At a budget hearing this week before the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Daryl Metcalfe ripped into Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Patrick McDonnell for evading questions about DEP’s implementation of Governor Tom Wolf’s order that Pennsylvania participate in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
Metcalfe, who chairs the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, compared McDonnell’s evasiveness to what would happen if he responded to a constituent’s questions the way McDonnell had replied to him.
Metcalfe called out McDonnell for his “extremely insulting pattern of evasive non-answers and blatant refusal to provide any substantive information on the rogue governor’s executive order to begin illegally entering Pennsylvania into the (RGGI).” Referencing Representative Jim Struzzi’s earlier comments about the number of jobs the state would lose, Metcalfe said McDonnell’s testimony “amounted to more Chicken Little, partisan-pandering for the governor’s job-killing, false-science-driven climate proposals.”
Representative Struzzi and Senator Joe Pittman have introduced bills barring the state from joining RGGI without legislative approval.