How the Environmental Vote in Pennsylvania is Being Derailed
Craig Stevens made the same phone call every week for seven years. A Tea Party Republican with generational roots in Northeast Pennsylvania, the water on his family farm had been impacted by the fracked gas boom overtaking his corner of Appalachia. Negative impacts to his property caused him to cross paths with a growing number of residents facing air and water pollution related to the extraction of natural gas, also known as fracking.
His weekly call was to the attorney general of Pennsylvania. He left the same message every time, the pollution Craig and his neighbors were experiencing amounted to crimes that demanded an investigation. Week after week, year after year he always made the call. After Josh Shapiro was elected as Pennsylvania’s attorney general in 2016, Craig received an unexpected return call, inviting him to the AG’s office in Harrisburg to elaborate on evidence of pollution he’d been gathering. Craig decided to bring a few impacted residents along, seventeen in all. They recounted harrowing tales of fracking related pollution that destroyed their home’s value and harmed their health. They also described how the company responsible led a public campaign to smear them as lying about the pollution.
Shapiro’s office opened a case and spent more than two years interviewing dozens of harmed residents, reviewing scientific reports and testing. A grand Jury reviewed the evidence and found grounds for an indictment. In June of 2020, charges were announced: “the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General is formally charging Cabot Oil and Gas, an unconventional gas, or ‘fracking,’ company, for environmental crimes that occurred in northeastern Pennsylvania.” Craig and his neighbors were elated. After a decade, the residents thought justice had finally arrived.
2020 became 2021, with no word of a court date or any deliberations. Finally at the end of 2023 Shapiro’s office announced a plea deal. By this time Cabot had merged with a Texas-based company, Coterra Energy. The plea deal promised that Coterra would fund a new water line to bring potable water to Dimock residents, who had been without usable water for more than ten years. Shapiro himself showed up for a local press briefing, with many of the impacted homeowners onstage. There was a tangible sense of jubilation. After ten years, they thought they had accomplished the impossible: making a big corporation pay for their mistakes.
The celebration lasted one night. The next morning, pollution victims realized they’d been duped. Shapiro’s office together with Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Regulation, the agency tasked with regulating oil drilling in Pennsylvania, had been working on a deal with Coterra that basically gave the company what it wanted. Coterra promised to build a water line bringing clean water to residents. But in exchange a decade-long moratorium on drilling and fracking that had been protecting the Dimock aquifer from further pollution was lifted. Cottera could go back to drilling and fracking, once again threatening the area’s drinking water.
Not only that, many families were promised deliveries of bulk water until the water line was built, but the final agreement swapped out the bulk water for bottled water. You can’t shower with bottled water, or do laundry or wash dishes. Complaints fell on deaf ears. One resident has been doing his own bulk water deliveries for ten years and was forced to continue that weekly chore. Other residents are pulling water from their ponds, or nearby Burdick creek.
Once Shapiro was elected governor, he became even more frack friendly. One of his signature initiatives is the Appalachian Hydrogen Hub, which would be fueled by fracked gas from in and around the area where the moratorium was lifted. While the goal of bringing jobs and long-term environmental benefits to Pennsylvania was laudable, the residents impacted by the fracking boom felt betrayed by Shapiro. The promised water line was making little progress as of 2024 and the kinds of regulations needed to keep fracking safe (if that is even possible) seemed farther away than ever.
The Pennsylvania environmental community was naturally suspicious when Kamala Harris became the nominee for the 2024 presidential election. In 2019 Harris said, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” While Harris still supports moving the nation off fossil fuels, and her record on environmental issues is solid, the candidate now says she would not support an immediate fracking ban. This position has been widely seen as a political necessity to win Pennsylvania (90% chance of being the state that decides the election), her flip flop was viewed with hostility by many of Pennsylvania’s environmentalists.
If America shut down our fracked gas energy supply “now” millions would go without power. The real goal is to phase out fracked gas as renewable energy is phased in. In support of that goal Harris cast the deciding vote in support for the Inflation Reduction Act which is the most comprehensive climate legislation ever passed in the US. But the more immediate need is tighter regulations and transparency from the fracking industry. These are the kinds of policies left-leaning voters can get behind and that Harris naturally supports..
Harris and Shapiro have driven some left leaning voters in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania to declare they will vote for neither Trump or Harris. A recent Guardian article highlighted the trend with a title declaring; “I’m not voting for either.” Losing too many in that base could cost Harris the state and the election. Former President Trump told Fox News in an interview that he would be a dictator for one day, and on that day he would dictate ‘drill baby drill’, a chilling promise for water pollution victims living in frackland. Trump is a staunch deregulation supporter. But that’s an outcome some anti-fracking voters seem fine with. The specter of a deregulation focused “frack frack frack like a duck” President Trump doesn’t seem to be enough to get these voters over their loathing of Governor Josh Shapiro and other Democrats they feel have let them down.
One politician this group did trust was Robert Kennedy jr. An early and vocal opponent of fracking, Kennedy was a passionate supporter of anti-fracking efforts. An environmental lawyer at the time, he was also arrested in front of the White House while protesting the Keystone Pipeline. When he announced as a candidate for President in 2024, many in this group were all in. Kennedy visited Dimock in Spring of 2024 and produced a short film to help raise awareness of the ongoing pollution issues faced by residents.
Then Kennedy left the race and endorsed Trump. Trump’s platform includes; “Make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!” That’s a goal you would think most environmental voters would rush to oppose. A source close to Robert Kennedy says that Kennedy hopes to move Trump away from deregulation to stricter environmental regulations. Any look at the candidate’s rhetoric would cast doubt on that possibility. Sources within the Pennsylvania anti-fracking movement contend that most voters who were hopeful about Kennedy are now voting for Trump or Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, who has vowed to keep Harris out of the White House.
In 2014, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Regulation admitted they had sent letters to 243 residents alerting them that their water had been impacted by fracking. Ten years later no one knows how many cases of pollution have occurred. DEP does not keep track. All impacted residents have to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they can have their water restored. It’s not possible to know how widespread the negative impacts from fracking are because all pollution victims are gagged in this way. Taking a Trump led deregulation road from here spells even more trouble.
“The difference between the climate and environmental impacts of a Trump or Harris presidency would be vast. We know this because we’ve already seen it.” says Dana Nuccitelli, an environmental scientist and climate journalist. “The Trump administration rolled back every possible environmental regulation during his first term. It was a polluter’s dream. Conversely, the Biden-Harris administration signed into law America’s largest-ever climate bill in the Inflation Reduction Act, and implemented numerous strong climate and environmental regulations.”
While trusting Harris after she changed views on fracking may be hard, it’s valuable to remember that banning fracking on the fly sounds nice, but it’s not realistic. If the fracked gas switch was shut down tomorrow, millions would be without lights. “Phase out fracking” would have been a more accurate promise from Harris, a promise that could draw these voters back to here in these last days, in a state she desperately needs to win, and these water pollution victims need her to win.