Unfrackingbelievable

Democrats backing away from a fracking ban is a smart move in Pennsylvania. Jumping on Trump’s “Drill Baby Drill” bandwagon is not.

Liberal economists and policy wonks have been staging a lovefest for fracking over the past week.  Like fracking fluid gushing into an injection well, articles have flooded my Substack feed calling for Kamala Harris to aggressively promote expanding oil and gas production as part of her campaign message.  It began with Noah Smith’s Harris Needs to be Pennsylvania Fracking's Biggest Champion followed quickly by Matt Yglesias’ Harris is Right on the Merits About Fracking and Ruy Teixeira’s Energy Abundance, Not Climate Action, Is the Road Forward for Harris.

The immediate motivation behind these pieces is no mystery.  To the growing annoyance of the rest of the country, winning Pennsylvania has become a singular obsession of both the Harris and Trump campaigns, who know all too well that their chances of an Electoral College victory plummet without having the Keystone State in their column.  With Pennsylvania’s economy becoming increasingly reliant on the oil and gas industry, a fracking ban would doom the Harris campaign and hand the state to Trump, who maintains an unhinged “Drill Baby Drill” stance on fossil fuel extraction.

In a questionable leap of logic, writers like Smith, Yglesias, and Teixeira believe that if backing away from the fracking ban will win Harris some Pennsylvania votes, aggressively promoting fracking will win her even more.  Noah Smith praised Harris's public disavowal of her previous calls for a fracking ban while maintaining “Harris needs to go much further. Instead of simply promising not to ban fracking, she should promise to expand it.” The temptation to fall for this “if a little is good, more is better” fallacy undoubtedly arises from these writers' preexisting impulses to woo pro-business conservatives into the Democratic Party’s fold while simultaneously sticking it to foes on the Socialist Left by driving a few more nails into the coffin of the Green New Deal.  But what is shockingly absent from all three of these pieces is even the slightest regard for the firsthand experiences and nuanced opinions of the Pennsylvanians who actually live in fracking country, the people who these commentators simply assume will be more likely to vote for Kamala if she rebrands herself as a hardcore fracking fan.  Smith, Yglesias, and Teixeira seem completely oblivious to the possibility that the Pennsylvania voters might have just as much disdain for out-of-touch coastal elites pushing for rapid fracking expansion as they have for out-of-touch coastal elites pushing for an outright fracking ban.

As a local elected official on the suburban-rural borderlands outside Pittsburgh, I must wrestle with the fracking debate from a much more personal and immediate perspective than these detached economic policy experts.  When a fracking project is proposed, I have to hear the public comment of my constituents.  I hear the fearful mom whose special needs child suffers from respiratory complications.  I hear from the young couple whose best hope to own a home relies on employment with a gas exploration company or the aging couple whose retirement plans depend on the royalties from cashing in on mineral rights beneath their property.  I hear the resident who has just finished chemotherapy asking me why the State of Pennsylvania makes it so difficult and legally risky for local municipalities to create zoning laws that keep fracking well pads safe distances from residential areas.   For better or for worse, fracking is a part of our daily life in Pennsylvania.  Talk of banning it would certainly put Kamala Harris at a serious disadvantage.  But parroting Trump’s reckless push for expanded fracking could just as easily backfire for the Harris Campaign and the Democratic Party in general.

The articles equating greater fracking promotion with more Pennsylvania votes deeply misjudge our residents’ enthusiasm for the industry.  Pennsylvanians are not unlike other Americans.  They want good-paying jobs and opportunities for their children to stay close to home after graduation.  They want to fill up their car or heat their home without worrying about paying the rent or affording groceries.  Their support for fracking is a means to these ends, not a deep-felt devotion to the gas industry. Favorability ratings for fracking have remained around 50/50 in the Pennsylvania electorate.  Pennsylvanians' feelings about fracking are deeply conflicted.  What an increasing number of Pennsylvanians agree on is that (1) Fracking is an important part of Pennsylvania’s economy, and (2) regulators need to crack down on the gas industry to protect residents from the harmful side effects of the fracking process. This is not a paradox or a contradiction, it is a reasoned conclusion by residents who see the gas industry gaining greater power over the state economy while witnessing firsthand the toll fracking can take on their quality of life.  They do not want to suffer the economic dislocation that would inevitably result from a fracking ban.  But they would be just as disturbed by a full-throated promotion of fracking on a federal level supercharging the industry’s potentially destructive impacts on human health, property values, and the natural beauty of the state.

