Kamala Harris is doing well in the national polls, and in some swing states, but she’s struggling in the all-important state of Pennsylvania. Her weakness in the Keystone State is why Nate Silver’s election forecasts, which predict that Pennsylvania will be the pivotal state in November, continue to predict a Trump victory. There are a number of reasons for this — Harris isn’t a Pennsylvania native like Biden, and she passed on the state’s popular governor Josh Shapiro when making her VP pick. But every article I read cites the fracking issue as the #1 reason why a Pennsylvania voters worry about Harris. For example, here’s MSNBC:

In 2019, Harris was supportive of a federal ban on fracking. But in a CNN interview last week, she pledged not to ban the practice as president, saying her perspective was shaped by clean energy gains that were made in the Biden administration without the passage of such a ban.

“I have made it clear that in our state, this is both a jobs issue and energy issue,” Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said in an interview, adding, “There’s no question it’s a significant issue in the state. And I was heartened when, right after her campaign was launched, her campaign made it clear that she wasn’t going to have a policy of banning fracking. That’s a consensus position.”

Harris has already repudiated her 2019 position, and promised not to ban fracking. She repeated this promise at the recent presidential debate:

"I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking," Harris said Tuesday [at the debate].

This is a very good step, but Harris needs to go much further. Instead of simply promising not to ban fracking, she should promise to expand it. And she should be loud and unambiguous about trumpeting what Biden has already accomplished in this regard. The fate of the election could hinge on this. But it also happens to be good policy.

Why fracking is so important to Pennsylvania’s economy

First I think I should point out why fracking is essential to Pennsylvania’s economy. The Marcellus Shale, the country’s biggest source of natural gas, is located almost entirely in Pennsylvania and West Virginia:

Usually, both politicians and pundits think about the economic importance of something like the Marcellus Shale in terms of how many jobs it directly supports. No one knows exactly what this number is for the state of Pennsylvania, but industry estimates are around 123,000.

A lot of people, especially climate activist types, will dispute that figure and claim that it’s an overestimate. But in fact, it’s probably a big underestimate, because of economic effects that even the fracking industry itself doesn’t understand. I’m talking about local multipliers.

Almost none of the gas that gets produced from the Marcellus Shale gets consumed locally — it gets sold to other towns, other states, and other countries. From the perspective of towns in the Marcellus region, it’s export revenue.

Export revenue creates a “local multiplier”. Every dollar that comes in from outside gets circulated locally. It gets spent on construction and heating and lighting, on doctors and dentists and tax prep services, on haircuts and pizza and everything else that makes a local economy tick. Estimates of this effect for shale gas and similar industries range from 1.3 to 2, meaning that for every job shale gas creates, there are 1.3 to 2 other jobs created locally.

Those jobs almost certainly aren’t included in the industry association’s estimates — if you said that jobs in pizza restaurants and hair salons were supported by fracking, the climate activists would laugh at you. And yet it’s true! Without fracking, whole towns would have no real economic reason for existence.

And once you add in the dependents of all those workers, the number of Pennsylvanians whose economic livelihood depends on fracking is probably in the hundreds of thousands. That’s a constituency Harris simply can’t afford to lose.

A fracking ban was always a bad idea

2019 was the high water mark of the socialist movement that was unleashed by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign. The socialists put climate front and center, putting forward the unworkably expensive and over-ambitious Green New Deal, only to see it flop. Undaunted, they proposed other policies, including a ban on fracking. This was more successful, with states like New York and Vermont banning the practice, and national polls showing lukewarm support. But it was obviously a lot less popular in states like Pennsylvania.

The idea of a fracking ban wasn’t just bad politics; it was bad policy. Yes, fracking has its problems — methane leaks and toxic runoff, plus the fact that natural gas itself is a fossil fuel. But all of these are manageable problems. A whole bunch of technological solutions have been found to minimize water pollution from fracking, as well as reducing methane leaks. Meanwhile, natural gas hasn’t stopped the rise of renewables at all, as some environmental activists feared, and it releases a lot less carbon than the coal it replaced. Thanks largely to fracking, the amount of carbon the average American emits has gone down by a quarter since 2006:

But in addition to the environmental and economic benefits of fracking, there are big geopolitical reasons to support it. The Ukraine war cut much of Europe off from Russian gas, but America has stepped in to save the day with LNG exports:

This boosted American growth while saving our European allies from economic collapse. And fracking is what makes this possible.

