I’m all for banning it. But let’s take an honest look at the election predictions and notice PA will almost certainly be the deciding state in November. Eastern PA is solid blue, so the election effectively comes down to Western PA, where fracking is a single issue vote.
Perfection is the enemy of progress. We have a two party system and that’s not going away in 2 months. She can say she’ll ban it and Trump wins PA, or she can reverse course, opt for greater regulation, and have a chance to be the most climate forward president in US history.
How local do we have to get? Can the opinions of swing voters in like one county in PA hold the rest of the world hostage?
Polls indicate the majority of Pennsylvanians oppose fracking: https://penncapital-star.com/energy-environment/poll-majority-of-pa-residents-want-fracking-to-end/
“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Pennsylvania had about 4,900 oil and gas extraction jobs in December of 2019. (For a frame of reference, there are more than 148,000 employed registered nurses in Pennsylvania. In January, there were 6.2 million jobs in Pennsylvania.)” https://www.pghcitypaper.com/news/pittsburgh-area-republican-candidate-sean-parnell-inflated-fracking-job-figures-by-a-lot-17001969
It’s a very dedicated interest group with a lot of money behind it, but fossil fuels simply don’t employ that many people, even in PA. It seems like an inadequate excuse for taking positions friendly to the fossil fuel corporations that are destroying our biosphere, both on the local scale and the global scale. Don’t blame Pennsylvania for Harris reversing her position on fracking.
We have a factory up the road that is the lifeblood of the town it is in (taxes and community support, but also just families supported). I could quote the number of people that work there (around 400 I think), but that town of 10k people would would vanish without it. The population would turn on someone promising to shut down the factory that only employs 400.
Multiply that scenario by…every rural town…and you get conciquencual numbers.
Also, while PA is undoubtedly a vital battleground, I want to mention that ElectoralVote currently has the tipping point state for both presidential campaigns as North Carolina: https://electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Pres/Tipping_point/Aug28.html
In other words, if Harris carries PA there’s a decent chance she will also take NC by a slightly larger margin, and will already have secured the presidency without PA’s electoral votes.
That’s because the President can’t ban it if they wanted to. From this very article:
While there are several ways Harris, if elected president, could halt fracking on federal lands using executive power, she wouldn’t be able to unilaterally ban it on private land. Under a 2005 law, the Environmental Protection Agency has almost no regulatory power over fracking. Changing that would require an act of Congress.
There’s little reason to change your stance then, other than to virtue-signal to the right
I prefer to think of it as vice-signalling
