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A Message from Our Executive Director |
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Many of us are nearing a year of isolation in our homes, but recently it feels like the very ground beneath our feet is changing when it comes to the oil and gas sector. Our report on the failure of the fracking industry to deliver on its economic promises struck a chord that continues to reverberate throughout the region. The Delaware River Basin Commission, after years of pressure from residents and advocates, took the historic step of banning fracking in the Delaware River Watershed. And, Environmental Health News announced a four-part series called “Fractured” with startling new findings on exposure to harmful chemicals for western Pennsylvania families near fracking, and the failure of regulations to protect communities’ mental, physical, and social health.
In this edition of our newsletter, Senior Researcher Ted Boettner provides a window into the West Virginia Legislature, including challenges with transparency and the legislative threats and opportunities to expect during this session. We also highlight the key findings of a PennFuture report on the failure of fossil fuel subsidies, and a new article from Research Fellow Eric de Place on the risk associated with transporting LNG by rail and how the Biden administration could protect vulnerable communities with common sense insurance policies.
We are also pleased to introduce you to our featured Advisory Council member, Jill Kriesky, Ph.D., who has dedicated her career to working in university-based research and community outreach on issues including labor relations, economic development and community health. Dr. Kriesky, with the WV Center on Budget and Policy, will soon release an important new report on the economic costs of the drug epidemic in Kanawha County, WV.
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| Advisor’s Corner: Meet Advisory Council Member Jill Kriesky |
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”It’s time for West Virginia and Kanawha County to understand the value of harm reduction programs in controlling the costs of the drug epidemic and improving the quality of life for all of their residents.”
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Jill Kriesky, Ph.D., has spent many years engaged in university- and community-based outreach activities in Appalachia’s Ohio Valley. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kriesky was a professor at the Institute for Labor Studies and Research at West Virginia University (WVU) where she developed and delivered programming and conducted research for unions on economic and collective bargaining topics. Her career broadened to include outreach to a variety of community-based non-profits after she became the Director of Service Learning Programs at WVU and Executive Director of WV Campus Compact in 2001. She continued to promote student engagement in local non-profit work as the Director of the Appalachian Institute and the Service for Social Action Center at Wheeling Jesuit University from 2004 to 2010. Among the student immersion trips she created there was an environmentally-focused one that raised her awareness of the health impacts of West Virginia’s extractive industries on workers and communities.
After moving to Pittsburgh in 2010, Kriesky continued to focus on both the economic and health impacts of environmental degradation through her work with the WV Center on Budget and Policy, WVU’s Center of Excellence in Women’s Health, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Healthy Environments and Communities. In 2013 she became the Associate Director of the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project (EHP). The newly-formed non-profit helped residents whose health was impacted by shale gas fracking through health and environmental data collection, analysis and dissemination. Since retiring from EHP in 2020, Kriesky has volunteered with several policy- and community-oriented initiatives including Reimagine Appalachia, the Southwest Pennsylvania Cancer and the Environment Network, and the Pittsburgh Schweitzer Fellows Program. She is also completing a study on the economic costs of the drug epidemic in Kanawha County, WV for the WV Center on Budget and Policy.
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Railroaded By the Gas Industry: why Biden should use common sense insurance requirements to protect Pennsylvania communities.
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Before you get behind the wheel of a car, you’re required to have auto insurance. It costs a few bucks, especially for bad drivers, but everyone understands that insurance is a commonsense way to protect the public from the costs of accidents.
It’s too bad railroads don’t have to play by the same rules. Even when moving dangerous cargo through towns and cities, they are not required to carry insurance proportional to the risk. So when railroad accidents happen — and they do — taxpayers can end up footing the bill.
The fact is, a commonsense insurance requirement would almost certainly spell the end of LNG by rail because neither the railroads nor the gas companies can buy enough coverage to protect the public. And even if they could buy it, it would likely be so costly as to make the whole endeavor unprofitable. But if the project they’re backing — running mile-long LNG trains through Pennsylvania cities — can’t be underwritten by private insurance, isn’t that a big red flag that it’s just too dangerous?
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The West Virginia Legislature got underway on Wednesday, February 10th and so far the legislative session has been marked by a lack of accountability and transparency, not to mention moving legislation aimed at crippling public education, reducing workers’ rights, and large regressive tax cuts that will hurt working families.
As the 60-day legislative session moves forward in West Virginia, stay tuned for more in-depth review of policy proposals, especially as they relate to energy policy and fair democracy. In the meantime, be sure to subscribe to the weekly newsletters of some of the organizations on the ground working on these issues, including WV Environmental Council, WV Rivers Coalition, WV Center on Budget and Policy, and WV Citizen Action Group.
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The Failure of Fossil Fuel Subsidies in Pennsylvania: new analysis tallies billions in giveaways, but anemic results.
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$3.8 billion is enough money to run the entire economy of a small country. But it’s just barely enough to cover the cost of Pennsylvania’s annual subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
Those subsidies are described in painstaking detail in an excellent new analysis by PennFuture, “Buried Out of Sight.” Researchers at PennFuture were able to identify over 50 ways that state and local governments subsidize fossil fuels so extensive that the value works out to $296 for every person in the state.
The authors are quick to point out that the subsidies encourage pollution and harm the environment. What’s worse, they don’t even seem to be effective at producing real economic benefits. A little more than half the value of the subsidies went to the shale gas industry to support fracking and other activities (with the remainder split between coal and oil). One would expect, then, to see economic benefits arise in proximity to gas development, but as we illustrate in our recent report, “Appalachia’s Natural Gas Counties,”precisely the opposite has happened.