It’s also worth noting that although the Marcellus Shale itself doesn’t produce a lot of oil compared to other locations, oil fracking is what has made the U.S. the new global powerhouse of the oil industry:

U.S. fracking has kept oil prices in check, giving the U.S. economy a boost, reducing Russia’s ability to fund its war in Ukraine, and weakening a variety of other petrostates like Iran.

Joe Biden ended up doing exactly the right thing by encouraging fracking rather than trying to strangle it. But as with so many other policies, he did it quietly, and has failed to get as much credit as he deserved. Kamala Harris should change that.

Biden championed fracking quietly; Harris should do it loudly

Biden has been the all-time champion of domestic oil production, and of fracking. This wasn’t an accident — it was deliberate policy:

After Biden took office, his administration kept issuing oil and gas permits and did so at a slightly faster pace than his predecessor Donald Trump. The…Inflation Reduction Act…yokes oil and gas lease auctions to wind and solar projects on federal lands and blesses such leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet.

More consequentially, in the past year, the Biden administration dramatically increased liquid natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe. As reported by The Guardian, Biden “paved the way for new pipelines and export facilities, established a new taskforce to boost gas exports to Europe, and approved $300 million in funding to help build out gas infrastructure on the continent.”

You don’t hear Biden trumpeting these policies or these accomplishments much, and I think there are two reasons for that. First, Biden has generally been a modest President who does good things without taking sufficient credit for doing them. Second, Biden is probably wary of alienating Democrats’ progressive activist base, which really, really dislikes the fossil fuel industry.

Matt Yglesias has argued that this is a mistake, and that climate is much less of an important issue than Democrats think. But whether or not Yglesias is right, I think that Harris really doesn’t have to worry about losing progressive voters by championing fracking in Pennsylvania.

As I see it, there are basically two groups of progressive voters. The first, a small group of extremists, would indeed be willing to abandon Harris over support for fracking — if they hadn’t already abandoned her, and the Democratic Party in general, over Palestine, or over the fact that she said she wanted a “lethal military” at the convention, or over the fact that Dick Cheney endorsed her, etc. These voters are a lost cause, and are (fortunately) electorally insignificant.

The second, much larger group of progressives is pragmatic and reasonable enough to realize that even with maximal support for fracking, Kamala will be much, much better for the climate than Donald Trump would be. Trump would likely abandon or try to sabotage the Inflation Reduction Act, the most consequential piece of climate legislation in American history. Harris would not; in fact, she would extend and strengthen promotion of green energy. An “all of the above” energy policy is simply far, far better for the climate than Trump’s policy of sabotaging energy sources that don’t fall on his side of the culture war.

My prediction is that the number of progressives who are unreasonable enough not to realize that Trump is far worse on climate, but reasonable enough not to have already abandoned the Democrats, is vanishingly small. I predict that this tiny slice of voters is far outweighed in importance by the Pennsylvania normies who just want to preserve their jobs and their towns. Meanwhile, overall American support for fracking has risen, as Americans have refocused on pocketbook issues in the wake of the pandemic.

Thus, I believe Harris should not just promise not to ban fracking, but should go around Western Pennsylvania talking about how she plants to expand fracking, while also making it clear that she plans to expand green energy and green manufacturing at the same time. She should be specific about projects that she’ll encourage and new licenses she’ll grant. That promise will make it abundantly clear that Harris’ candidacy poses no threat whatsoever to Pennsylvanians’ way of life, and neutralize Trump’s main vector of attack. It’s good policy and it’s good politics.

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Kamala Harris does not want to ban fracking. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the United States is pumping record amounts of oil and record amounts of natural gas, even as solar installations soar and crucial progress is made on advanced nuclear and advanced geothermal.

Democrats now overwhelmingly understand that they need to say this about fracking, and some (though by no means all) are even willing to boast about oil and gas production. But to the extent that they embrace this tactic, it’s largely because they’ve been told that fracking is politically important in Pennsylvania. So we get takes like David Roberts questioning the wisdom of the pro-fracking stance by noting that there are more direct jobs in Pennsylvania clean energy than in Pennsylvania fracking, or leftist climate communications guru Genevieve Guenther saying it’s bad to give in to Republican “framing” about this.

And I want to push back on this a bit.

It’s of course true that fracking is economically important in parts of Pennsylvania, and that Pennsylvania is a very important state. But even if North Carolina or Arizona emerges as the pivotal state in the 2028 election, it would still not be a good idea for Democrats to ban fracking. Nor is this a question of framing.

