9/6/2024: This story is updated with a longer interview and transcript.
It won’t just be the presidential election up for grabs in Pennsylvania this November. Voters will have the power to give one party control of the state legislature. Republicans now control the Pennsylvania Senate, and Democrats control the House.
So, how are legislators handling the environment? The Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania recently updated its environmental scorecard for all 253 members of the General Assembly. It’s keeping a close eye on who wins this November to see what laws will be passed in the next two years.
Molly Parzen, the group’s executive director, told The Allegheny Front’s Reid Frazier that the legislature’s current split control has created a new paradigm in Harrisburg.
“This has created a really new dynamic in Harrisburg and was the most evident in two things,” Parzen said. “First, the number of pro-environment bills that were passed by the state House, but were unfortunately never given consideration in the state Senate. And the number of bills that the House majority was able to stop in their tracks: extremist anti-environmental bills that we now have a critical firewall that was able to hold the line against.”
LISTEN to the conversation
Reid Frazier: The scorecard rates legislators on how they voted on what your group considers pro- or anti-environmental legislation. What bill passed this year that your group considers pro-environment legislation?
Molly Parzen: One of the most exciting pro-environment bills that has actually passed both chambers in a bipartisan manner, which is pretty rare these days, is a bill called Solar for Schools.
This is phenomenal legislation that we’ve been working really hard on the last year. What this bill does is it draws down on federal dollars from the Biden-Harris administration that are available to issue grants to school districts to cover up to 90% of the cost of installing solar panels.
It’s a win for cash-strapped school districts who need to save on their energy bills. And it’s a win for the taxpayers who will be paying less for the massive energy bills some of these large school districts are incurring.
Reid Frazier: Can you give me an example of an anti-environment bill that you’ve seen in the statehouse this year?
Molly Parzen: A particularly insidious bill that we deemed anti-environmental this year was Senate Bill 819. This bill would create felony penalties for trespassing on infrastructure facilities, including gas pipelines and gas compressor stations. We deem that it could count [the] protesting outside of a facility or hanging a pro-environment sign on the fence outside of a fracked gas facility. And the intent of this bill is really clear to us, and it’s to limit the public’s right to free speech and assembly when it comes to polluting infrastructure.
Reid Frazier: This election could go either way. What are some of the possibilities that we could see out of this election? In other words, what are the stakes?
Parzen: The stakes really scare me. We have such a thin firewall against some really anti-environmental legislation. We saw this last session when the Republican majority in both chambers attempted to pass constitutional amendment legislation. This legislation would enable them to legislate by constitutional amendment and completely bypass Governor Shapiro’s veto pen.
We saw a number of bills that proposed sending the vote to the public, to the people, which doesn’t sound like a terrible idea. But it was a clear workaround to prevent Governor Shapiro from vetoing some really extreme legislation, and not just on environmental issues, but on voting rights and on reproductive health. We are very worried about some of those constitutional amendments coming back to life if we were to lose our one-vote bulwark against that in the statehouse.
On a rosier note, I think we have an enormous opportunity if we were to solidify pro-environment control of the state House and seize pro-environment control of the state Senate. We have seen what is possible with the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. We’ve seen what is possible in Michigan with Gov. Whitmer and what they were able to pass in terms of transformational clean energy legislation.
Pennsylvania remains the fourth biggest greenhouse gas-emitting state. We produce a lot of pollution. We have an opportunity to flip that script, to make Pennsylvania a leader in the clean energy economy, the economy of our future, to move away from our past of extractive industry after extractive industry.
Reid Frazier: Should Democrats gain control of both houses or are able to get a more pro-environment legislature, what types of legislation would your group and its allies be pushing for?
Molly Parzen: One in particular, which I’ll mention, is called PRESS, the Pennsylvania Reliable Energy Sustainability Standard. This is something that we’re going to be working on to update our requirements statewide for the use of alternative energy sources to modernize Pennsylvania’s energy portfolio.
We are really lagging behind a lot of states in many ways. And so there’s a lot of legislation that we need in order to launch us into that clean energy economy. One of those things is this piece of legislation, PRESS, which will update the requirements for how much clean energy the state is generating and using. Our requirements are woefully low right now, and this would bring us into kind of the modern era and alongside other states.
Another bill that I’ll point to, something that was considered in this scorecard and did pass the state House, is the community solar bill we need in order to move into the clean energy future. We just need to broaden access (to solar). Right now, our laws and our systems in Pennsylvania are not built up to empower Pennsylvania residents to access clean energy. And HB 1842 would expand Pennsylvania’s clean energy portfolio by allowing customers in a certain geographic area to receive their energy from an off-site solar array, and so this would be particularly beneficial to low-income homeowners and renters who might not otherwise be able to put a big, expensive solar panel on the top of their house.
Molly Parzen is executive director of the Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania.
