“What the Frak? How is Fracking Still Controversial in 2024?” By DAVID BLACKMON
“ The whole thing was admittedly a great PR success for the environmental left, one that helped to drive a legal and regulatory assault on the nation’s oil and gas industry throughout the Obama/Biden
What the Frak? How is Fracking Still Controversial in 2024?
NOV 2
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PAID
Back in 2008, in anticipation of the potential election of Barack Obama in his race against Republican John McCain for the presidency, the major environmentalist groups got together to fund a coordinated effort to attack hydraulic fracturing. Together with an array of anti-progress celebrities like Yoko Ono, they had the campaign well established by September of that year, complete with the standard planted stories in friendly media outlets, along with paid digital, tv and radio advertising.
The campaign even managed to turn the safe, effective, and well-regulated industrial process into a cussword in the public’s mind, co-opting a phrase made popular in the reboot of the Battlestar Gallactica TV series – “frakking” – but changing the spelling to “fracking.” Obama himself, along with running mate Joe Biden, even worked the “fracking” talking points into their rally speeches as the general election campaign progressed.
The whole thing was admittedly a great PR success for the environmental left, one that helped to drive a legal and regulatory assault on the nation’s oil and gas industry throughout the Obama/Biden years, with a special focus on the shale sector, for whose success the continued deployment of the process in combination with horizontal drilling was essential.
As the Obama years progressed, the ongoing attacks on fracking and shale become a bit of logical contradiction given that the oil and gas business was one of the few real growth sectors in the Obama economy. You might have thought Obama, Biden and his political appointees would have gained an appreciation as time went along, but you would have been disappointed in entertaining that thought.
Here we are, 16 years down the road, having now spent an absurd amount of time in this year’s campaign discussing whether Kamala Harris, this year’s Democrat party anti-oil and gas nominee, would ban fracking should she be declared the winner. The fact that this issue even remains a topic of serious discussion after all the economic benefits this country has derived from fracking and the oil and gas bonanza it has unlocked from the nation’s major shale formations is hard to explain.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal this week, S&P Global vice chairman Daniel Yergin – author of energy-focused best-sellers like “The Prize,” and “The New Map” – expressed similar amazement of his own about the conversation surrounding fracking in an op/ed titled “America Can’t Do Without Fracking.”
“A ban on fracking would be both misguided and destructive for the U.S. and its allies,” Yergin writes. “Recurrent out-of-touch debates on the topic need to be tabled in light of a central fact: Shale has become crucial to the U.S. economy and global energy security.”
“Out of touch” is perhaps the most apt way to describe Harris’s 2019 pledge to ban fracking outright, and her campaign’s intentional lack of clarity on whether she has changed her mind 5 years later. The truth is, there is simply no way to know what will happen related on this and other energy-related matters in a Harris/Walz administration.
This isn’t a problem just for Americans for whom production and use of shale oil and natural gas is crucial to their personal well-being: The lack of clarity of policy is also a problem for America’s allies whose own economies depend on oil and LNG exported by the US.
“Japan and South Korea have come to rely on U.S. energy exports, which have proved essential for diversifying their supply and strengthening their security,” Yergin points out. “Losing that contribution would make them more vulnerable, reduce their confidence in the reliability of the U.S., and likely push them toward importing from Russia.”
America today stands as the largest producer of oil and natural gas in world history, a fact that has enabled the US to become a net exporter of both products following decades of over-reliance on foreign imports. A ban on fracking would very quickly return our country to a dependency on exporting countries in the Middle East and other parts of the world.
If you are a national security voter, Harris’s refusal to provide clarity on this specific issue should make your decision in this election a no-brainer. “Fracking” is not a cussword – it is an American economic dynamo and a national security necessity.
