NaturalGasNOW

Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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NaturalGasNOW has an agenda. We’re not afraid to say so. We advocate for natural gas development; it’s good for our economy, our environment and our nation!

As we launch into a new year here at NaturalGasNOW I ask for financial and other support to continue our advocacy for natural gas development. That it is good for our economy is beyond challenge. Just ask Thomas Henry, Wyoming County, Pennsylvania Commissioner or, better yet, visit Tunkhannock to see for yourself.

That it is good for our environment is evidenced by huge amounts of data documenting the plummeting of emissions after conversion to natural gas.

That it is good for our nation is obvious from the fact we finally, against all odds and thanks to natural gas, achieved energy independence now being systematically and intentionally sacrificed by the “Big Guy” in the Biden Crime Family.

We at NaturalGasNOW, as you can see, are unafraid of being honest, of spelling out the facts and advocating for what we know to be true; that natural gas development is good for all of us. We are not blind to the possibility of man’s affect on the climate and proudly proclaim the benefits gas offers in that regard.

We have no fear, though, to call out climate alarmism as a game intended to deliver power to wannabe totalitarians and riches to corporatists looking to raid public treasuries by selling green eggs and scam to helplessly uniformed ratepayers and taxpayers. That’s why we appeal for financial and other support to continue our effort.

Here is a video I put together some 1,300 posts ago, explaining NaturalGasNOW and why we need your help:

For those of you who forgivably prefer to read what I said rather than listen to me, here is the transcript:

Good morning. I’m Tom Shepstone. Many of you probably, know me, but some of you don’t. You just know of NaturalGasNOW, and I’d like to talk to you a little bit about it and express, my desire for your help with NaturalGasNOW, because I think what we’re doing is very important.

I think we have an opportunity to influence a lot of people and we are doing that on a day to day basis. First of all, a little bit about who I am.

I’m here in my office in Honesdale Pennsylvania. I’m, a long time native of Wayne County, Pennsylvania, which is the most Northeastern corner of the state. And, I grew up on a farm in the Upper Delaware region, which is Northern Wayne county. I love that farming background and many years ago, about a decade ago now, we were approached about leasing our land.

I still have land there myself and we were approached about leasing it for natural gas drilling. I knew nothing about at it at that point and got involved. And, to make a long story short I ended up advocating for natural gas development. It was a long, complicated series of events, but I ended up being an advocate and decided to work for another group called Energy In Depth for several years, doing some consulting, work with them.

I then moved on doing this myself with NaturalGasNOW. I was motivated by what are really the factors that go into the slogan on our site, which says for our nation, our economy and our environment.” And, I firmly believe that we need natural gas for energy security. We are now energy independent for all practical purposes, as we’re seeing with the world events that no longer affect us anywhere near as much. That’s thanks to fracking, thanks to natural gas.

It’s also extremely beneficial to our rural economies, as we see with places such as Susquehanna County and Bradford County, it’s revitalizing those areas, which I think is extraordinarily important. And, it’s a very important thing for our environment, because there’s nothing you can do with so little impact on the land; so little land disturbance with so much economic return, and that allows us to keep land in open space and preserve rural character, which I happen to think is also relatively important.

Now, about NaturalGasNow, our blog. It’s NaturalGasNow.org, of course, as you know, or you wouldn’t be here watching this, We’ve been in, business, so to speak for six [now eight] years. We have published roughly 4,000 [now 5,300] posts at this point. And, we’ve had, incredibly enough over a million and a half [now over 2.1 million] page views.

So, that’s how much we get paid attention to. We’re not a big blog, but we have a lot of activity. And, we’re reaching people who are in the industry who are in politics and who are very involved from a landowner perspective. We’re touching the minds and hearts of people who matter in this whole debate. And, our focus tends to be on New York, Pennsylvania, the Northeast generally, including Maryland, Ohio, and places like that, but primarily Pennsylvania, New York and the industry as a whole

We look at the positive trends, and we look at them worldwide for that matter. We’ve done stories on Australia, we’ve done stories on the U.K. and so on. We also focus on some particular perspectives. You know, there are other people who do this sort of thing that I’m doing and we all have our own little particular perspective.