America should not ban fracking, because fracking is a means of obtaining oil and natural gas, two extremely valuable commodities. The utility of oil is currently declining due to improvements in battery technology, but robust demand for oil will continue for the foreseeable future. And though global natural gas consumption has leveled off over the past few years, I think it’s likely to start rising soon due to increases in electricity demand.

Either way, the world is using oil and gas in 2024, and will be using oil and gas in 2025, 2026, 2027 and so on. There are very good reasons to try to speed the pace at which the world reduces its consumption of fossil fuels, and there are plenty of reasonable policy measures that can help achieve that. But to the extent that the world continues to use oil and gas, it is the correct policy for the American economy, and for the world’s environment, for the United States to produce a larger share of that oil and gas and for foreign autocracies to produce a lower share.

Democrats should own this policy proudly, exploiting it to maximum electoral effect in Pennsylvania (and Texas), but also seeing it as a correct policy idea, not a grudging concession made to the electoral map.

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We’re going to keep using oil for a while

Nobody knows the exact future of global demand for any commodity, but because rich people with money on the line want to make decisions about investments, a good amount of work goes into trying to guesstimate the future. I wouldn’t take an investment bank research note on any subject as oracular prophecy. But they’re good to look at because they represent good-faith efforts at forecasting by people whose financial incentives lead them to try to be accurate.

David Ernsberger of S&P Global Commodity Insights says that “by 2050, oil demand will be about where it is today.” Goldman Sachs says that global oil demand will peak around 2034, though I think that may be wrong based on the apparent decline in Chinese oil demand.

Right now, most people (especially in America, where gas is cheap and very large vehicles are the norm) don’t want to switch to electric cars. But a lot of the forecasted increase in demand comes from poor countries that are getting less poor and where people are driving more. Current EVs are good enough and cheap enough that it seems totally plausible that many who currently rely on bikes or dirty scooters will upgrade to small, cheap, electric cars, and peak oil could come in 2030 or earlier.

But even when that happens, we’re still looking at years of oil usage. An average car lasts 12 years, so even if the Walz Administration bans the sale of internal combustion engine cars in 2033, plenty of old ones will be on the road into the 2040s. There isn’t currently any viable technological substitute for using oil to power jet planes, and the planes rolling off the assembly line from Boeing and Airbus last for decades.

Maritime shipping is important. Heavy trucks and other industrial equipment are important. There’s a kind of weird discourse in which hardcore anti-greens insist that these are unsolvable problems, which leads environmentalists to push back and talk about all the promising initiatives in these arenas. And they’re right, there are promising initiatives; I think these problems will be solved. But they’re not currently solved, or even on the verge of being solved.

We’re going to need oil for a while.

The case for gas is even stronger

Hostility to oil production at least makes sense to me emotionally, because all this oil that we’re burning really is bad for the air, and existing electric car technology is ready to go. Lots of people don’t want to buy an electric car, because it would be a pain to need to charge it during long road trips (this gives me pause, personally), but if we had to do it, we clearly could, so the environmental community is frustrated.

But on any realistic account of how the global economy works, natural gas isn’t even bad for the environment. Right now, the world is burning enormous amounts of coal for both electricity generation and metallurgical purposes.

Coal is incredibly polluting, and driving it off the electric grid should be a top priority for global environmental policy.

At the same time, global electricity demand is set to rise. A lot of recent discourse focuses on the role that AI plays in this, which is important. But there’s also the fact that an enormous share of the world’s population continues to live in a state of dire energy poverty, from which we would like them to escape. And, of course, a big part of the climate solution is precisely to electrify things like home heat and transportation. A power plant is much more efficient than an internal combustion engine or a little furnace in your basement, so the environmental gains of replacing a gasoline-powered car with an electric one are real, even if the electricity comes from coal. But if the electricity comes from gas instead, it’s a bigger win.

Of course, it’s an even bigger win if the electricity comes from renewables (or hydro or nuclear). But because gas and renewables face different constraints in terms of construction, utilities don’t face an either/or choice between gas and renewables. Doing both lets you add more electricity faster. That’s especially true because the availability of gas-powered plants reduces the cost of building renewables, which would otherwise require massive overbuilding to meet edge-case reliability concerns.

Unless you’re just going to give up on economic growth (which Democrats haven’t and shouldn’t), then it’s desirable for the world to burn more gas, because the real-world alternative to that involves burning more coal.

There’s also the metallurgical situation.

