Democrats and VP Kamala Harris have tip-toed around the Fracking issue in Pennsylvania, the Conventional Wisdom being that the practice is an important job creator that is overwhelmingly supported in the all-important battleground state.
The CW is Wrong and wrong.
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.
- Nine in ten Pennsylvania voters support stricter regulations on fracking, including requiring companies to disclose chemicals used in drilling operations (94%), requiring safer transportation of fracking waste (93%), expanding air monitoring near fracking wells (92%), and increasing “setback” distances from schools and hospitals (90%).
- Pennsylvanians are broadly concerned about water (86%) and air (82%) pollution. Nearly eight in ten say they worry about the effects of pollution on the health of their families (79%) and communities (77%). More than four in ten (43%) say fracking has a negative impact on air and water quality.
- More than four in ten (42%) Pennsylvanians support an outright ban on fracking, and nearly half of Pennsylvanians say they’re opposed or on the fence about the practice. About one in five (19%) voters somewhat oppose fracking. One in ten (11%) voters say they strongly oppose the practice. An additional 19% say they’re not sure.
- Pennsylvania voters favor the clean energy industry. Solar (80%) and wind (73%) are overwhelmingly popular, and a significant majority (84%) support spending taxpayer dollars on wind and solar development to increase renewable energy usage.
So all the hullabaloo about fracking is driven by petropropaganda?
Evil and insidious, but these tricksters are effective.
That job number is like what I point out about US coal mining, too. If you take the 55,000 figure for PA fracking and fracking-adjacent jobs, you’d be able to fit all those people AND every single coal miner in the USA into the stadium to watch a Penn State home game, and still have a good number of seats left. Compare that to the size of the overall US civilian workforce of 168,699,000, according to the St. Louis Fed.
But looking at the polling on some of the monitoring desired, a smart politician would run on “OK, fracking’s allowed here in Pennsylvania, but it’s not making everyone rich, so let’s at least do it right and add the monitoring nearby residents deserve”.