National Review Online
Monday, September 09, 2019
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts promises that
if she is elected president, she will issue an immediate unilateral prohibition
— based on some presidential power that she’ll invent as soon as she gets
around to it — on the method of natural-gas production known colloquially as
“fracking.” Other Democratic contenders, including Vermont socialist Bernie
Sanders and Kamala Harris of California, have made similar promises.
Another way of saying this is that the Democrats promise
to induce artificial scarcity in the energy market. Yet another way of saying
this is that the Democrats promise to create effective subsidies for such
relatively high-pollution energy sources as coal and diesel at the expense of a
relatively low-pollution energy source in the form of natural gas. And yet
another way of saying this is that the Democrats propose to subsidize petroleum
producers from Russia to Iran at the expense of small to midsize businesses in
Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico, Texas, and other energy-producing states.
Why?
What we call “fracking” relies on two relatively old
technologies: hydraulic fracturing, which is used to break up underground shale
formations to release oil and gas trapped therein, and horizontal drilling,
which allows for the efficient recovery of that released oil and/or gas.
Combining those two technologies with recent advances in everything from
materials development to seismic imaging has revolutionized energy production
in the United States — and that gets up the noses of certain people, prominent
among them so-called environmentalists who are categorically opposed to all new
development of conventional energy sources — even when that development comes
with important environmental benefits. Their opposition is ideological and
quasi-religious. It is based only very loosely on genuine environmental
concerns.
Which is not to say that there aren’t any. Unconventional
gas production, like any other kind of energy production, brings with it
environmental challenges. These are mostly unsexy problems involving things
such as wastewater management — there’s a lot of poisonous and occasionally
radioactive stuff deep underground, and the water used in hydraulic fracturing
brings some of that up with it. In the early days of fracking, that wastewater
would be turned over to municipal water-management authorities, who often just
diluted it and dumped it into the nearest river; thankfully, better techniques
(including recycling fracking water) have since been developed. Other, more
dramatic environmental problems associated with fracking range from the
fictitious to the exaggerated. Fracking can contribute to “induced seismicity,”
meaning little earthquakes that are generally but not always too small to be
felt at the surface. Fracking can also lead to drinking-water contamination
through “methane migration,” meaning the leakage of natural gas from wells into
groundwater — but it is worth keeping in mind that such methane migration also
happens both naturally (“burning springs” were documented in North America as
far back as the early 1700s) and through other activity such as digging water
wells. Studies have suggested that fracking is in fact less likely to produce
this kind of contamination than is conventional drilling, in part because
fracking typically happens at a depth far removed from accessible groundwater.
Those are the environmental challenges. The
environmental benefit is this: In the first two decades of this century,
the United States substantially reduced its greenhouse-gas emissions, more so
than in many Western European countries pursuing active national programs of
carbon-dioxide reduction. This happened because the abundant production of
natural gas drove down prices and made it attractive to substitute that
relatively clean-burning fuel for such relatively high-emissions sources as
coal and heating oil for purposes such as generating electricity and heating
buildings. The United States achieved these reductions while emissions were
climbing in most of Asia and Europe. And it did so without any heavy-handed
regulation or federal bullying.
The fundamental issue here isn’t methane or carbon
dioxide or climate modeling: It is gullibility. On the one hand, the
Democrats offer a pie-in-the-sky “Green New Deal” through which greenhouse-gas
emissions might be radically reduced at no real cost to anybody and no
meaningful economic disturbance . . . at some point in the future . . . by
giving today’s Democrats a great deal of money and power and by implementing a
bunch of things that look for all the world like the longstanding Democratic
policy wish-list, many of them only remotely connected to energy or climate
change. On the other hand, we have the opportunity to substitute — right here
and right now — relatively clean sources of energy for relatively dirty ones,
and to do so mainly by relying on the fact that producers and industry will do
so on their own simply by responding to ordinary economic incentives — incentives
rooted in abundance and in the emergence of a world-beating U.S energy industry
that creates millions of good jobs in the process.
This offers a rare opportunity for agreement between
intellectually honest parties worried about climate change and those who think
that the climate threat is exaggerated but welcome the abundant domestic
production of natural gas for other reasons. But the Democrats are having none
of that.
A more responsible “green” agenda would consist of
helping to enable gas production with a minimum of environmental trouble by
regulating and managing the real and undeniable environmental challenges
involved in energy production in an intelligent and productive way — as,
indeed, many state environmental agencies have shown themselves more than able
to do when it comes to fracking. Making absurd, fanciful promises — and
inducing environmental terror — is a fine way to run a presidential campaign
but a poor way to run a country.
Despite the Lenten, renunciatory attitude of the environmentalists,
cutting off that plentiful and affordable supply of natural gas would not
mean simply forgoing a certain amount of energy consumption and the emissions
that go along with it. Rather, it would mean paying higher prices for the same
energy, possibly switching in some cases from natural gas to coal or diesel or
other relatively high-emissions fossil fuels, or relying more heavily on
imports instead of enjoying our current position as the world’s largest
petroleum producer and a major energy exporter. In exchange for what? Some
vague promise that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to train newly unemployed
oilfield workers in Pennsylvania to install energy-efficient windows in
Brooklyn?
We have high hopes for other parts of the energy
industry: Solar panels, for example, have proved valuable for powering fracked
gas wells, which tend not to be located next to power outlets. The success of
fracking is one of those prototypical great American entrepreneurial success
stories, a very fine example of the magic that can happen when the profit
motive brings together capital, expertise, and commitment. If the same process
means that one day we can power spaceships with chopped kale and good wishes,
then no one will be better pleased than we. But, at the moment, the best thing
the federal government can do is to let prosperity emerge on its own, without
the clumsy attentions of Senator Warren or one of the other clever lawyers who
believe that we can talk our way into abundance.
The American gas industry is one of the best things our
country has going for it economically. That the Democrats propose to sacrifice
it to ideology and political convenience is one of the better arguments for
keeping them far away from the levers of power.
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