Right now, making steel out of iron typically involves burning a lot of coal. But there’s another way to do it called “direct reduction,” which is typically done with gas. Direct reduction produces a type of iron that can be used in an electric arc furnace (EAF), a kind of facility that currently is mostly used to recycle scrap metal. The deep decarbonization vision is that we run all our EAFs off of zero-carbon sources, get all our basic steel through direct reduction, do the direct reduction with hydrogen rather than gas, and get that hydrogen using electrolysis powered by zero-carbon electricity. And that’s a great vision. But until we have such incredibly abundant zero-carbon electricity that it’s affordable to manufacture huge quantities of hydrogen, gas isn’t just useful, it’s cleaner than the alternative approaches. If you drop the bad habit of reasoning backward from semi-arbitrary emissions targets and just look at the actual impact of your policy choices, blocking gas production doesn’t make sense.

It matters where energy is made

As long as the world is using oil and gas, one reason to want that oil and gas to be made in the United States is jobs. But per Roberts’s point, the direct employment impact of fossil fuel extraction is pretty small. In economic terms, this is actually one of the virtues of fossil fuels — extracting them is a high-productivity undertaking that generates a lot of energy relative to the labor inputs.

But there are other benefits to producing energy at home rather than importing it from abroad.

One is the impact on terms of trade. Back fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years ago, when the United States was a huge net importer of oil, we had a big problem any time the global price of oil spiked. Short-term oil demand is not very elastic, so the dollar value of oil imports would soar, pushing the trade deficit way up and negatively impacting Americans’ living standards. Now that the US is a net oil exporter, our economy is able to ride out price shocks without disastrous consequences. It’s still annoying to consumers when gasoline gets more expensive, but the American economy continued to grow through two different oil price shocks in the post-Covid years.

Another is proximity benefits.

Because natural gas is a useful input in various industrial processes, easy access to abundant natural gas bolsters a wide range of domestic manufacturing. One can concede the point that our long-term policy objective should be to develop cost-effective ways of doing these things that don’t involve gas. But you accomplish that by developing the cost-effective alternative, not by strangling domestic energy, and domestic manufacturing along with it so that equally dirty stuff gets imported from abroad. The global nature of the climate problem is annoying and inconvenient. When Al Gore titled the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” he wasn’t wrong, climate change is genuinely very inconvenient. But it’s still the reality. As long as the gas is being used, it may as well be us using it.

Finally, energy has national security implications. European reliance on Russian gas has undermined the defense of Ukraine. It’s true that Europe is to some extent accelerating renewable deployment in response, which is great. But, again, it’s not like Europe is at a zero coal usage equilibrium. Gas plus the same renewables investment would be a better result. Indeed, one huge climate problem is that in recent years, China has substantially increased its already high coal usage, even as they’ve also deployed tons of renewables. That’s because China doesn’t have much domestic gas and doesn’t want to rely on imports.

That, of course, speaks to the poor state of US-Chinese relations. But to the extent that we can export gas to other, friendlier countries, that will help cement relationships. To the extent that we don’t, those countries will rely more on coal and more on Russia and Qatar.

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A good, prudent policy

Recognizing the virtues of domestic fossil fuel production, as the Biden-Harris administration has, doesn’t mean ignoring environmental considerations.

The centerpiece of the Biden-Harris climate agenda has been huge investments in technology and deployment to reduce long-term demand for fossil fuels. That is a correct and important step. The budget deficit is also high and rising now, which is a problem that Donald Trump would make much worse, but that we should be making efforts to improve. Carbon pricing would further reduce fossil fuel demand while helping to address America’s fiscal problems. I concede that nobody wants to talk about this because it’s unpopular, which is fair enough. But the reason it’s unpopular is people don’t like it when energy gets more expensive. Supply-side fossil fuel policy has the exact same downside and also doesn’t generate any revenue. So I’m not saying climate hawks should be pursuing carbon pricing — political caution is warranted — but if you do want to run the political risk of making energy more expensive, you should at least do it in a way that makes sense.

Meanwhile, the administration is also moving to implement prudent regulation of the extraction process itself — cracking down on methane leaks, for example, and ensuring that US production is much cleaner than its foreign rivals.

I would like to adjust policy to be a bit friendlier to American fossil fuel extractors. But the first step in making that happen, I think, is to convince Democrats to be less sheepish about the fact that they haven’t given in to demands for a huge crackdown. They ought to see this as a balanced, prudent policy that is worth proudly articulating and whose logic they should take seriously. Instead, they often seem to see it as a shameful compromise with political necessity or the specific dictates of Pennsylvania. It’s not. It’s simply a correct analysis of a difficult problem.

