Oops - my mistake. It ALREADY HAS started burning up.

If so... then winning PA is absolutely critical. Positions that make that untenable need to be reconsidered.

It's also worth considering that "fracking" in PA is almost exclusively natural gas... and that cheap supply has not only helped the economy (of far more than just PA)... it has substantially lowered national carbon emissions.

What about the methane?

I'll admit this isn't my area so I don't have numbers, but the general sense is that fracking isn't nearly as clean as it is touted, because of the methane released. That may not offset the carbon benefit on the other side though.

Meanwhile it is polluting groundwater.

There is no free lunch, there is no perfectly clean energy (yet at least). Even capturing solar has lifecycle pollution costs.

The job of politicians should be forcing reversal of "externalization" of costs to the environment, with those costs calculated as accurately as possible.

The consumption side of the scale is where I want to focus. I don't think it helps the environment all that much where fuels are extracted. If we're going to burn oil/gas, I'd rather that it be produced as locally as possible so that we aren't exporting either the cash or the production impact to other countries.

Yes, the counterargument could be made that the lower prices encourage increased consumption, but that is better handled through taxation than in supply constraints that only benefit OPEC and oil companies.

Coal is on the ropes, and the reason why is that gas is so much cheaper

You get rid of gas and oil by making other alternatives even cheaper. Taxing the undesirables won't work, the tax gets passed on and consumers revolt and vote Republican. You have to massively subsidize the market to the point that no one wants to use fossil fuels.

And yes, a fracking ban could easily push PA red again. It's not just the jobs, it's also land leases.

If a man or woman has problems putting food on the table for their kids, fires in Australia are the last things on their minds.

We will not learn. There is no hope.

I hope everyone here realizes that even if we reduced output of all greenhouse gasses today, to zero, the effects of what we've already done would not stop. Not for decades.

And people are arguing about whether or not we should ban fracking. SERIOUSLY?!

Fracking is WORSE for the environment due to the methane released!


https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-climate-change/

I don’t think that estimates of emissions associated with natural gas consumptions are necessarily accounting for “upstream” emissions; rather, I think they may just be accounting for emissions at the power plant and “downstream” from there. Depending on the assessed “upstream” impact, that could really change the benefit cost calculations on programmatic decarbonization interventions.

"Come and get it, take our resources for FREE" approach that PA took from the start.

PA is FUCKED on fracking.

I support an eventual ban but Fetterman - very liberal - is correct. An all-out, "right now, everywhere" ban will lose PA in the presidential election. But at the least the stuff ought to be taxed and far better regulated. Gas companies are touting how cheap they are by comparison to other energy sources but that is because they have externalized so many costs that they should not have been able to externalize)

(yeah I recognize the irony with the guy I'm supporting. He is generally correct. In the real world, we do need to factor in politics. Since my state goes so late in the primary, for me to support someone is a pipe dream anyway, so may as well be the guy with the best ideas.)

Until we figure out how to keep people fully employed while we go from fossil fuels to clean energy, republicans are going to have powerful talking points if we try to ban stuff.

Some people that least the actual drilling location rights make out, but their neighbors that get gas fracted from under them get the side effects and none of the money. But fracking produces jobs in places that were once hard hit for jobs, so banning it becomes a political hard sell.

There's a fracking glut in PA:

Nowhere are the declining fortunes of natural gas more in evidence than in Appalachia, where the Marcellus field centered in central and western Pennsylvania was once viewed as the most promising in North America. With gas prices slashed nearly in half from a year ago, the number of drilling rigs operating in Pennsylvania has dropped to 24, from 47, over the last 12 months. EQT, one of the premier producers in the Marcellus, recently cut nearly a quarter of its work force, eliminating 196 positions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/business/energy-environment/natural-gas-shale-chevron.html

Unfortunately for the next decade or so (and that's optimistic) it's kind of a "pick your poison" situation.