Terrie Baumgardner: Fracking and Harris — how close is too close?

Kamala Harris’ change in position on banning fracking has been a hot topic of discussion, and for good reason. On the one hand, political 180s are hard to justify; but on the other, for most of our history, Americans have expected their presidential candidates to gain pragmatic wisdom through political experience, and Harris is soon graduating from a four-year apprenticeship that has tested both the limits of the presidential office and the political influence of Big Oil and Gas.

More importantly, we can’t know what spurred Harris’ 2019 response, but anyone who has investigated hydraulic fracturing in depth — as did Pennsylvania’s 43rd Grand Jury for two solid years under Josh Shapiro — might suspect an impulse to call attention to the harms of fracking experienced by so many, including thousands of Pennsylvanians.

The danger fracking poses to our air, water, property values, families and once-normal climate is real and growing, as is its danger to our health. In a decade of research, numerous studies have shown that the closer we humans are to frack wells, compressor stations, pipelines, gas processing plants, ethane crackers and the four other types of fracking infrastructure encircling us, the greater our risk for cancer, asthma, heart problems, adverse birth-outcomes, and the thyroid and reproductive disorders wrought by endocrine disruption.

Industry has no reason to admit that fracking cannot be done safely. And, as the 43rd Grand Jury concluded in 2020, our government has systematically failed to protect us from the chemical plant being built around us in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

That’s why it’s up to us to ask ourselves these commonsense questions about the problem: Why should fracking infrastructure be built anywhere near our schools, hospitals and homes? What right does the petrochemical industry have to encroach on our residential lives?

And that’s why it’s up to each of us to ask our Pennsylvania decision-makers these policy questions about the solution: Why not put some distance between us and the fracking empire? If we can’t ban it, what about protecting us from its impacts?

In other words, how about some protective buffers from all the encroaching components of fracking?

And more directly, we can and should ask our decision-makers this: When will you, as our public servants in Pennsylvania, step up to adopt the 43rd Grand Jury’s top recommendation — to enact no-drill zones of at least 2,500 feet from homes, and to double that distance from our schools and hospitals?

If necessary, we can add how proud we are to live in a state where the Constitution our elected officials have sworn to “support, obey and defend” actually — and amazingly — guarantees our right to clean air and pure water.

We can remind our decision-makers of how unique among states that constitutional guarantee is.

And we can hope that the uniqueness of that provision does not go down in history as ironic.

Terrie Baumgardner is the Clean Air Council’s Beaver County outreach coordinator based in Aliquippa.