The model to emulate should be something like the approach of the center-left government of Norway, which is way ahead of us in terms of reducing their domestic fossil fuel demand, but which continues to pump oil and gas for sale on the world market. The Norwegians take care of their genuine responsibility to the global environment, while also recognizing that it is better, not just for Norway, but for the entire world to have fossil fuel resources controlled by a responsible democratic state with good values rather than by Venezuela or Iran. The United States is new to the game of being a fossil fuel exporter but should try to emulate that ethic — investing in innovation and targeting demand, and also supplying the world with the energy it needs, while it needs it.

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Dear Patient,

In our continual efforts to provide you with the confusing level of treatment you’ve come to expect, we’d like to introduce you to HellthChase, our new cumbersome and contactless check-in solution.

HellthChase invites and obligates you to engage in the unpaid data entry of your health information. Once you’re set up, you can complete a variety of other activities online without having to interact with a human regarding important medical care.

What kinds of activities can I complete on HellthChase?
You can attempt such tedious tasks as:

• Ask questions or request prescription refills from doctors and staff who might read and respond within one day or never
• Regularly scan and upload your insurance card and driver’s license because we’re not sure we believe you that you are who you say you are
• Sign forms with a pre-selected online signature in the font of an eight-year-old child’s writing
• Be gaslit into thinking you can schedule appointments online easily
• Examine some HIPAA forms you signed but never read and don’t give a shit about
• Opt in by default to receive texts about balances due, with no billing or insurance detail

Are my records secure?
Yes. All personal data entered online is completely hacker-proof. Did you know that prior to web-based recordkeeping, paper records were constantly being snagged from doctors’ offices by cat burglars?

Is that true?
No, but it’s a narrative that HellthChase says inspires instant cooperation from technophobic patients.

Given that I can complete forms at home before my appointment, will HellthChase save me time?
Oh, god, no. HellthChase convinced us to purchase off-brand digital tablets that our receptionists will hand you at check-in. The tablets love to freeze and time out, which allows you to mindfully watch a digital hourglass (HellthChase likes to say they put the “patient” in “Patient Portal”). Once our Wi-Fi has caught up and the screen refreshes or starts over at the beginning, you will get a chance to confirm or re-enter any information you previously completed before your appointment.

Wait, if I have to hold a tablet… didn’t you say it was contactless?
Well, you don’t have to touch the receptionist’s hand; you just have to take the tablet. Technically, you aren’t making contact with a human, which is our ultimate goal. However, holding a tablet that was held moments earlier by another ill person allows you exposure to healthy germs that will keep your immune system robust.

Will this system connect with patient portal systems my other doctors use so I can have one login?
No. As an American with healthcare, you must have unique passwords for at least twenty bespoke portals, none of which connect with one another.

Did my previous online health records migrate over?
Ha ha ha, what? No. Those were lost in a cloud fire. You can declare yourself at the beginning of a fresh start of your health, or if you were a really anxious nerd and you printed your previous records, you can try entering them on your own (but remember the character limit). Or you may give them to your provider, who will just throw them in the trash.

Two days ago, I requested a prescription refill, but I have not heard back. Should I request a refill via my pharmacy?
No. This double-dipping will create confusion and delay. Just be patient. Doctors may take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to respond, but sometimes take 1,204 hours due to regular software updates to the portal.

I received a scary test result via the portal. Can I please speak with a doctor to confirm I’m not dying?
What are you doing trying to interpret your own test results? Those are not meant for your eyes. Wait for your doctor to message you that everything is fine.

Isn’t the point of the portal to access my information?
The point of the portal is that it’s cool and proves we aren’t afraid to stay on the cutting edge of technology, even when it’s not helpful yet. There are definitely notes our doctors make and see, and you will never know about anything you don’t have access to. You really shouldn’t be looking at anything. Except the HIPAA forms.

I’d prefer not to be texted balances due. Can you mail me a bill instead?
No. One hundred percent of ill Americans, you included, are criminals who plan to never pay their medical balances, so for efficiency, we omit sending detailed paper bills. Instead, the portal bombards you with a series of texts with balance reminders, which is not unlike the harassment of debt collectors. Just trust that the amount we say you owe is correct. Pay immediately, or you will be texted repeated threats and insults, you lazy sack of disease-riddled bones.

Can I opt out of this bullshit?
No, you are obligated to take charge of your well-being with HellthChase. Sign in today to take an active role in getting actively frustrated by your healthcare. Your username is your social security number, and your default password is SucKeR.