Pennsylvania’s airwaves and campaign stages have been inundated with messages about fracking this year, but with a month-and-a-half to go until the second largest natural gas-producing state in the country has to decide between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, voters are being told — by politicians — an incomplete story.
The truth isn’t as cut-and-dry, or damning to the sector, as what Mr. Trump has said: that Joe Biden will end fracking and destroy a half of a million jobs. The truth also isn’t as ideologically consistent as Mr. Biden’s campaign would have voters believe: that he’s always said — clearly, resolutely and without the need for clarification — exactly what he now says he believes.
The truth is, the political argument over fracking — the subject of a years-long partisan divide in Pennsylvania — has become a complicated entanglement of half-truths, out-of-context quotes, unclear messaging and exaggerations in this presidential race.
When Mr. Trump and his running mate, Vice President Mike Pence, have come to Pennsylvania to rally supporters in recent months, they’ve painted Mr. Biden as a conduit for the “radical” elements of his party who will issue a total ban on fracking.
While Mr. Trump has generally warned that “you’re not going to be allowed to frack anymore” under a Biden administration, Mr. Pence has made the case more specifically, pointing to Mr. Biden’s past statements to allege the Democrat wants to “crush American energy jobs.”
Mr. Pence has referenced a few particular quotes from Mr. Biden: that he said, “No, we would make sure it’s eliminated,” when asked if there would be a place for fossil fuels and fracking in a Biden administration; and that he pledged “No new fracking” in a debate last March.
When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash in a debate last July if there’d be a place for fossil fuels, fracking and coal in his presidency, Mr. Biden’s full response was, “No. We would work it out. We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those, either — any fossil fuel.” Asked by Bloomberg News to clarify what that meant, his campaign responded, at the time, that Mr. Biden wants to get to net-zero emissions and a 100% clean energy economy by the middle of the century, as well as eliminate subsidies for coal and gas.
Mr. Biden did say the words “no new fracking” in a debate in March during a back-and-forth with Sen. Bernie Sanders, a proponent of banning fracking. Once again asked to clarify, a spokesman for the campaign told the Wall Street Journal that Mr. Biden doesn’t support banning fracking, but was referring to his proposal to ban new oil and gas drilling permits on federal land and offshore.
Seeking to clarify his position again, Mr. Biden said — in Pittsburgh in late August — that he’s not banning fracking and “no matter how many times Donald Trump lies about me, the future, what’s that this is all about.” It’s also about “easing the financial burdens on millions of families with a clean energy strategy that has a place for the energy workers right here in Western Pennsylvania,” he said.
“Fracking has to continue because we need a transition,” Mr. Biden said during a televised town hall from Scranton this past week. “We’re going to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, and we’ll get to net-zero power emissions by 2035. But there’s no rationale to eliminate, right now, fracking.”
The Trump-Pence presidential ticket has countered that voters should believe Mr. Biden the first time when he speaks.
Even if Mr. Biden’s position were characterized correctly — that he wants a total and immediate ban on fracking — estimates of job loss under a ban on fracking have varied speech-by-speech from the reelection ticket, and seem to rely on a study that doesn’t share its underlying methodology.
In Latrobe earlier this month, Mr. Trump alleged Mr. Biden “would wipe out that entire industry killing the jobs of more than 600,000 Pennsylvania workers. It’s probably 940,000, they say. Think of that.” Mr. Pence has said a Biden fracking ban would “literally cost a half a million jobs by some estimates” in one visit to the state, then 600,000 in another visit to Pittsburgh. Mr. Trump, on Aug. 20, said, “I guess 600,000, 670,000 [would] lose their jobs.”
Though the Trump campaign did not respond to requests to cite their sources for the 600,000 estimate or the president’s 940,000 estimate, a June 25 memo on Mr. Trump’s campaign website, claiming that Mr. Biden’s “war on fracking” would kill 609,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, cites a study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute.
That study, 71 pages long and titled “What If ... Hydraulic Fracturing Was Banned?”, was part of a series of studies by the institute that intended to provide “clear-eyed, data-driven answers” on the impacts of political rhetoric, and quotes Mr. Biden in it as an example of a pledge to end fossil fuel.
Starting with the premise that America must “expand the benefits of U.S. shale to even more American families,” the study does claim that if a fracking ban were instituted between Jan. 1, 2021 and the end of 2025, Pennsylvania would lose 609,000 jobs.
It says that 54,000 jobs in Pennsylvania would be lost directly in the drilling, exploration and extraction industries if fracking were banned.
But the bulk of the job loss will come downstream from the gas and oil industry, the report says, though it doesn’t detail exact methodology or mathematical reasoning as to how the institute reached the numbers.
It claims to have used a model that “tracks monetary transactions within the economy between different industries, the government and households” — but doesn’t indicate any details on the modeling, how it was applied or what numbers were fed into it.
The study does provide a colloquial example: that if energy prices increase, a household’s purchase of food may decrease, which will — in theory — harm the restaurant industry, agriculture producers and wholesale suppliers. It reasons that lower energy costs, with fracking, allow companies to hire more workers, and without fracking, higher energy costs will translate to fewer jobs created and “fewer resources to support existing employees.”
But it also says that it chose to model data in the short-term because of the possibility of any "large, structural shifts in the production or consumption of energy in the United States."
Julian Routh: jrouth@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1952, Twitter @julianrouth.
First Published: September 20, 2020, 11:00 a.m.
