In last week’s vice presidential debate between Sen. Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence, Harris reiterated Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s rejection of a fracking ban, despite her earlier call for one when she was a presidential candidate (CBS News, 10/7/20):
“I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact,” Harris said.
Harris emphasized that Biden “believes” in science; claimed that he “understands that the West Coast of our country is burning” and “sees what is happening on the Gulf states, which are being battered by storms”; and that he has “seen and talked with the farmers in Iowa, whose entire crops have been destroyed because of floods.”
One can only wonder whether Biden or Harris truly “believe” in science when they pretend a fracking ban and a host of other strong climate measures are not urgent necessities required immediately. In 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that carbon pollution needed to be cut by 45% by 2030 in order to keep the planet below the critical 1.5°C warming threshold to prevent irreversible planetary devastation (Guardian, 10/8/18). As time goes on, more reports inform us that pollution and the climate crisis are actually even worse than we thought (e.g., Vox, 8/12/20; New York Times, 10/23/19, 12/4/19).
Yet whenever there are discussions about enacting a national fracking ban, corporate media seem to prioritize the supposed short-term potential “risks” to Democrats’ electoral prospects, or potential economic downturns, over the long-term prospects for human civilization’s survival.
The New York Times (1/27/20) quoted absurd claims that a fracking ban would mean “hundreds of thousands” of Pennsylvanians would be “unemployed overnight.” In reality, about 26,000 people work in all of Pennsylvania’s oil and gas sector (Pittsburgh City Paper, 9/4/20).
When there was discussion of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bill for a nationwide fracking ban earlier this year, the New York Times’ “In Crucial Pennsylvania, Democrats Worry a Fracking Ban Could Sink Them” (1/27/20) cited a few state Democratic politicians claiming that any presidential candidate who supports a national fracking ban would risk losing Pennsylvania in the general election. The Times trivialized the issue by reducing it to a “political bet,” with the highest stakes being the mere loss of a Democratic presidency, as opposed to dooming humanity to climate apartheid (FAIR.org, 7/30/19) and ultimately losing human life as we know it to natural disasters (FAIR.org, 6/11/19, 9/5/19, 1/3/20, 9/18/20). The Times’ Lisa Friedman and Shane Goldmacher wrote:
A pledge to ban all hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, could jeopardize any presidential candidate’s chances of winning this most critical of battleground states—and thus the presidency itself…. In some ways, the fracking ban is indicative of the entire political bet undergirding the candidacies of Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren that the 2020 campaign will not be won by appeals to the narrow interests of traditional swing voters but through the mass mobilization of an energized electorate.
NPR (2/11/20) cited without rebuttal claims from the US Chamber of Commerce that a fracking ban would eliminate 17% of all US jobs.
NPR’s “Proposals to Ban Fracking Could Hurt Democrats in Key States” (2/11/20) likewise made dubious pronouncements on the opinions of swing-state voters the focal point of the story, as opposed to what actions are required to resolve the climate crisis:
Climate change is a top issue in the Democratic presidential primaries and some candidates have taken relatively aggressive policy stands, including vows to ban hydraulic fracturing. But some Democrats worry that could push moderate voters in key swing states to reelect President Trump next November.… In a swing state like Pennsylvania, a major gas producer, fracking and energy are key issues. Even a small segment of voters swayed one way or another could change the election.
After the primaries, it’s clear that corporate media believe it’s their duty to function as Biden’s de facto campaign manager by explaining to voters what Biden’s position on a fracking ban actually is, as well as advising Biden to reject a fracking ban because, they claim, that would be an electoral disaster. Soon after the debate, Quartz (10/8/20) explained that Biden and Harris don’t support a fracking ban, because it “tempts political suicide in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio where fossil fuels still rule.” Why an electoral disaster ought to be prioritized over civilizational disaster is never explained.
The LA Times (9/23/20) stressed the need for Biden to appease “voters whose economic well-being depends on extracting natural gas,” while acknowledging more than halfway through the story that “statewide, voters are evenly split on a fracking ban.”
The Los Angeles Times’ headline “Joe Biden’s Pennsylvania Hurdle: Voters Who Fear a California-Style Energy Plan” (9/23/20) presented swing voters as an obstacle to Biden’s electoral ambitions, as opposed to presenting Biden as an obstacle to stronger environmental protection and meaningful climate action for the country. The LA Times described Biden’s opposition to a fracking ban as a “nuanced position,” and characterized Biden’s climate plans as “robust,” despite his opposition to climate action on the scale of a Green New Deal. Instead of advising Biden to go after younger voters who care more about climate action, the LA Times advised Biden to go after swing voters who don’t care as much:
Television commentary about the presidential race may focus on the future of the Supreme Court and other national questions, but in the states that will actually decide the election, local issues often matter more. In this corner of America, that means fracking. Voters whose economic well-being depends on extracting natural gas are extremely skeptical of any politician who would inhibit it.… The key for Biden, party strategists believe, is to maintain a carefully balanced approach, even if that frustrates activists on both sides.
