Anaïs Peterson: Fracked Gas in Appalachia won’t help Ukraine, but will hurt our communities

On Feb. 28, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition David Callahan took to the press to exploit Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to advance the coalition’s agenda to increase Appalachian natural gas (aka fracked gas) production, pipelines and exports.

In his interview with KDKA, Callahan said “we have generations of natural gas available” and emphasized the need to build more fossil-fuel infrastructure across Appalachia.

Callahan’s brazenly opportunistic comments gloss over the truth: Increasing fracking right now in Appalachia will not benefit the Ukrainian or European people, because European gas terminals lack capacity to import any more gas, and building new infrastructure requires years of development and billions of dollars. Increasing fracking instead increases the toxic pollution harming the health of Appalachian communities and our global climate.

The most recent report from the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change makes clear that our reliance on fossil fuels has resulted in “nearly half of humanity living in the danger zone” with many ecosystems at the point of no return. Meanwhile, meeting the target of not surpassing 1.5C degrees of warming, which the world scientific community warns is necessary to avoid catastrophe, will soon be out of reach.

Further, recent studies have also shown Pennsylvanians want to see a serious crackdown — not expansion — of fracking, with 25% of Pennsylvania voters saying it should end as soon as possible and nearly one-third saying it should be phased out over time.

The gas being fracked in Appalachia is neither going toward “energy independence” nor benefiting local communities. Two of the most high-profile fossil-fuel projects being built in Pennsylvania that would drive continued fracking demand have nothing to do with energy security or independence. The Shell ethane cracker plant in Beaver County and the Mariner East II pipeline, which cuts across the entire state from Washington County to Delaware County, exist for making single-use plastics and serve to create an unneeded market for fossil-fuel gas. The Shell plant will take ethane and crack it into nurdles, the building blocks of single-use plastic items. The Mariner East II pipeline is a natural gas liquids (NGL) pipeline that would facilitate the transport of NGLs to Europe for the production of single-use plastic. Further unrest and invasion into Europe won’t be prevented by the oil and gas industry’s ability to create plastic forks and bags.

In his interview, Callahan also alluded to increased exports capacity in Pennsylvania, which could only mean the proposed New Fortress Energy (NFE) Gibbstown LNG (liquified natural gas) facility connecting Wyalusing Township to a terminal in Gibbstown, N.J. In February, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) released a new report on New Fortress Energy that stated, “NFE’s presence in the market creates a risky financial and dysfunctional economic dependence on natural gas as a future resource for host nations and communities.”

As the economic feasibility of the fracking industry worsens, the more desperate the oil and gas industry becomes.

The best way to protect the working people across the globe who are most impacted by this invasion, wars and climate catastrophe is to divest from fossil fuels and invest in a renewable energy — which creates more jobs per dollar spent than fracking. An economy that runs on fossil fuels is at the mercy of authoritarian aggression and, as Naomi Klein, professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia and author of “Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” reminds us, disaster capitalism relies on and takes advantage of disasters to push economic reforms that would otherwise fail.

We must not let fossil-fuel companies use Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a public relations campaign to increase fracking, especially in light of dire climate warnings of the need to transition off of fossil fuels.

We must break our dependence on fossil fuels that cause wars and drive the climate crisis. Fracking is not Pennsylvania or Appalachia’s future. Our future is in driving an all-out mobilization to bring renewable energy online in Appalachia, Europe and around the world — promoting the health of the economy, the climate and all of humanity.