The Answer to the Fracking Question
Kamala Harris almost got it right
In her CNN interview on August 29, Kamala Harris almost gave the right answer when asked about fracking. Here’s the answer she should have given:
Look, here’s the deal on fracking. It’s provided a lot of benefits. Prices for natural gas fell, saving consumers billions of dollars overall. It’s made us less energy-dependent on foreign sources and created an export market that helps our balance of payments. Natural gas is a fossil fuel, but it’s a better way to create energy than coal or oil.
Most importantly, it’s provided jobs, in places where jobs are badly needed — Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Texas and Louisiana, the Rocky Mountains, southern Appalachia. Has it been good for those local economies, overall? No. Has it been good for those local communities? Not really. Has it been good for the companies that finance fracking? No. It’s never made any real money for them — net net, they could’ve made more investing in other things, and in many cases, they outright lost money.
And why is that? It’s mainly because the price of alternatives, especially wind and solar, keep dropping, and the costs of fracking don’t. So the market will take care of this. Do we need to ban fracking? No. The market will do it, in a way that won’t wreck the communities that currently depend on it. And so what we need to do is invest in those communities right now, with clean-energy jobs, with technology, with education, so that these communities can not only be ready for the future we’re building, they can be a part of the backbone of the future we’re building.
Sources:
The Faltering Economics of Fracking (IEEE Spectrum, 2021)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/economics-of-fracking
The economic benefits of fracking (Brookings, 2015)
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-economic-benefits-of-fracking/
The Local Economic and Welfare Consequences of Hydraulic Fracturing (University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute, 2016)
https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/the-local-economic-and-welfare-consequences-of-hydraulic-fracturing/
https://epic.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/UCH-120116_FrackingResearch_final_1.pdf
Economic and National Security Impacts under a Hydraulic Fracturing Ban (U.S. Department of Energy, 2021)
https://www.energy.gov/fecm/articles/economic-and-national-security-impacts-under-hydraulic-fracturing-ban
Earthquakes triggered by fracking, not just wastewater disposal, study finds
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/earthquakes-triggered-by-fracking