However, as journalist David Sirota (Daily Poster, 10/8/20) pointed out, this flimsy basis for rejecting a fracking ban isn’t even true:
There’s just one problem with that storyline: It isn’t substantiated by empirical data. Indeed, the idea that a fracking ban is political poison in Pennsylvania is a fantastical tale fabricated by a national press corps that refuses to let public opinion data get in the way of fossil fuel propaganda and a manufactured narrative.
A January poll of Pennsylvania voters, from Franklin and Marshall University, found that more voters (49%) believe that the environmental risks of fracking outweigh the economic benefits than the reverse (38%), and that more registered voters support a fracking ban (48%) than oppose it (39%). A local CBS report (1/30/20) noted Franklin and Marshall University’s findings in its headline, showing that “Pennsylvanians Favor Statewide Ban on Fracking.” A later CBS/YouGov poll in August found 52% of Pennsylvania voters supporting a fracking ban. A slight majority in support of a fracking ban does not make it a political ace, but neither is it “political suicide.”
Environmental activist Bill McKibben (New Yorker, 10/9/19) pointed out that US claims to have reduced carbon emissions during the past 20 years have mainly been accomplished by replacing coal-fired power plants with natural gas-fired power plants. While burning gas produces less carbon dioxide than coal, carbon dioxide isn’t the only greenhouse gas. The second most important contributor is methane, which can warm the planet more than 80 times as much as the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
“Fracking,” more formally known as “hydraulic fracturing,” is a method of extracting natural gas (as well as oil) from the ground with a horizontal drilling process that pumps water, sand and chemicals into the ground to fracture rocks that release fossil fuels. And in the process of fracking, lots of methane leaks out at every stage. The US strategy of reducing carbon emissions without reducing the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted is a form of literal gaslighting that encourages other countries to do the same.
The New York Times (11/8/19, 12/16/19) has published a series of excellent investigative reports that used infrared video gear and satellite measurements to capture the invisible methane emissions at “super emitter” fracking sites, where large-scale methane leaks are responsible for a disproportionately high share of methane emissions. The Times (6/21/18, 2/19/20) has also reported on findings showing that the US oil and gas industry is responsible for a much larger proportion of methane emissions than the US government previously thought, with oil and gas production in general being more responsible for soaring methane levels than natural sources, like the ocean bed and mud volcanoes.
For example, a 2017 study of the Barnett Shale Basin in Texas found that super emitters made up 1% of sites, but were responsible for nearly half of all methane emissions, while Robert Howarth, an earth system scientist at Cornell University, estimated that North American gas production is responsible for a third of the global increase in methane emissions in the past decade. So when US media outlets issue doomsday warnings of mass unemployment from a fracking ban (e.g., CNN, 2/7/20; The Hill, 2/27/20), or pedantic factchecks (e.g., USA Today, 6/19/20; AP, 7/31/20) criticizing Trump for falsely accusing Biden of supporting a fracking ban—when he merely supports banning new oil and gas permits on federal land (which reportedly accounts for less than 10% of US oil and gas production)–it comes across as lethally obtuse.
FAIR (10/16/19) has pointed out how corporate media cheerleading of the “Shale Revolution” helped lead the US to become the world’s largest oil and gas producer during the Obama years; when they bemoaned the loss of fossil fuel emissions during the Covid pandemic (FAIR.org, 4/29/20), corporate journalists seemed more concerned with the profits of advertisers than with the survival of human civilization. Running excuses for presidential candidates in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry is only more evidence of the same.
Environmental and labor activists, economists and scientists have for years discussed the need for a full employment program based on green jobs to serve as a just transition for workers who would be displaced by a fracking ban; there is no reason for a fracking ban to be “political suicide” unless corporate journalists are determined to equate that with the death of the fossil fuel industry.
Is it obtuseness
Or obsequiousness to power?