If Pennsylvania voters have complicated and conflicted feelings about fracking, why are pundits like Smith, Teixeira, and Yglesias so sure Kamala Harris would benefit from promoting the industry's rapid expansion?  Noah Smith bases much of his argument on an absurd exaggeration of fracking’s economic benefits.  In the late 2000s, gas companies and their political allies sold the “Shale Revolution” to Pennsylvanians with the promise of job growth, an end to population decline, and renewed prosperity for struggling rural communities.  Over the past 15 years, those promises have proven largely empty. Compared to the rest of the country and even the rest of the broader Northern Appalachian region, Pennsylvania counties with the most fracking activity lagged in job growth and income growth, while outpacing the rest of the state in population loss.  With economic data this dismal how can Smith claim that fracking serves as the lifeblood of the Pennsylvania economy?  First, he makes the suspicious move of taking the 123,000 jobs figure provided by the Marcellus Shale Coalition at face value then claims this number is just the tip of the iceberg of economic activity related to fracking (as if the trade association hadn’t already baked those extrapolations into their own self-serving data).  Smith overlooks independent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing only 12,000 direct gas industry jobs in PA, far less than the number of clean energy jobs in the state.  He also fails to mention that these “good jobs” in the oil and gas industry often are generously subsidized by Pennsylvania taxpayers.  Shell’s ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, a petrochemical plant fueled by fracked natural gas, created 600 permanent jobs from $1.6 billion in tax incentives.  Any serious economist would question whether the state giving away $2.75 million per permanent job created is money well spent.  Thoughtful economic analysis would compare the return on public investment in the Shell cracker plant and the billions Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is funneling into fracking-friendly ventures like carbon capture and hydrogen hubs to the number of jobs that could be created by subsidizing climate solutions like solar installation or regenerative farming, activities that do not inflict negative externalities like air pollution, which threaten Western Pennsylvania's ability to attract investment and job creation in other fields like robotics and Artificial Intelligence, where Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University stands as a worldwide leader.  By promoting only the benefits of fracking job creation and completely ignoring the costs of Pennsylvania doubling down on a toxic industrial economy, Smith’s piece reads more like the sales pitch of a desperate lobbyist than the reasoned analysis of a serious economist.

Ruy Teixeira’s argument for Democrats taking a strong pro-fracking stance is based primarily on polls showing voters’ lack of concern about climate change compared to economic anxieties that lower energy costs could help alleviate.  Teixeira must be ignorant of the fact that Pennsylvania residents have environmental concerns about fracking that have nothing to do at all with climate change.  They are worried that drilling will worsen the air quality near their kids’ soccer fields, contaminate their favorite trout stream, or poison their livestock.  Matt Yglesias echoes Teixeira's climate change myopia in his curious comment that "on any realistic account of how the global economy works, natural gas isn’t even bad for the environment." Of course, there are carbon reduction benefits to shifting from coal to natural gas, but the environmental threats from fracking that most worry Pennsylvanians are local, not global. All politics is local, and the Harris campaign will do itself no favors by extolling fracking's global benefits while turning a blind eye to its local risks.  If Kamala emphasizes fracking's role in weaning Western Europe off Russian oil but fails to recognize local anxiety over pediatric cancer clusters near well pads she will come off as an out-of-touch globalist just like Ruy Teixeira or Matt Yglesias.

So if the average Pennsylvania citizen has conflicting feelings about fracking and the gas industry has a spotty record in delivering economic benefits to the Commonwealth where did Smith, Teixeira, and Yglesias get the idea that Kamala Harris would win more votes if she lavishes praise on fracking expansion?  Probably from Pennsylvania politicians.  While the oil and gas industry has failed in bringing a promised renaissance to rural Pennsylvania, they have delivered in filling the campaign coffers of Pennsylvania politicians, especially the Republican variety.  Pennsylvania politicians have returned this generosity with tax breaks, incentives, and legal protections for the oil and gas industry, most notably the 2012 Act 13 signed by Republican Governor Tom Corbett, which greatly limits the ability of local municipalities to create gas well setbacks greater than 500 feet from residences. Although Republicans are the main beneficiaries of the gas lobby’s largesse, Pennsylvania Democrats have also become increasingly pliant in granting the industry's wishes.  Nearly every prominent Democrat in a statewide position has had a very public conversion to the gospel of oil and gas on their road to Harrisburg or Washington D.C.  John Fetterman went from calling fracking a “stain” on the state during his 2016 Senate run to becoming a vocal supporter of the practice in 2022.  As Attorney General in 2020, Josh Shapiro convened a Grand Jury that studied the impacts of fracking on communities and recommended that setbacks be increased to 2500 feet to protect our citizens’ right to clean air and pure water under the Pennsylvania Constitution.  Much to the frustration of Western Pennsylvania voters from all parties, Governor Shapiro and the Democratic-controlled State House have made no effort in the past two years to codify these Grand Jury recommendations into state law.

Given these growing resentments toward Harrisburg’s unwillingness to rein in gas companies, Kamala Harris would be wise to reject calls by Smith, Teixeira, and Yglesias for her to cheerlead fracking expansion.  Instead, she should pledge to ensure all federal funds granted to the industry are contingent on gas companies agreeing to the citizen protections the Pennsylvania state government is unwilling to provide. What these liberal puff pieces on behalf of fracking fail to realize is that Kamala’s clearest path to the White House comes from being a sensible and reasonable alternative to Trump’s unhinged lunacy.  Mirroring Trump’s “Drill Baby Drill” promotion of fracking would only reinforce the image that Kamala is a feckless and flighty political operator whose positions are guided by the whims of polls and focus groups rather than any firm convictions.  She will win Pennsylvania by crafting a thoughtful policy that rejects both the puritanical teetotaling abstinence of anti-fracking activists and the chug, chug, chug excess of a Trump administration that would allow a gas industry already drunk with power to run roughshod over the rights of our citizens to clean air and pure water.  At the risk of completely torturing this alcohol analogy, Harris’ winning message to Pennsylvanians on energy should be simply this: it’s okay to frack, but if you are going to frack, frack responsibly.