State Rep. Joe Hamm, R-Hepburn Township, believes Pennsylvania is making times tougher on the natural gas and coal industries.

“We’re seeing an attack on natural gas,” Hamm said. “We get a lot of fight when we try to put pipelines in the ground.”

He noted Pennsylvania is second in the nation, behind Texas, for natural gas production and further noted that if Pennsylvania was an independent nation it would be fifth in the world for natural gas production.

He said domestic production of natural gas can help isolate Russia. Hamm noted New England still gets significant amounts of natural gas from Russian exports and that a domestic pipeline for gas from Pennsylvania to New England would reduce revenue to the adversarial country.

He acknowledged the state government of New York remains hostile to pipeline construction, but added that obstacles to construction of pipelines to North Carolina and to liquified natural gas development in Philadelphia are entirely within our state’s political climate.

“We’ve got to get smarter” about natural gas production and distribution, Hamm said. “We would see an economic boom like we’ve never seen.”

“You will never hear me say we don’t need solar, we don’t need wind — we do,” he said.

But Hamm has concerns that solar and wind are too intermittent for Pennsylvania to completely depend upon.

“I’m a big proponent for a diverse portfolio of energy,” he said.

Hamm cautioned the public that in December of 2022, Pennsylvania came close to blackouts.

“A lot of that has to do with shutting down coal plants,” he said, under the conditions of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. “You’re losing reliable energy.”

Hamm finds the animosity toward gas and coal particularly vexing because Pennsylvania has steadily reduced its carbon footprint.

“There’s no reason we should be trying to kill those two industries,” he said.