Empiricism evinces the latter
What fracking jobs for Pennsylvania? That was basically during Obama’s reign? I’m an out-of-state gas & oil services worker. We ALL loved PA DLI’s exceedingly high and trouble-free unemployment payments as over 12K fracked methane wells were completed THEN, as 19 giant Marcellus Shale pipelines were started to power the hundreds of gas-fired power stations in the south, LNG terminals planned to sell gas overseas and NYC replaced scores-of-thousands of ancient fuel-oil boilers. Thing is: we were virtually ALL out of state contract workers. Two Democrat administrations permitted horrendous water, air and food pollution from tens-of-thousands of leaky cement-jobs, annulars & failed casing; as state inspectors were threatened, whistleblowers incarcerated, protestors spied upon by Israeli “anti-terrorist” firms and landowners thrown into solitary protecting their farms, or sued while dying of novel cancers. It was Democrats who fracked giant reservoirs, close to aging Nuclear power stations, allowed it in community water systems, sprayed radioactive fracking brine on icy roads and installed ETHANE lines adjacent to schools, hospitals, retirement homes, etc. Neither Biden or Harris will stop fracking since neither was really intended to win. If Hillary had won in 2016, there’d doubtless be 50K new fracked wells: kicking, blowing out and abandoned for us to “clean up?”
I spent 6 years working for ARAMCO which was, at the time, an American consortium of Texaco, Standard Oil (SoCal / Chevron), Esso (Exxon) & Mobil. I can add my support and verify the validity of your comments. Fossil fuels have seeped into every orifice of our environmental, economic and political lives and will continue to do so until we wake up and realize there is only one party, the Corporate Party. Tired of the lesser of two evils, I vote for integrity only, regardless of chances of winning. We need a new ballot line: “Not satisfied with choices given” – it will garner 90% of the votes.
I spent 6 years working for ARAMCO which was, at the time, an American consortium of Texaco, Standard Oil (SoCal / Chevron), Esso (Exxon) & Mobil. I can add my support and verify the validity of your comments. Fossil fuels have seeped into every orifice of our environmental, economic and political lives and will continue to do so until we wake up and realize there is only one party, the Corporate Party. Tired of the lesser of two evils, I vote for integrity only, regardless of chances of winning. We need a new ballot line: “Not satisfied with choices given” – it will garner 90% of the votes.
thank you
Joshua worries about fracking threat to planet not World Economic Forum’s & WHO’s 4th Industrial Revolution & Great Reset’s threat to humanity.
The additional absurdity is that fracking isn’t even profitable. It’s just a way to shovel venture capital and subsidies and other graft, a roundabout way of wealth transfer. Does provide jobs, but no money would be lost if instead they were just paid to sit and watch TV.
Good article! That’s been a lifelong frustration of mine — the media’s atomization of the news. The cultural news typically make the ‘front page’, but then the science news and the military news more typically is in later ‘pages’, seldom making it to the ‘important’ discussions on the opinion pages or the business pages, except occasionally as problems/ roadblocks to be surmounted and trivialized at the same time.
The natural gas industry accounts for just 4% of the US’s CO2 emissions. There is too much methane being emitted due to leaks, to be sure, but this is as much an argument for upgrading the industry’s infrastructure as it is for banning the fuel outright.
And when politicians or activist journalists talk about banning natural gas, they never talk about the very real negative consequences.
NG is responsible for more than 1/3 of the total energy consumed in the US. There is no renewable or energy storage technology remotely capable of filling this void. How can we outlaw the source of 1/3 of our power without a viable replacement?
NG is also the most affordable source of energy available today. Eliminating it will therefore cause bills will increase significantly. Who foots this bill? Working class ratepayers?
Not only do the proponents of banning LNG fail to provide adequate answers to these questions, they rarely acknowledge the questions at all.
Dan, have you ever noticed that these leftists toss around the word science as if they have now concluded their argument. They know nothing about science and that includes Cho. If they understood science, they would first know that science changes as discoveries are made. Einstein himself told Heisenberg that God does not play dice. Einstein was wrong about Heisenberg (maybe he was right about God). That was Einstein. Very little science is settled. Its very nature is to be curious and seeing where the data might lead.
They never answer the questions on energy density, energy storage or energy costs. The dream of a utopia cloud their minds so as not to worry about three VERY important matters on energy. They never talk about plastics, medicine, farming, airlines, trucking, etc. They never talk about China or India. If they were deep thinkers, they would admit that they don’t have answers to all of these problems and maybe jumping in head first is fool hearty.
FWIW, I am an electrical engineer and know a little bit about energy. I certainly have more of a science background than most of the leftists who opine on this subject.
I, too, am an Electrical Engineer (P.E.) with experience on LNG pipelines (RF/OF SCADA) – and nobody is talking about “banning LNG” you dopes. Texas and New Mexico produced LNG without the use of hydraulic fracturing up until about 2010 – The U.S. didn’t export any significant amounts of LNG until 2016.
