This month, No False Solutions PA and the Better Path Coalition presented PA Energy Month that, for four weeks, took on the topics of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), Hydrogen, LNG Exports, and Advanced Plastic Recycling. As the month comes to an end, our Week 5 topic is the industry that is behind all of them — Fracking.
This month also happens to be the 20th anniversary of the first fracked well in Pennsylvania, a Range Resources well that was drilled the previous year in Washington County.
For twenty years, fracking has contaminated water, air, and soil, killed people and animals, made many others sick with a variety of diseases, conditions, and illnesses, caused explosions, fires, leaks, and spills, industrialized once-pristine rural areas of the state, destroyed quality of life, caused financial ruin, and captured our government. There has been no upside to fracking.
Thousands of peer-reviewed studies, reports, media investigations, and testimonies have led to the same conclusion. No amount of regulation will make fracking safe because it cannot.
In spite of that, the state government under four governors – Rendell (D), Corbett (R), Wolf (D), and Shapiro (D) – has gone out of its way to enable the industry in myriad ways. The state’s environmental regulators tolerate, and even encourage at times a culture of noncompliance. State legislators block legislation that would rein in the industry or hamper it in any way while moving pro-industry bills to the floor, sometimes without sending them to the appropriate committees for consideration or holding hearings. The Governor, with the help of the Department of Community and Economic Development and Team Pennsylvania, negotiates the deals that have brought about a parade of dangerous, damaging, and destructive projects to keep the industry in business.
CCS, Hydrogen, LNG Exports, and Advanced Plastic Recycling are among the bad ideas currently leading the parade. They are being presented as climate solutions, but are nothing more than greenwashed snake oil solutions that are intended to keep the industry in business.
The insult added to the profound injury that has been afflicted across the state is that taxpayers have been footing the bill for subsidies and direct investments in the very things that are injuring them and will bear the burden of the staggering costs of dealing with legacy issues like abandoned wells and liability shifted from the industry to them.
The only rational course of action is to rapidly phase out fracking. The state lags behind the rest of the country in renewable energy, producing only 4% of its power from renewables. Until the gas industry’s chokehold on the state is broken, we will remain tethered to outmoded forms of energy that exacerbate the climate crisis.
No False Climate Solutions PA 