Massive Policy Shifts Still Needed as the Ninth Edition Fracking Science Compendium is Released

By Carmi Orenstein, Editor

“You didn’t need to be a geologist or any other kind of expert to know from the start that hydraulic fracking was fraught with a host of health and safety questions in Pennsylvania.” 

—Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board, September 7, 2023

When news arrived in 2008 that the fossil fuel industry was looking to bring the brutal technique for extracting gas from shale to New York State, many of us in the health community had a similar response. But if no special expertise was needed to foresee the health and safety impacts of fracking if it were introduced in New York, it was clear that a coalition of experts and ordinary New Yorkers was indeed required to bring this foresight home to state policy makers. Conversations among health professionals, engineers, scientists of various specialties, and indeed, geologists, congealed into various efforts to warn the public and inform state regulatory procedures.

Since governmental policy—then as now—doesn’t tend to ere on the side of precaution, we sensed a battle ahead. We ran with the idea that scientific and medical expertise and data would make for a powerful stone in the slingshot. This is the context in which Concerned Health Professionals of New York (CHPNY), now part of SEHN, was formed in 2009, and began producing its fracking science Compendium. Frontline communities and statewide campaigners organized, armed with the data we provided, along with regional concerns such as the potential industrialization of rural areas and small towns.

Sooner than we imagined, we succeeded in New York State. As the Inquirer Board continued,

[Pennsylvania capital] Harrisburg’s embrace of fracking is a shameful study in contrast to what happened when lobbyists came knocking in New York. In 2010, the New York State Assembly approved a temporary moratorium on fracking. Four years later, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that banned fracking because of health concerns. State lawmakers in Albany codified the ban in 2020.

What did New York know that Pennsylvania lawmakers either didn’t or willfully ignored?

It’s painfully clear in 2023 that they did—and continue to—willfully ignore the growing pile of evidence of health harms, much of it based on research conducted in Pennsylvania. Collected in eight—soon to be nine—Compendium editions, this evidence grows ever more extensive and disturbing. We have personally delivered the document to decision-makers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital, for more than one edition over the years.

It remains to be seen whether Harrisburg will budge, especially in the aftermath now of striking findings from research the state funded (following extreme pressure). The occasion of the Inquirer editorial was the long-awaited release of those three health studies, carried out by the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. The observational studies focused on asthma, childhood cancer, and birth outcomes in heavily fracked Southwestern Pennsylvania. The results only reinforce our trove of knowledge to date and include the horrifying finding that children who lived within one mile of one or more gas wells had five to seven times the chance of developing lymphoma, compared to children who lived in an area without wells within five miles. This research also found that proximity to wells exacerbated asthma and that infants born to pregnant women who lived near gas wells during the production phase were 20 to 40 grams (about 1 ounce) smaller at birth, both finds adding to extensive existing data on those connections.

Release of the 4th edition of the Compendium in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 2016.

Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, September, 2021. Photo by Ted Auch, FracTracker

Harrisburg is not alone in its accommodation and embrace of the fracking industry. Now the most common means of oil and gas extraction, fracking is allowed in most of the states that encompass some or all of the major shale gas and oil “plays.” Because policy is made at multiple levels of state government, we depend on frontline activists and communities to help us discern where we might best assist in applying the data-as-slingshot strategy. (See for example, our interview with Ranjana Bhandari, of the regional Texas organization, Liveable Arlington.) CHPNY has a reciprocal relationship with organizations nationwide.

Other nations come calling, too. Several are currently on the cusp of decision making, others now deep into suffering the harms brought forth by the industry. CHPNY has worked with organizations and activists on all continents in difficult fracked-gas related struggles, including in South Africa, Namibia, Germany, Romania, Mexico, and Argentina. Most recently, this month Dr. Sandra Steingraber provided testimony for the current national-level Colombian debates on fracking, basing her remarks on the Compendium’s most recent edition’s presentation of crystal-clear research findings of harm to health, climate, and environment. It remains to be seen whether Colombia will stand as an example and heed the science by banning fracking, a step “that could reverberate positively throughout the Global South” and that would be in stark contrast to what ultimately has been unleashed in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale region. The latter, holding the world's second-largest shale gas reserves, may set a “fracking completion record” in 2023, an outcome that the Argentine government has pursued in the face of strong regional opposition and to the detriment of the inhabitants of the Vaca Muerta.

That kind of news demands our continuous reflection on the role of data, in particular the striking evidence of harm to health and climate. As we prepare to release another edition of the Compendium, the question for us always intensifies: how can we and this resource be of most service to those currently or potentially in harm’s way, worldwide?

The Compendium is a crucial link between the scientists’ research and the public and policymakers efforts. For many scientists at many institutions, there is no strong mechanism for putting their findings into the hands of the public and policymakers. Many studies don’t even seem to get picked up by the authors’ own universities’ news rooms. We comb the databases (as do our colleagues at PSE Health Energy for their publicly-available fracking research resource) to produce the Compendium, as well as closely following a cadre of remarkable research organizations and investigative journalists. And the Compendium is followed in return. It’s not hard to find us and we’re told that the Compendium is highly accessible and comprehensive, useful for zeroing in on whatever specific fracking impacts a campaign or potential policy is prioritizing. (Children’s health? Check. Environmental injustices? Check. Air quality? Water, soil? Check. Impacts on urban, rural, or natural areas? It’s all there.)

Policy makers are willfully ignorant. As we approach publication of the ninth edition of the Compendium, we haven’t stopped asking ourselves how we, frontline communities, and policy makers (who truly prioritize their constituents’ wellbeing) can break through the forces that enable such a harmful energy system as well as facilitate its export abroad. “Follow the money” is a useful directive: vast sums of money flow back and forth between the fossil fuel industry and government (campaign contributions to elected officials one way, record government subsidies to industry the other). 

But we also know that victories we have experienced and observed suggest that breaking through the corruption is possible. The Philadelphia Inquirer suggests so, in its comparison of neighboring states situated above the same Marcellus Shale. Harrisburg needs to be held to account.