Keith Srakocic/AP Photo
The sun shines through clouds above a shale gas drilling site in St. Marys, Pennsylvania. A majority of Pennsylvanians now oppose fracking, according to recent polling.
PITTSBURGH — Tonight, Joe Biden is closing his campaign in Pittsburgh with a high-profile rally with Lady Gaga, as Western Pennsylvania has become battleground zero for both parties. Donald Trump’s campaign immediately released a statement targeting Gaga as an “anti-fracking activist,” part of Trump’s consistent warning to voters that if elected, Joe Biden will end fracking.
In Butler County on Saturday night, Trump announced that he signed an executive memorandum to “protect” fracking that would direct the secretary of energy and U.S. trade representative to write a report showing the economic and trade impact of the practice. “Pennsylvania oil and natural gas supports nearly one million jobs,” Trump said at the rally. “If one of these maniacs come along and they say we’re gonna end fracking, we’re gonna destroy the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, you can say, sorry about that.”
Much of the national media has focused on fracking as a key wedge issue in the battleground state, with CNN running a headline on October 28, “This Single Issue Could Decide How Western Pennsylvania Votes.”
However, the reality on the ground is very different.
As a result of more than a decade of organizing against fracking, the majority of Pennsylvania now actually opposes fracking by a 52-48 margin, according to a CBS/YouGov poll this summer. Increasingly, activists say, as more Pennsylvanians become affected by the expansion of fracking fields and the expansion of natural gas pipelines, they are becoming opposed to it.
“Support for fracking has always been a mile wide and an inch deep,” says former Democratic state Rep. Jesse White.
White was first elected in 2006 in Washington County, ground zero for fracking in Western Pennsylvania. At the time, the first major discoveries of natural gas were being made on the Marcellus Shale.
“When fracking was first started, it was popular because nobody had any idea of the health effects. All people knew was these stories they would hear of some friend at work or a neighbor had sold their land and gotten a big check for it,” says White. “Then, when people started getting sick and seeing how destructive, that’s when things start to change.”
Bob Schmetzer is the retired assistant business agent of IBEW Local 712 and currently serves as president of the South Heights Borough Council. “All of my family is dead of cancer, what more can I say,” he says. For the past decade, he’s been organizing against fracking and says that education has increased, particularly about how radioactive material is brought to the surface through fracking.
“They are drilling next to high schools out here in Washington County and all these high school kids are getting a rare cancer caused by radioactivity called Ewing’s sarcoma. These are football players and kids in good health and they are dead,” says Schmetzer. Studies in 2019 showed that some high schools in Washington County have Ewing’s sarcoma cancer rates that are three times the national average.
As more and more communities organize to stop fracking, groups like Protect Elizabeth Township are going door-to-door to educate Pennsylvanians on the dangers of fracking.
“When we educate people, particularly younger families, about how this shouldn’t be around schools or children, that really changes things,” says Jill Taylor of Protect Elizabeth Township. “It’s incredible how quickly you can persuade people that we shouldn’t have this in our area. We are a little fish coming against a billion-dollar company, but we’re making a difference.”
In October, East Pittsburgh, a small municipality located in the deindustrialized Monongahela Valley, decided not to renew a permit for fracking at the site of the historic Edgar Thomson Steel plant.
Black community activist Jonathan Reyes, 33, was recently elected to the city council of East Pittsburgh in part on the promise of stopping fracking.
“When I was going door-to-door to talk to people about fracking, I found that educated people really were opposed to it,” says Reyes. “A lot of people were very receptive when I talked about the possibility of creating alternatives to fracking.”
“Support for fracking has always been a mile wide and an inch deep,” says former Democratic state Rep. Jesse White.
Despite the growing opposition to fracking, national and local media often ignore the on-the-ground organizing being done by activists to change public opinion. Jesse White says that part of the reason is the outsized influence of the industry from a political and public relations standpoint.
Fracking companies enlisted the support of charities and even some unions to promote fracking as a job creator in the state. CONSOL Energy, a fracking company, even bought the naming rights to the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey stadium when it was first built.
With so much positive media attention for fracking companies, White said he struggled to get his message out in the press when he first became concerned about fracking in the early 2010s.
“If it was a positive industry story, they had a full-blown propaganda machine to help you out. If you had any stories that challenged the party line, many journalists would play along with the party line or challenge environmentalists to muddy the waters,” says White. “The fracking industry pulled from the playbook of Big Tobacco and they made enormous investments in the media in Western Pennsylvania. They thought it was easier to buy public approval than to earn it.”
Eventually, the fracking industry spent over $500,000 to successfully defeat White when he ran for re-election in 2014. White says that part of the reason that public myths exist about Pennsylvanians supporting fracking is because the media tends to take its cues from politics.
“So much of these generalizations are made by what happens in the state Capitol, and fracking in Harrisburg is right there with the charter school lobby in terms of political power,” says White. “And the fracking lobby has yet to run into any obstacles in the lobbies of power in Pennsylvania from either party.”
However, things are changing. Recently, a group of pro-fracking construction unions spent nearly $200,000 in an attempt to defeat Summer Lee, a former Fight for $15 organizer and the first Black woman ever elected to the state House from Western Pennsylvania. Despite heavy spending against her, Lee won with 77 percent of the vote in her Mon Valley district.
As the cost of natural gas declines and promises of fracking jobs have failed to materialize, many Western Pennsylvanians, who have seen communities devastated by decline, are wondering if they want to mortgage the future of their environment on fracking.
“They called oil and gas the bridge to the future, but in all reality, it’s a gangplank. We aren’t moving fast enough into renewables,” says Bob Schmetzer. “And we are gonna fall back into the same old crap that happened when the steel mills picked up, closed the doors, and left. We are gonna have a ton of empty houses that nobody will buy them. It’s history repeating itself.”
While the national media paints fracking as a Pennsylvania wedge issue, activists think that it’s unlikely to sway many voters.
“I just don’t see it as a serious wedge issue anymore,” says White.
