Intraparty foul

Vouchers aren’t the only area where Shapiro has split from many in his party and its traditional allies. These intraparty disputes have been some of the trickiest for Shapiro, who is seen as a consensus-builder who is more motivated by accomplishment than ideology.

Shapiro has not endorsed the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an interstate program to reduce carbon emissions, that was championed by Wolf and embraced by many Democrats. His administration is appealing a court decision that blocked the state’s participation but only to protect executive power.

The governor, however, is fully on board with hydrogen hubs, which refer to the infrastructure needed to produce, store and transport the fuel and any byproducts. His administration in October said it helped to bring $1.6 billion in federal money to build two hubs partly in the commonwealth.

While environmental advocates have been cautiously optimistic about using hydrogen in hard-to-decarbonize industries, a lack of available detail on the Pennsylvania hubs has “disappointed” people like Pete Budden, who leads state and regional hydrogen policy work at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Budden said missing details about safety measures and exactly how the hubs will produce hydrogen makes it hard to advocate around the projects and propose oversight legislation.

But Shapiro has rebuffed those concerns, saying at one news conference that people “who are attacking this project, they’re standing in the way of real progress.”

That position has won Shapiro fierce support among many labor leaders, including Jim Snell, business manager at Philadelphia’s Steamfitters Local 420. At that same news conference, Snell recounted a morning in summer 2022 when then-candidate Shapiro called him to discuss getting Pennsylvania involved in hydrogen production.

“I thought, this guy’s the real deal, he really means it,” said Snell, adding that the commonwealth would never have gotten involved in two hubs “if it wasn’t for Governor Shapiro behind the scenes, doing what he needs to do.”

David Masur, who heads the group PennEnvironment and has known Shapiro for decades, said the governor’s mixed bag of positions on environmental issues is both characteristic of Shapiro and the compromises inherent in a politically divided, energy-producing state.

Masur believes that Shapiro is sincere in saying he wants to make Pennsylvania greener, but also that he feels he must be pragmatic to get anything done.

“The politics of Pennsylvania can be really tough,” Masur said.