America’s fracking boom has given the country inexpensive and secure energy. It has also spewed climate-wrecking greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And evidence is mounting that it is gravely harming the health of people who live nearby. Is this a price we’re willing to pay for cheap gas?
Three new studies released by the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health found links between hydraulic fracking for natural gas and serious health problems:
• The first and perhaps most alarming study found that children who live within a mile of a fracking well have significantly higher rates of the cancer lymphoma than children who live five miles away.
• The second suggested links between natural-gas well development and “small for gestational age” weights in babies.
• The third tied proximity to ongoing natural-gas production to higher asthma risks.
The first effect would be deadly, while the other two merely threaten life-long health problems. The studies join a long and growing list of similar findings, including a Yale paper last year suggesting children and newborns living within a mile of a fracking well have higher rates of leukemia.
Concerned Health Professionals of New York, a nonprofit group, keeps a database of every study and report finding some problem caused by fracking. As of early 2022, its latest (now outdated) tally, the group had found 2,239 peer-reviewed studies.
Scores of those studies suggest that the nearly 18 million Americans who live within a mile of a fracking well are at elevated risk of not only cancers, asthma and low birth weight but also heart and respiratory diseases, dangerous pregnancies, skin diseases and mental-health issues. And as is ever the case with the risks of fossil fuels, the worst effects of fracking fall especially heavily on children, pregnant women, minorities and lower-income people.
Other studies suggest fracking pollutes air and water and causes earthquakes. It is also a relentless font of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 86 times better at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
“Our examination uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends,” the nonprofit wrote in 2022.
The fossil-fuel industry, unsurprisingly, denies all of this. But some policymakers are paying more attention. There are efforts to tie carbon-capture technology to fracking equipment to at least mitigate its greenhouse-gas emissions. The Biden administration this month announced a $1.2 billion investment in new carbon capture and storage facilities. But the technology is expensive, unproven and must be powered by some kind of energy, which could contribute to even more pollution and even more warming.
Frackers could use their powers for good, in a way, by probing the earth for geothermal hot spots, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague David Fickling has written. But that would still subject locals to earthquakes, contaminated groundwater and other ills.
It’s naive to hope such concerns will inspire U.S. political leaders to shut down fracking in this country, given all the economic benefits it has brought to voters. And fracked gas is the consensus candidate to carry the country through the transition to a cleaner-energy future.
But whenever we tally up the pluses of cheap fossil fuels, we must remember the other side of the ledger, where the costs are measured.
Those include the exorbitant and rising economic costs of natural disasters and the health impacts of a warming planet. Wildfire smoke, like fracking, is giving small children and babies life-long illnesses. Warming waters are expanding the territory of disease-bearing mosquitoes and deadly flesh-eating bacteria.
For a long time now, society has decided such costs are reasonable in exchange for abundant, inexpensive energy. But the tab is rising, and much worse is in store, given the amount of global warming already in motion. A better plan would be to hasten the transition from fracked gas by putting a price on carbon that matches its societal costs, while making it easier to build and connect clean-power energy to the grid. It’s still not too late to make a different calculation.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