One of the things that I’m very intrigued about and I’ve written about many times, and in depth, is the influence of wealthy nonprofit foundations, mostly private foundations, which means they’re not supposed to be doing any lobbying whatsoever.

And in fact, they’re doing tremendous amounts of lobbying against natural gas and doing it because the, the people who donated the money for these foundations have investments in renewables, or they want to acquire land on the cheap for “parkification” purposes, to have a wilderness for themselves.

There’s lots of reasons they do it. They’re all special interests. They’re not good organizations, that they’re designed to do something for the public good so much as they are to enhance special interests.

The other thing we focus on is renewables versus gas. I’ve actually worked on renewable projects. I’ve worked on wind power projects and reviewed wind power projects. I’ve reviewed and helped approve, on behalf of municipalities, various solar projects. So, I know something about these industries, and the fact is, even though some of these projects are just fine from a physical perspective, they are economic wastelands. They just do not make any sense whatsoever. And, we focus on that.

These are, those ridiculous subsidies. None of this stuff would be happening, but for major subsidies and major incentives and preferential regulations and that sort of thing. So, we expose all that.

We also look at legal issues and pipeline issues and all those kinds of things. On the legal side, we are very adept at explaining, in lay terms, what lawsuits are about, what the court decisions are about and those kinds of things.

What is our job? You might say—well, some people would say—it’s education. I suppose that would be the standard answer for this kind of thing. We’re trying to educate people, or we’re trying to convince people to take a particular position; that we’re trying to bring people to our side.

I wouldn’t answer any of those things. I would say our job here is to motivate our supporters. We, we know who you are, you know the issues. You know them reasonably well. And, you’re ready to go to bat because you’ve made up your mind and we’re simply trying to show you what needs to be done and to motivate you to take action. That’s what NaturalGasNow is all about. And, quite frankly, we like to expose the enemy and there are enemies out there.

It’s foolish to think that there aren’t. There are people with very selfish, private special interests. They are very opposed to natural gas development and we are fighting back

The question, then, becomes how can you help? And that’s the reason for this video. Well, there are a few things. One is that you can write a guest post for us. We really need guest posts. We get our best readership from guest posts, particularly from just ordinary people providing ordinary opinions and backing them up with their own personal experiences and the facts that they’ve leaned. So, please, please think about writing a guest post for us. We can clean it up if you’re not a particularly good writer, but we need your opinions and your passion.

Also,, we would like you to comment on our site and to give us feedback that way. We have a number of, anti-gas people who regularly comment on our site and we need people to respond to them. We find that’s very invigorating for everybody involved and very enjoyable. So we would like your comments.

And, we’d like your news tips. You’d be surprised how many tips we get from people who want to let us know something that’s going on. And, frankly, we don’t often know that it’s going on out there. We may not know. So, when you give us a tip, it matters, it helps a lot. So please feel free to do that. [Note this is why we now a “NaturalGasNow Best Picks of the Week” feature post every Saturday.]

And finally, of course, we need your financial help. I get some support from the industry for this blog. That’s indicated on our website. But, it’s really a modest amount, a very modest amount, and covers perhaps a third of the cost of what we do.

I’m willing to donate a lot of my time and have for many years now. We get support from landowners, a large number of landowners, but we need more of you. We’d like you to sign up by going to our “Support What We Do” tab [below] and just sign up for 99 cents a month to support what we do. It’s very simple. You can pay with PayPal, you don’t even need a PayPal account. It’s so easy.

Of course we accept larger donations and, support. So if you’re of mind to do that, and you think what we do is valuable, please think about helping us out, so we can continue to do what we do.

And, I thank you for paying attention to this video. Hopefully, we’ll have more videos in the future, but we need to get more support if we’re going to do that. So, give it a thought. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time.

A special thank you to all of you who have been supporting us in one or another! You folks are the reason we do this!