was no significant impact on stream water quality in the SRBC region the majority also governed. They also knew gas drilling was being permitted there in Exceptional Value watersheds — the highest stream water quality designation — and the standards for those were being met by gas drillers.

It was an out-and-out betrayal, in other words, by and for the sole benefit of elites. Now, it’s time to undo the betrayal. It’s time for restorative justice and everyone in the DRBC region (and Upstate New York) must start demanding it. President Trump has declared an energy emergency and it is readily apparent in the Northeast where governors and the DRBC have fought pipelines, made fracking illegal, and wasted billions on insane off-shore wind projects. They intimidated multiple pipeline developers who could have brought huge amounts Marcellus gas into New Jersey, New York, and England.

Fortunately for the betrayed, their whole scheme is falling apart, and they are slowly coming to realize everything else they need to care about (e.g., data centers, energy reliability, electric bills) is going to fall apart, too, unless they bring in more natural gas and quickly, while also developing more nuclear, which takes considerable time and money. You can feel it in the quiet actions and remarks of Kathy Hochul and also the relatively new Executive Director of the DRBC, Kristin Bowman Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh, like her predecessor, Steve Tambini, is an engineer, which raises hopes of reason taking a seat at the table, but he was a huge disappointment, preferring to follow rather than lead. She was his Deputy Director for five years, which is a big red flag, of course. A recent interview of her on Radio Catskill, though, suggests she may be better at reading the signals than him. She comes across as pensive, in fact. Too much of the interview is wasted on climate resilience, which the DRBC shouldn’t even be involved with, but the term itself suggests she is more focused on adaptation than crusades.

She is also asked about fracking, and her answer is mostly about her appreciation of the fact the DRBC simply did something, rather than any defense of the action itself. She also measures her words as to the future, cautioning that she has to wait on whatever actions Trump takes. She also surely knows what Trump has said about restarting the Constitution Pipeline and the implications of that. Trump is saying what everyone knows but is afraid to say: the Northeast needs more gas.

That’s why now is the time to push harder than ever before — demanding, not asking — that things change and change now.

#DRBC #SRBC #ConstitutionPipeline #Energy #Trump #Wind #Climate