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A Message from Our Executive Director |
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Last week, we hosted a forum on the future of the oil and gas industry’s “Shale Crescent” vision for Appalachia. If you were not able to join us live, you can view the full recording on our YouTube channel. During the event, Prof. Kathy Hipple explained that “there has been no business case for fracking.” Industry analyst Anne Keller shared that increasing demand for recycled plastic may reduce the expected market for new petrochemical facilities in this region, and Former Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, John Hanger, cautioned policymakers to rely on facts rather than “motivated thinking.”
When it comes to the oil and gas industry, policymakers often diminish impacts to communities in favor of supposed economic benefits. They claim that the money and jobs the industry supplies outweighs the human costs. A forthcoming report from our Senior Researcher, Sean O’Leary, calls into question the validity of this approach to energy and economic development. Sign up here to receive a copy of “Appalachia’s Natural Gas Counties: Contributing More to the U.S. Economy and Getting Less in Return” when it is released tomorrow.
In this edition of our newsletter, we are also pleased to introduce you to Advisory Council member, Dr. Martina Angela Caretta, a feminist geographer researching human-environment interactions who has co-authored an important new article on the fear and other stresses experienced by Appalachian residents living in proximity to natural gas pipelines.
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| Advisor’s Corner: Meet Advisory Council Member Dr. Martina Angela Caretta |
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“What we found illuminates the stress and uncertainty that communities experience when natural gas pipelines change their landscape. Residents live with the fear of disasters, the noise of construction and the anxiety of having no control over their own land.”
Read more about Dr. Caretta’s new article, “Living with natural gas pipelines: Appalachian landowners describe fear, anxiety and loss” in our Research Spotlight.
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Dr. Martina Angela Caretta was an Assistant Professor in Geography at West Virginia University between 2016 and 2020. While at WVU, Dr. Caretta investigated the social, economic and environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing and pipeline development in Appalachia. Dr. Caretta is now a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Human Geography at Lund University, Sweden. She holds a PhD in Geography from Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research agenda revolves around the human dimensions of water and climate change adaptation. Dr. Caretta is a Coordinating Lead Author of the United National Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment Report.
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Living with natural gas pipelines: Appalachian landowners describe fear, anxiety and loss.
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A Guest Blog Post by Dr. Martina Angela Caretta and Erin Brock Carlson.
More than 2 million miles of natural gas pipelines run throughout the United States. In Appalachia, they spread like spaghetti across the region.
Many of these lines were built in just the past five years to carry natural gas from the Marcellus Shale region of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where hydraulic fracturing has boomed. West Virginia alone has seen a fourfold increase in natural gas production in the past decade.
Such fast growth has also brought hundreds of safety and environmental violations, particularly under the Trump administration’s reduced oversight and streamlined approvals for pipeline projects. While energy companies promise economic benefits for depressed regions, pipeline projects are upending the lives of people in their paths.
Energy analysts expect gas production to increase this year after a slowdown in 2020. Pipeline companies expect to keep building. And while the Biden administration is likely to restore some regulations, the president has said he would not ban fracking.
“It’’s just kind of sad because they think, once again, this will be West Virginia’s salvation,” one landowner said. “Harvesting the timber was, then digging the coal was our salvation. … And then here’s the third one. We just keep doing the same thing.”
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ORVI In The News
Ted Boettner: Manchin Has Rare Opportunity to Make WV Shine (Charleston Gazette-Mail) Like Senator Byrd before him, Senator Manchin has an extraordinary opportunity to use his power in Washington, DC to give our country and our state a new deal that works for all of us and a legacy of leadership that will be remembered for generations to come. If new leadership fails to significantly improve people’s lives over the next two years, it is highly likely they won’t be in leadership much longer and we will be back to political deadlock.
Will The Fracking Boom Ever Translate Into Jobs And Income For Appalachia’s Residents? (Forbes) The U.S. fracking boom has delivered record amounts of shale gas — fuel used not just for electric generation but also as a feedstock for the manufacturing sector. But despite that explosive growth, the Appalachian region has failed to realize corresponding economic benefits.
Panel Discusses Economic Future of Oil and Gas (Times Leader) A panel of experts from the think tank Ohio River Valley Institute discussed the oil and gas industry and potential cracker plant at Dillies Bottom this week. Panelists expressed doubts about the economic future of the industry and its benefit to local residents.
Ohio Petrochemical Hub Proposal Faces Indefinite Delay (Columbus Dispatch) It’s been years since a massive petrochemical hub was proposed along the Ohio River in Belmont County, creating what would be the biggest economic-development project in Ohio with thousands of construction jobs and a couple hundred permanent jobs. Yet the company behind the project, Thailand-based PTT Global Chemical of America, has never formally committed to building on the site even as JobsOhio, the state’s economic-development arm, has paid $70 million to develop the site.
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What We’re Reading at ORVI
Energy and democracy issues continue to dominate headlines. Here are the stories we are reading this week:
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West Virginia Has Everyone’s Attention. What Does It Really Need? (New York Times) “The joke is that we’re going to have a futuristic West Virginia,” said Kelly Allen, the executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. “The honest answer of it, from our perspective, is that West Virginia and Appalachia deserve an outsized piece of any federal recovery policy.”
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‘Big Tent’ Environmental Justice Plan Looks Past Racial Divides (Bloomberg Law) Environmental justice advocates are looking to link communities of color with experience fighting industrial polluters and landfills with polluted communities in Appalachia—a “big tent,” strength-in-numbers approach they say is ripe for results.
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Report: Clean Energy Plan Could Create 243,000 Pennsylvania Jobs (Beaver County Times) An initiative to combat climate change and invest in renewable energy could generate just short of a quarter-million new Pennsylvania jobs each year, a new report suggests. The Political Economy Research Institute report, released in partnership with the Keystone Research Center, state union leaders and PennFuture, outlines the benefits of an economic plan created by ReImagine Appalachia – a coalition of left-leaning policy and environmental groups.
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Black History Month: An Early Look at William Turner’s Memoir ‘Harlan Renaissance’ (Daily Yonder) William H. Turner’s The Harlan Renaissance: A Memoir of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns is coming from West Virginia University Press in fall 2021. In this preview, from the manuscript, Turner—a sociologist and recipient of the lifetime of service award from the Appalachian Studies Association—reflects on Black life in his hometown of Lynch, Kentucky. This excerpt is republished with permission from “Booktimist,” the blog of West Virginia University Press.
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Deconstructed: Could HR1 Save American Democracy? (The Intercept) H.R.1, also known as the “For the People Act,” is a sweeping reform bill that aims to make voting easier, gerrymandering harder, and generally rein in the out-of-control minoritarianism that has come to characterize American democracy. Does it have a chance of becoming law? Rep. John Sarbanes, political scientist Jacob Hacker, and The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz join Ryan Grim to discuss.
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