Everything you know from TV about Pennsylvania and fracking is wrong

It’s a new day here in Pennsylvania, where folks waking up eagerly check the internet to see how the frackers did last night, where the ideal weekend getaway is a quaint mountain bed-and-breakfast animated by the constant whine of natural gas wells, and where contented people have been known to blurt out, “I love the smell of tert-Butylthiol in the morning!”

OK, that’s not actually the Keystone State I’ve come to know and love since I moved here 35 years ago (where the number one fall issue among voters is probably Bryce Harper’s banged-up body), but that is the portrait of Pennsylvania someone who lives in Oregon or Oklahoma might get from watching too much cable TV news, where political pundits insist our love for unconventional extraction of fossil fuels is more powerful than our desire for cheesesteaks.

Fracking — which was more of a hot-button issue back in the 2010s — is back in the news with the sudden arrival of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee. Harris had said in 2019 — while appealing to left-wing Democrats as a 2020 White House hopeful — that she opposed fracking before changing her position when she joined President Joe Biden’s ticket. According to the TV talking heads, even that brief flirtation with opposing Pennsylvania’s most beloved gas-drilling process might cause her to lose the commonwealth to Donald Trump in November.

After Harris’ widely publicized CNN interview last month, host Abby Phillips questioned whether the fracking issue even matters much “except in Pennsylvania” — echoing comments I’ve heard on CNN and MSNBC probably a dozen times that the Democrats must pledge allegiance to the fracking gods to have any hope of winning our 19 electoral votes.

None of them really know what they’re talking about.

Here’s the truth from someone who actually lives in Pennsylvania. Most folks, especially in areas like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and their suburbs where many voters reside, don’t really talk about fracking — certainly not as much as the big issues like the economy or abortion rights. And when we do discuss it, many Pennsylvanians — perhaps even a majority — oppose fracking, because we don’t want to prolong the climate destruction of fossil fuels, or because folks who live near these fracking pads are sick of the smell, the noise, and the threat to their health.

A 2021 poll commissioned by the pro-sustainability Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI) found just 31% of Pennsylvanians support continued fracking here, and that a majority want the process to end either immediately (25%) or see it phased out over time (30%). Other surveys show the state more evenly divided, but unfettered support for unconventional gas drilling doesn’t top 50%.

One reason for the split is that the economic benefits to Pennsylvania that are cited again and again by TV pundits just haven’t materialized outside of just one or two of the state’s 67 counties. A series of studies have shown that fracking is not a major job category here, that the number of new hires has never matched the industry’s overblown promises, and that counties with fracking activity have mostly underperformed the state and national economy.

“I find the whole discussion” — around fracking — “pretty deeply frustrating,” Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher for ORVI, told me this week. “I think most Pennsylvanians are at best ambivalent about fracking as a technology.” And he thinks a fair amount of the public support for fracking is reinforced by politicians — including Democrats like Gov. Josh Shapiro — constantly overstating the economic rewards.

This means that when it comes to the presidential race, the so-called experts are getting the issue completely bass-ackward. Think about it: The voters who see fossil fuels as a gift from God and nod along to Republicans’ “Drill, baby, drill” chants are in Trump’s back pocket already. But Harris’ resolute endorsement of fracking — minus a more concrete plan to end America’s addiction to oil and gas — could slow her momentum with young voters who rank climate change as a top issue and have been drifting back to the Democrats since Biden’s withdrawal.

But the myth that fracking is overwhelmingly popular in Pennsylvania has become a feedback loop between politicians — some of them heavily funded by oil-and-gas campaign dollars, some of them seeking the endorsements of trade unions that have bought into the job-creation hype — and a lazy news media. Since fracking resurfaced as a campaign issue, reporters for outlets like CNN or the Washington Post have flocked to places like Washington County, where the ORVI found the economy has performed somewhat better than other heavily fracked counties — partly because of exurban Pittsburgh job growth unrelated to fossil fuels — and hunt down the local bar owner who’s slinging pitchers to parched well workers.

They never seem to go to a community like Dimock in north-central Pennsylvania. The small Susquehanna County community, which was made semi-famous in the 2009 documentary Gasland when a resident lit his methane-contaminated tap water on fire, had enjoyed a 12-year ban on fracking activity. Some residents felt deeply betrayed when the Shapiro administration cut a deal last year that allowed Coterra Energy to resume drilling in return for admitting past pollution and $16 million for a new clean water line. That won’t come until 2027 at the earliest, but the fracking started immediately.

» READ MORE: Does anyone care about the study linking Pa. fracking to cancer in kids? | Will Bunch

“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. The broken economic promises — which are now being repeated, and broken, for fracking-related projects like ethane crackers and hydrogen hubs — are reason enough to be cynical about fossil fuels and politicians’ reluctance to phase them out.

But what’s much more morally unconscionable is both political parties’ refusal to take seriously the now well-documented health risks for people who live near active wells. A major Pennsylvania-funded study released last year found that children living near fracking sites 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. The politicians who normally tell voters that nothing matters more than the life of the child managed to sweep this bombshell report under the rug.

Maybe a good question for Harris at Tuesday’s make-or-break debate here in Philadelphia would be not to yet again ask her why she briefly opposed fracking in 2019, but to prod her on how she can support it now when little kids are getting cancer. Maybe that level of scrutiny would prompt her not necessarily to back an immediate fracking ban — even many environmentalists like O’Leary say that isn’t realistic or practical — but to get more specific on a plan to phase out fossil fuels and create thousands of clean energy jobs as quickly as possible.

Until she does that, Pennsylvania voters like Dimock’s Switzer are going to be wary of the Democrats’ newly minted nominee. “I wish maybe she’d take a look at it [fracking] when she’s safely in office and have some kind of panel,” she said, recalling how Barack Obama once promised fracking was “a bridge” to clean energy, and yet “that bridge keeps getting longer and longer.”

That’s what a lot of Pennsylvanians would tell Harris and her campaign — as long as they listen to us and not the clueless political experts up and down I-95.