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Vice President Kamala Harris has said that she will not attempt to ban fracking if elected president, a reversal of a position that she took during her 2020 presidential campaign. But a TV ad from Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick claims that Harris “would make” hundreds of thousands of fracking-dependent jobs in Pennsylvania “disappear.”
Even if Harris wanted to ban fracking, which she now says she doesn’t, she alone would only be able to do so on federal land, where presidents have the authority to restrict drilling for oil and natural gas, experts told us. A ban on state or private land, where the vast majority of oil and natural gas production in the country takes place, would require an act of Congress.
It’s also questionable that more than 300,000 jobs in Pennsylvania “depend on fracking,” as the ad claims. That estimate of indirect and induced jobs attached to the state’s wider oil and natural gas industry comes from a 2023 report commissioned by an industry trade association. Others say the estimate is inflated.
The McCormick ad, released in tandem with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, began airing across the Keystone State on Sept. 17, according to the ad tracking service AdImpact. The ad starts with a nearly 5-year-old video of Harris talking about fracking, known formally as hydraulic fracturing.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” Harris says in the clip, which was her response in a 2019 climate town hall to a question about a potential fracking prohibition.
The ad’s narrator then goes on to say: “Harris would make these Pennsylvania jobs disappear. But that’s not all. Three hundred thousand Pennsylvania jobs that depend on fracking would also disappear.” After that, McCormick appears in the ad and says that means “truck drivers, hard-working people like mechanics, even bartenders,” would be out of work.
McCormick then asks, “And what’s Bob Casey say about Kamala?” That’s followed by a clip of Sen. Casey of Pennsylvania, McCormick’s Democratic opponent, saying in a July MSNBC interview that Harris is “prepared right now to do this job.” At the end of the ad, the Republican businessman calls Casey and Harris “too weak.”
To be clear, Casey is against banning fracking, and Harris now says she is, too.
“As president, I will not ban fracking,” Harris responded when asked in an Aug. 29 CNN interview if she still wanted to ban the procedure that uses water, sand or chemicals to extract oil and natural gas from underground rock formations. In that interview, Harris said her position changed when she realized that it is possible to achieve certain climate goals “without banning fracking” — a drilling process that can negatively impact the environment, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Harris reiterated her promise not to ban fracking at the Sept. 10 presidential debate, in which her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, claimed — as he often has — that Harris “will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania” if she becomes president.
“My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” Harris said, after noting that she voted for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Among other things, that law requires the Department of Interior to make at least some federal land and offshore waters available for leasing by oil and gas companies to do drilling.
Furthermore, no president can unilaterally ban all fracking, experts told us.
“The President would only be able to truly ban fracking on federal lands, where it can fully control land and resource use,” Jennifer Baka, an associate professor of geography at Penn State University, said in an email to us. “On state and private lands, where most fracking occurs, fracking is regulated by the states through their authority to govern land and resource use.”
Presidents could try to further limit fracking through executive actions or regulations, but such measures would have to survive expected legal challenges and also could be overturned by a future president. “It would require an act of Congress to ban it nationwide,” said Timothy W. Kelsey, a professor of agricultural economics at Penn State, in an email to us.
In recent years, Congress has failed to pass bills eliminating fracking nationwide.
Fracking Jobs in Pennsylvania
Fracking has helped produce record amounts of crude oil and natural gas in the U.S., which is currently the world leader in production of both energy sources. The technology also has contributed to Pennsylvania becoming the second-largest producer of natural gas behind Texas.
The ad’s narrator says that a ban would mean Pennsylvania fracking jobs would no longer exist, and “300,000 Pennsylvania jobs that depend on fracking also would disappear.” But the number of jobs in Pennsylvania that rely on fracking is debatable.
Text on screen in the ad says, “Harris Fracking Ban 330,640 lost jobs,” although no source is cited. Supporting documentation that an NRSC spokesperson provided to FactCheck.org shows the figure comes from a 2023 report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and natural gas trade association.
The report, produced by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that there were 423,700 jobs tied to Pennsylvania’s oil and natural gas industry in 2021, including 93,060 direct jobs, 143,530 indirect jobs at businesses within the industry’s supply chain and 187,110 induced jobs from the spending of wages made by people employed directly or indirectly in the industry. (The indirect and induced jobs figures add up to 330,640.)
So, the ad’s figure for fracking-dependent jobs at risk if a total ban were implemented is an estimate of the economic impact for the broader oil and gas industry. It’s also an overestimate, according to Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher for the Ohio River Valley Institute, a think tank that focuses on clean energy policy and economics.
In an August 2023 blog post, he argued that the estimate of indirect and induced jobs in the API report was derived using “exaggerated multipliers” and “double counting.” In an email to us, O’Leary — using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the partially labor union-funded Economic Policy Institute — estimated that there were 55,509 fracking-related jobs in Pennsylvania in 2023, of which 18,636 were direct jobs and the rest were indirect and induced jobs.
His estimate was based on employment in five BLS categories that could “reasonably be associated with the fracking industry,” he said, including oil and gas extraction, drilling for oil and gas, support services for oil and gas, oil and gas pipeline construction, and pipeline transportation. Meanwhile, the API’s report mostly relied on data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and included additional employment sectors.
O’Leary said many jobs that API counted, such as clerks at gas stations with and without convenience stores, are “not specifically associated with fracking.”
Kelsey also said in an email to us that the API figure “seems pretty high” compared with jobs estimates from studies done years ago when “natural gas development was much more robust in PA than it has been for the past few years.”
As for state government data, the 2022 Pennsylvania Energy Employment Report, produced for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Energy Programs Office by the consulting firm BW Research Partnership, said that in 2021 there were a combined 40,684 petroleum and natural gas jobs in the state, including jobs across sectors for fuel extraction and mining, power line transmission and wholesale trade and distribution, fuel storage, and electricity generation. The report did not mention fracking, explicitly.
However, Kelsey noted that state employment figures do not account for indirect and induced jobs, and thus are “almost always less than the total economic impact of a sector.”
So, the number of jobs in Pennsylvania that “depend on fracking” may be lower than the ad claims, but it also may be higher than state data suggest.
Correction, Sept. 24: We originally reported the wrong figure from O’Leary for fracking-related jobs. We have corrected the error.
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