Pennsylvania can make smarter investments with public money. The environmental damage from fossil fuels is well documented and well understood. And as the evidence becomes clearer that the industry is a lousy economic bet, too, it’s time for state lawmakers to consider new approaches that can save taxpayers money while delivering real prosperity for local communities.
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ORVI In The News
Winds of Change in Appalachia (KBOO)
This episode of Locus Focus highlights two people at the forefront of reshaping the direction of Appalachia – Ted Boettner and Eric de Place of the Ohio River Valley Institute.
Ohio Ethane Cracker Plant Decision Could Face Delay (Columbus Dispatch)
“Investors are becoming increasingly wary of the petrochemical industry and major companies like BP are divesting their global petrochemical business,” said Joanne Kilgour, Executive Director of the Ohio River Valley Institute. “ It is time for local and regional policymakers to take a hard look at past decisions that put all of their economic development resources into the false promises of the oil and gas and petrochemical sector and embrace new, diverse strategies for more resilient local economies and healthier communities.”
Gas Industry Hasn’t Delivered on its Economic Promise to Communities, Report Says (StateImpact Pennsylvania)
“This extreme disconnect between economic output and local prosperity raises the question of whether the Appalachian natural gas industry is capable of generating or even contributing to broadly shared wellbeing,” the report said. “And, if it is not, should it continue to be the focus of local and regional economic development efforts?”
Appalachia’s Fracking Boom has Done Little for Local Economies: Study (Environmental Health News)
Appalachia’s fracking boom has failed to deliver on promises of jobs and benefits to local economies, according to a new study. The study, published today by the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank, revealed that while economic output in Appalachian fracking counties grew by 60 percent from 2008-2019, the counties’ share of the nation’s personal income, jobs, and population levels all declined. The analysis concluded that about 90 percent of the wealth created from shale gas extraction leaves local communities.
A Decade Into the Fracking Boom, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia Haven’t Gained Much, a Study Says (Inside Climate News)
The natural gas industry hasn’t been an engine for economic prosperity, said Sean O’Leary, the institute’s senior researcher and principal author of the report, and “there is no basis on which we can see that it even can be, going into the future.”
Fracking Puts Pa. at an Energy Crossroads (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Pennsylvania is the home of the first oil well drilled in U.S. history. The commonwealth has a long relationship with extractive industry, but it is an abusive one. It is time to start planning a divorce. The encouragement of industry, in the form of petrochemical subsidies and still-lax regulations, undercuts important investments in renewable energy and the potential benefits of programs like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
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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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Fractured: Harmful Chemicals and Unknowns Haunt Pennsylvanians Surrounded by Fracking (Environmental Health News) We all face myriad exposures to toxic chemicals every day—a byproduct of living in a modern world replete with vehicles, heavy industry, plastics, and pesticides. EHN’s pilot study was small, and more research is needed to tease out fracking exposures and trends. Still, the exposures we found in Gunnar, his family, and four other southwestern Pennsylvania households suggest that the approximately 18 million Americans who live within a mile of an active oil and gas well might face above-average levels of exposure to chemicals that are harming them.
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Regulators Ban Fracking Permanently in the Four-State Delaware River Watershed (Yale Environment 360) The regulatory agency in charge of managing the Delaware River and its tributaries voted last week to permanently ban natural gas drilling and fracking within the entire four-state watershed, which supplies the drinking water for more than 13 million people in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York.
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Recovery while Black in Appalachia (Scalawag) For Black people in the throes of addiction, race adds another complex layer to the process of finding help, which can already be a challenge in Appalachia. Here the face of addiction is often white, and so is the story of recovery. But not all heroin addicts are white. And not all those suffering from addiction in Appalachia are dependent on heroin.
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Is the Choice for Democrats Joe Manchin or the Minority? (Washington Post) West Virginia’s politics have taken a hard-right turn over the past two decades. A state that as recently as 1996 voted for a Democratic presidential candidate and had two Democratic senators is now one in which even a narrow Manchin victory (such as the one he saw in 2018) is essentially a miracle. Across the state, in every county, Republicans do much better now than they did 20 years ago.
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Climate Change Increases Flooding Risk For Some 230,000 Ohio Valley Homes (WKMS) A new analysis of flooding risk that accounts for the effects of climate change finds many more homes in Appalachian communities in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia are at risk of flooding than the federal government’s emergency managers have indicated. In 12 Appalachian counties in the region, at least half of all residences are at risk, and in West Virginia one in five homes carry a high risk of flooding, according to an analysis of the data released by the nonprofit First Street Foundation.
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New Report Predicts Power of Investments in Clean Energy Infrastructure in WV (Charleston Gazette-Mail) The analysis released Thursday by the ReImagine Appalachia Coalition and the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy suggests that investing an average $3.6 billion per year in clean energy projects in West Virginia from 2021 to 2030 will generate an average of about 25,000 jobs per year in the state, with total employment creation amounting to about 41,000, including new jobs in construction, sales, engineering and office support.
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How Renewable Energy Jobs Can Uplift Fossil Fuel Communities and Remake Climate Politics (Brookings Institute) If federal and state leaders can focus workforce development efforts and renewable energy investments in specific areas of need, it can reduce climate obstructionism in many of the communities that question the transition to renewables.
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