Regardless, indeed 2/3 of the LNG used in the U.S. is produced by fracking. However, that’s just not the case with other LNG producers/exporters. The truth behind that is that there’s an oversupply so it now must be exported via export terminals (formerly import terminals), usually built near impoverished communities that only marginally benefit financially from them – including along the Gulf of Mexico. In addition, large international banks are beginning to place moratoriums on financing for fracked (shale) LNG. Further, international markets for U.S. shale gas are either not growing as was “expected” or actually shrinking. The U.S. managed to produce 93% of our LNG by way of extraction methodologies OTHER THAN fracking in 2000. By 2015 with the boon of fracking (made possible by depressed markets after the 2008 financial crash) and export terminal permits, the amount of LNG produced in the U.S. by means OTHER THAN fracking had decreased to 33% – again with most of the production intended to EXPORT.
Here’s a good report from the “leftist” side on the impacts: https://www.ran.org/wp-content/uploads/rainforestactionnetwork/pages/17026/attachments/original/1478634931/LNG_Report_Updated_11.7.pdf?1478634931
Shale gas is mostly a big fraud – creates some jobs like the guys up above mentioned, but in the mid- to long-term they will be net job destroyers, along with the environment where eco-tourism will suffer and sensitive areas destroyed/damaged. It is going away sooner than you think, anyway – but again nobody including Democrats are trying to “ban LNG” you dolts. We could produce enough LNG to meet domestic demand without fracking as we once did.
I often wonder if the rightists who carry water for private international finance and giant petrochemical companies ever study the environmental and humanitarian impacts of fracking. China, too, has seen a boom in shale oil/gas production along with all the negatives. But China seems to at least have a commitment to the preservation of the environment and they don’t pull out of global treaties intended to address MMGW – that would the the U.S., which Vladimir Putin has rightly labeled “not agreement capable.”
“nobody is talking about “banning LNG” you dopes.”
NYS last year passed a major climate bill requiring elimination of all carbon emissions from statewide electricity generation, which would effectively require (you guessed it!) a ban on LNG. Berkeley CA also last year passed a law banning NG hookups in new builds. Leftists in several other cities in CA and MA are trying to do the same.
What was that you were saying about no one wanting to ban LNG?
From the PDF linked in my previous comment:
The spread of hydraulic fracturing is closely connected with the spike in applications to build LNG export terminals in the United States. With the rise of natural gas production due to hydraulic fracturing technologies, the United States experienced a decrease in domestic natural gas prices, and thus a glut of gas on the market.61 With a still-increasing flood of shale gas into the market, natural gas prices in the United States reached a 17-year low in February 2016. This was the same month the first export of LNG from the lower 48 states left the country, heading for the newly expanded Panama Canal.62 The EIA forecasts that natural gas production will rise by 2.9 percent in 2016 over the previous year, partly due to proposed LNG export.63 In 2014 projections, the EIA found that about three quarters of increased natural gas production for LNG exports would be from shale.64 That is, hydraulically fractured gas and LNG for export are connected by circular reasoning: a glut of cheap hydraulically frocked gas produced in economically unfavorable conditions is fueling a race to build out more LNG export terminals, while exporting LNG at these terminals provides an incentive for further hydraulic fracturing, with the potential to worsen the market’s glut.
[Germany and France, among other countries have already banned fracking]
Opposition to hydraulic fracturing poses an existential threat to the LNG export industry. Without rampant production of hydraulically fractured natural gas there is no demonstrable need for the exports, and as the movement in opposition to the practice strengthens and regulation increases, the terminals lose their primary feed gas source. Anti-hydraulic fracturing sentiment abroad can also threaten the profitability of North American LNG export terminals. France, another country that has banned the practice, is considering a ban on importing LNG from the United States because a large percentage of the gas will be shale gas produced by hydraulic fracturing.68 Policies like this could mean U.S. shale would lose valuable import markets; in 2015 France’s LNG imports made up 1.8 percent of the world’s total, while Europe as a whole imported 15 percent of the world’s exported LNG.69 Where consumers don’t want hydraulically fractured gas produced on their own land, they are also unlikely to want to purchase that same type of gas produced somewhere else.
Any words on energy density, energy storage? What do you plan to do about the great China building coal fired plants? What do you plan to do about India?
Don’t be naive. This problem is much larger than you’ve thought through.
LOL what about you? No comment on the fact that NOBODY is talking about BANNING LNG? That was the entire premise for your comment.
Talk about not thinking things through. China should be engaged and lobbied through the international community to reduce its reliance on coal. Furthermore, the situation is not quite as simple as you claim.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-will-china-build-hundreds-of-new-coal-plants-in-the-2020s
At least China is taking the issue seriously and participating in numerous agreements/accords to reach carbon emission goals.
I’m not talking about banning LNGs. I don’t know enough about them. I do know that you can’t force China to do anything. I also know that China is duplicitous. They can talk all you want, but you cannot force them to change and they are a much large pollutant than the US. You cannot even force India. Where did I once say the situation was simple? I clearly stated that it is complex. How can you draw the exact opposite of what I said and then assign it to me?
We need articles like this.