Peter Walks for Democracy

It’s time for us to act like we love the world we live in and live for the world we love. These are my thoughts after responding to six questions from a student who interviewed me on fracking. Here are my answers.

Good or bad for what? All in all, I’d say fracking is bad, especially the way that it’s happened in Pennsylvania. The fracking industry has run rough-shod over people’s inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The industry has bilked property owners by promising wealth beyond their wildest dreams but in most cases given a pittance while clearing acre after acre of fields and forests. Additionally, there are the horrid cases of water contamination that have led to dead pets, livestock, and sick kids. There’s the roar of trucks for a short time and sometimes the long-term din from compressor stations that themselves release large amounts of volatile organic compounds into the air, known carcinogens.

As if the sound and the pollution weren’t bad enough, the natural gas industry runs over our rights. They have admitted using Army field manuals to learn how to suppress resistance or questions in communities where they want to “do business.” The pipeline companies have used the state’s power of Eminent Domain to seize property in the name of the public when, in fact, the profit and benefit will go to private shareholders of fossil fuel companies. See the case of the Gerhart family in southern Huntingdon County who are fighting the Mariner pipeline. Finally, there are cases where the gas industry has so egregiously damaged families that they’ve paid them off. But for the family to accept the payments, they’ve had to sign gag orders and remain silent. The Hallowich family is the most famous of these.

These actions show they believe our communities and land are more like territories to be occupied than like free people living in a democratic republic. A free people have no justice when their rights are trampled this way. They are doubly a violation in Pennsylvania because our Commonwealth Constitution says the following in Article 1, Section 27:

§ 27.  Natural resources and the public estate.

The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.

(May 18, 1971, P.L.769, J.R.3)

Yes. It impacts the tiniest local places and the globe. The fracking industry fractures the subsurface while it fractures landscapes that fracture our communities. A few years ago I read a study (I think it was by the Natural Resources Defense Council) that said the spider web of roads, well pads, and pipelines if built out to predicted capacity would be three times the size of Washington, DC. That’s just cleared land. If we think about the plumes of methane coming from wells, the toxic fracking brine flowing back out that can never be used for anything but more fracking (and not well), and the ambient air pollution it causes, we have compounding impacts right here in our towns. And when all of these traveling men–they are overwhelmingly male–coming to town to work, they are disconnected from home and family. They, like men are known to do the world over since time immemorial, do what men too easily do. They drink too much, get into fights, and sleep around. Community studies show an increased drain on services, more police action, rising alcohol and drug use, and more sexually transmitted diseases.

Who pays for that? Local tax payers. And some of these folks bring their kids with them. But since they don’t own property, they don’t pay property taxes that fund local schools. Who foots the bill? We do. How are many of these schools doing? Not very well…and now they have to pay more for less.

Who and what loses in all of this? The most vulnerable among us in rural PA: children and the elderly, the poor and the less educated. The despoiling of our land, water, and air is the despoiling of people. Of course, innumerable plants and animals lose out. The Scarlet Tanager, for example, is a bird that needs deep woods to thrive. Their lives literally shrink with every road or well pad. When there’s a spill, fish and amphibians pay, or livestock if it’s on a farm. And what if you own an organic farm?

What’s the point of having an organic berry farm when a fracking operation is a few hundred feet from your organic berries? Not organic. Whose livelihood matters?

Finally, there are global impacts. Nature gas is a fossil fuel. Its primary component, methane is 70-105 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. If it leaks at <3% from infrastructure, the methane forces the climate faster than burning coal does. So it’s possible–likely under some models–that fracked gas is and will continue to force human-cuased climate interference faster than coal would. And when we burn it, it’s still producing carbon dioxide, though half that of petroleum or coal. It’s being sold as a transition or bridge fuel. But it’s not being treated like a bridge to more gas which is a bridge to the edge of the world.

They are changing fairly rapidly. Solar and wind are taking off all over the world. The price of solar has come down incredibly over the last decade to a fraction of what they once cost. China, India, Chile, Argentina, and the EU are taking on solar, wind, and tidal power like it’s going out of style. Just a couple weeks ago, “wind provided 1/4 of Europe’s electricity! Denmark 109%, Germany 61%, Portugal 44%, Ireland 34%, Austria 33%, Spain 31%, UK 29%” according to Kees van der Leun, a renewable energy expert for Navigant.

I talked to a congressional aid yesterday, a Republican aid at that. He reflected back to me that we have a few hundred coal jobs in Pennsylvania. There are 3,000 in solar. Nationwide, the solar industry employs 250,000 people, more than in the solar industry than in coal, oil, & gas combined in the US.

There are 100,000 people working in wind with wind turbine technician as the fastest growing job fields in the US. If you add the green building industry, hydropower, biomass, and geothermal, we have close to 3 million people working completely or temporarily in the clean energy industry. 75,000 of them are in Pennsylvania. Even with the Trump administration messing with these markets, it will grow rapidly.

Right here locally, you will see changes coming. The University Area Join Authority (local sewer plant) is putting up a 2.7 megawatt solar array and the Ferguson Township Public Works building will by powered almost entirely by solar when it’s completed. The State College Area School District just voted to put rooftop projects on three elementary schools. Penn State, Ferguson Township, and other local organizations have performed comprehensive assessments of their properties for solar development. This change is inevitable and good. Earlier this week, Governor Tom Wolfe signed into law a change that will bolster solar.

The best argument for fracking is that it provides stable sources of natural gas that our power sector, manufacturing, and transit depend on and that it’s a staple of American geopolitical strategic power. But its costs enumerated above show that it’s not to our common advantage to continue investing in it.

Lots.

That’ll depend on whether we still need it when we run out. If we need it, then we will be in bad shape. But we don’t have to need it and we shouldn’t want to need it. A rapid transition to zero carbon manufacturing, transit, power, and heating is to every persons and nearly every organisms’ and ecosystems’ advantage to move away from fracking and other dirty fossil fuels.

It’s time for us to act like we love the world we live in and live for the world we love.