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EXCLUSIVE: The left-wing “climate cult,” as one lawmaker put it, will have fewer avenues to throw roadblocks in front of domestic energy production and President Donald Trump’s efforts to obtain “American energy dominance” if a landmark effort between members of both the House and Senate is successful.
“I am an energy guy from an energy-rich state,” West Virginia Sen. Jim Justice told Fox News Digital on Thursday before introducing a bill to prevent state governments less supportive than Charleston from getting in the way of the development, transmission and distribution of reliable energy sources.
His House counterpart in the effort, Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-N.Y., hails from such a place.
The congressman said that, in contrast to lawmakers in Justice’s state, New York Democrats have “waged an extremist crusade” against developing a crucial multi-state natural gas deposit ironically named for a town in the Empire State.
The “Energy Choice Act” has drawn 37 co-sponsors across the House and Senate and gained backing from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who’s been touring Alaska this week to promote similar energy development goals.
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The bill would prohibit state and local governments from placing restrictions on the connection, re-connection, modification, installation, transportation, distribution, or expansion of a source of energy that is sold in interstate commerce and/or is to be delivered to an end-user.
Justice, who, as governor, signed multiple bills boosting his state’s own renowned coal industry, including slashing severance taxes, said the U.S. energy crisis is “too great” to allow the “luxury of picking the winners and losers.”
“Americans ought to have the right to choose what is best for their energy needs.”
Tens of thousands of square miles of the massive Marcellus Shale formation runs through New York, but development has been under a state-sanctioned ban for more than a decade.
Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, meanwhile, continue to develop their major caches of Marcellus shale gas, while the piece of the formation in the Maryland Panhandle also remains off-limits.
Those bans, said Langworthy, have sent home energy costs “through the roof” in places like New York, which he said is “teetering on the edge of an energy crisis—all to satisfy the radical fantasies of the far-left climate cult.”
“New York has been ground-zero for the Green New Deal, where common sense goes to die and working families get stuck with the bill,” said the lawmaker, a former NYSGOP chairman.
FLASHBACK: JUSTICE IN THE SENATE – WV GOVERNOR VERY INTERESTED IN CHALLENGING JOE MANCHIN
That disparity led him to draft the House version of the bill, hoping, in his words, to “restore sanity” to U.S. energy policy and give Americans the choice of affordable and reliable power.
They shouldn’t be “forced into rolling blackouts to please eco-activists who don’t live in the real world,” he quipped.
“I thank Senator Justice for introducing this bill in the Senate and urge its swift action.”
Meanwhile, Justice’s state remains the second-largest coal producer in the nation, and his Senate counterpart, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito also signed onto the bill.
“America needs more energy, and our state and local governments shouldn’t discriminate against baseload energy generation that increases security, affordability, and creates good paying jobs across the country, simply because it doesn’t align with their political agendas,” she told Fox News Digital.
Alabama’s Black Warrior Basin is another area of the country home to a vast coal power potential developed over several decades.
Gov. Kay Ivey in 2025 signed the Powering Growth Act seeking to streamline the permitting process in the Yellowhammer State, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville – who hopes to succeed the term-limited governor – is another top sponsor of the bill.
“Energy security is national security,” Tuberville has said.
“For four years, Joe Biden and woke Democrats took a sledgehammer to American energy production. We need to rein-in blue states who caved to the climate cult and imposed ridiculous regulations that are deeply unpopular with hardworking Americans,” he said.
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