By Colin Jerolmack and Sean O'Leary

In the maelstrom of an election, an issue with a minor impact on most voters' lives can start to command wildly outsize attention. Right now, that's the case with fracking in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

Politicians -- and the press -- often act as if support for extracting natural gas from shale is essential to electoral success in the state. Donald Trump, Kamala Harris and down-ballot candidates of both parties have all emphasized their industry-friendly stances.

But polls show that Pennsylvanians, like other Americans, are about evenly split on fracking. A respected survey in August showed 48% for and 44% against, and there's little evidence that voters in the state are deciding how to cast their ballot based on the candidates' positions on the issue.

A dozen or so predominantly rural counties in Appalachian Pennsylvania sit over billions of cubic feet of natural gas locked in the sprawling geological formation known as the Marcellus Shale. Across the region, pollution and disruption caused by drilling pads, processing plants, tanker trucks and pipelines are omnipresent. So, too, are triumphant tales of hardscrabble farmers becoming "shaleionaires" by leasing their mineral rights to petroleum companies.

But only a few families win that fracking lottery, and front-line shale communities that host most of the drilling work -- and the employment -- collectively contain less than 10% of the state's population. Most Pennsylvanians, especially residents of cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, have little or no contact with shale gas drilling, yet politicians of both parties cling to the idea that the industry is vital to the state's overall economy.

Fracking, the story goes, is the golden goose of jobs -- whether industry jobs like pipeline welding or jobs said to be generated through the supply chain or spending across other sectors of the economy. In 2020, an ad by a Trump-supporting super PAC claimed that a proposed ban on fracking would "kill up to 600,000 Pennsylvania jobs." A recent ad by David McCormick, the Republican seeking to unseat U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, claims that 330,000 jobs in Pennsylvania depend on fracking.

Years of such boosterism have had an effect. Surveys consistently find that, even while being evenly divided in their support, over 80% of Pennsylvanians believe that fracking is important to the state's economy. But these purported job numbers are delusional. Even the industry's own research, published last year, claimed a smaller figure: 123,000 direct and indirect jobs combined.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reaches a very different conclusion, finding that direct employment from Pennsylvania's fracking industry amounted to just 18,636 jobs last year. By comparison, the School District of Philadelphia alone directly employs about 20,000 people. Fracking doesn't even make it onto Pennsylvania's official list of top 50 industries for employment, and a county-by-county review shows that even where fracking is prevalent, the share of jobs it provides is in the single digits.

If we assume that each fracking job indirectly supports two additional jobs elsewhere in the economy (a multiplier that many energy economists endorse), the number of jobs associated with fracking still only totals about 55,000, based on the BLS figures. At that level, the petroleum industry provides less than 1% of the state's 5.8 million jobs, slightly fewer than Walmart.

Another side of the political debate -- whether a presidential candidate might ban fracking if elected -- isn't grounded in reality either. The president can't unilaterally ban fracking, either nationally (Congress would have to approve) or in Pennsylvania, where very little of the shale is on federal lands.

This hasn't stopped Donald Trump from claiming that if Kamala Harris wins the election, "fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one." In turn, Harris seems so concerned with not alienating labor and the supposed single-issue fracking voter that she sounds at times like an industry apologist. She promises not to ban fracking, leaving unsaid that she couldn't.

Meanwhile, neither candidate has put forward a plan to better regulate the industry or to go beyond fracking to reverse the declining fortunes of rural Pennsylvania.

Amid the gas drilling "boom," many Appalachian shale communities continue to lose jobs and population. And the industry's infrastructure has brought significant pollution and disruption to the region. Polls show that most people in these communities, including a portion of fracking supporters, want stronger guardrails on the industry to mitigate damage to their health and quality of life. They want more accountability for fracking companies, which too often operate with impunity.

Published studies show that residents across the shale fields suffer disproportionately from maladies including asthma, birth defects and cancer. As Pennsylvania's attorney general, before being elected governor, Josh Shapiro accused petroleum companies and state regulators of failing to protect Pennsylvanians from the ills of fracking, but he has changed course since then. As governor, he allowed a representative of one of the very energy firms he prosecuted to help draft environmental regulations and has released an economic plan that includes expanding the use of fracked gas in the state.

A shift away from fracking is one of the energy-policy moves necessary to avoid catastrophic climate tipping points. Neither political party is likely to propose an abrupt ban, which would risk price hikes and service disruptions. But there are more practical and gradual options, like managing a transition in which reliance on fossil fuels declines as sufficient supplies of renewable energy become affordable and available.

In the meantime, federal and state governments can institute stringent regulations on fracking to address the damage being done to the environment and peoples' health and quality of life. They should also pursue development of other forms of energy that can truly deliver jobs -- and hope -- to economically distressed rural communities that are too often fed empty promises about fracking by politicians who should know better.

Colin Jerolmack, a professor of environmental studies and sociology at N.Y.U., is the author of "Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town." Sean O'Leary is a founder and senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, where he studies energy and economic development in the Appalachian region.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 24, 2024 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)

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