![]() One campaign ad that aired in the state said Biden’s “fracking ban” would “kill up to 600,000 Pennsylvania jobs.” (Biden can’t ban fracking, except on federal public lands.) At a rally in Latrobe, Trump claimed that fracking had created 940,000 jobs in the state. Yet four years later, running for reelection, Donald Trump used the same script to try to best Democratic nominee Joe Biden in Pennsylvania. The shale gas “boom” was as ephemeral as Cruz’s presidential prospects. Shareholders are revolting wealth managers are divesting. Methane emissions associated with fracking are so pervasive that many scientists now think substituting natural gas for coal won’t reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The petroleum industry has also taken a major reputational hit for its role in warming the planet while peddling climate-change denialism. As of April, the mining sector had the highest rate of unemployment in the country, at 15%. The oil and gas industry shed more than 100,000 jobs last year, and a report by Deloitte warned that about 70% of the jobs lost in 2020 may not come back this year-or ever. Chevron announced in December 2019 that it would write down up to $11 billion in shale gas assets. Some, like Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, liquidated their shale gas holdings. The stock prices of premier energy firms like Chesapeake Energy Corporation crashed (it declared bankruptcy in 2020). A wave of consolidations and bankruptcies swept across the sector. But nationwide, the glut of gas (and, to a lesser extent, oil) precipitated by the fracking boom depressed prices to their lowest levels since the 1990s. The entire model was premised on high oil and gas prices. With new wells facing average production declines of 60% in the first year, petroleum companies had to frantically drill more of them. ![]() What happened? As a Bloomberg report put it, “The numbers never added up.” Fracking has always been expensive extraordinarily generous fossil-fuel subsidies helped hide the true cost.
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