One position Kamala Harris has taken in recent years that is disappointing is her stance on fracking. When she ran in 2019, she was opposed to it. But after joining the Biden campaign and then the administration, she lined up with their support.
This has to do with the swing state of Pennsylvania, where fracking is geologically possible and the technology was sold to landowners as an economic boon back in the early 2000s.
I come from the part of New York just north of Pennsylvania, and the same sales job happened there. The residents are just as economically stressed as the ones in Pennsylvania. When I would visit my parents, I saw lawn signs on both sides of the issue, and heard about it from old schoolmates. There were people who wanted to be able to sell the drilling rights under their land, and people who opposed it because they could see the potential health risks and the noise and destruction it would bring.
We all know now what happened in North Dakota, which is a more extreme case (man camps, oil pipelines, missing and assaulted women). Because of public pressure and the different political climate in New York, activists managed to get the legislature and then-Governor Andrew Cuomo to pass a fracking ban in that state. But it went ahead in purple Pennsylvania.
According to Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch (gift link), polling shows there is not strong support for fracking in Pennsylvania, though of course oil companies and some prominent labor unions support it. Strong support for it iis below 50%, with 25% wanting to end it immediately and more than 30% wanting to phase it out over time.
How has fracking turned out for the areas where it is geologically possible? According to Bunch, at most two counties in Pennsylvania have seen economic growth since it was allowed. At least one of them, he points out, is a Pittsburgh exurb, where some of the growth can be attributed to jobs related to its location near Pittsburgh, not to fracking.
Dimock County, on the other hand, has not seen benefits. It's in the north central part of the state, not far south of the New York area where I grew up, which shares the same geological features. (That's the area that's part of the north-most section of Appalachia, as I wrote earlier.)
This is the place where a resident was able to light his tap water on fire. Residents there were able to enact a two-year moratorium on drilling, but Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro overturned it in 2023, in exchange for the company paying a fine and some promises that won't be enacted until 2027.
“We sit here pretty unhappy,” Victoria Switzer, a Dimock resident and anti-fracking activist, told me. She said lateral drilling for gas is passing under her nearly seven-acre property in what she’d thought would be a rural paradise, and that “I swear you can feel it and you can hear it as it whines, a horrible noise.” Switzer and other fracking opponents in their politically divided community say they feel “betrayed” by Shapiro’s deal that allowed drilling to resume.
ORVI’s O’Leary said that people who actually live in Pennsylvania’s southwest corner or north-central regions “know fracking imposes significant burdens — health burdens, quality of life burdens, and you know, if you live in those regions, it is not a source of jobs and income.” The institute’s 2021 study found that 22 Appalachian counties with significant fracking saw only 1.7% job growth when the national average was 10%. People often moved away from communities like Dimock, which lost nearly 18% of its population in the 2010s.
And that doesn't mention the state-funded study that found children who live near fracking "faced a higher risk of developing lymphoma, a form of cancer, and also showed links to low birth-weight babies and dramatically higher rates of asthma."
I hope Harris reconsiders her stance on this... though all of us need to remember that the president's power on fracking only applies on federal land, so it doesn't mean she could make changes in these cases in Pennsylvania.
But Democrats — as the only party who are close to sane on climate change — still need to walk the walk on the Green New Deal as well as talk it, including fracking*.
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* And ethanol, too, Minnesota Senators. Time to stop letting the ethanol lobby control on that topic. It's no longer a secret that corn ethanol is clearly a net negative from a climate perspective, when all of its production effects are included, like shipping the corn in, heat needed in the process, and fertilizer runoff from growing the corn. And now ethanol producers want to build a destructive pipeline across five states to send the carbon dioxide the process creates to bury it in North Dakota.
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