The Fossil Fuel Industry Has Killed Pennsylvania Twice Over

GREENE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA—Last weekend, I discovered myself standing in a cemetery beside one of many largest processing crops within the nation. The plant is fed by the biggest underground mining complicated within the nation. The plant stood large and tall beside the gravestones an oppressive shadow, its smokestacks like supersized headstones. The vibrant inexperienced grass of the cemetery felt like a sick joke, operating proper as much as the muted grey industrial infrastructure.

Nick Hood, a neighborhood organizer from the Center for Coalfield Justice who was main the tour that took me to this dystopian web site, mentioned that when this plant was constructed within the Nineteen Seventies, the graveyard was already there. Based on the area we had been in, it’s possible that a few of these buried at this web site labored for the coal {industry}. He mentioned that in keeping with longtime residents of the city, to create space to construct the plant, the agency dug up a number of the our bodies interred there and moved them out of the best way.

Standing below low grey clouds match for a funeral, it has by no means been clearer to me that the fossil gasoline {industry} is constructed on demise. The coal, oil, and fuel that kind its bedrock are themselves the stays of prehistoric organisms. Many a coal miner and oil employee has met their demise extracting these lifeless crops and animals from the bottom as have numerous individuals dwelling within the shadows of mines, rigs, refineries, and energy crops. The fossil gasoline {industry}’s most deadly act, although, is what it has carried out to the ambiance; burning coal, oil, and fuel has set in movement the sixth mass extinction—and humanity could be within the crosshairs.

As my tourmates and I took images of the dystopian scene, Hood gently prompt we flip round. There behind us on the opposite aspect of the cemetery was a frack pad, or a web site the place the fracking {industry} drills for fuel. This {industry} offered itself as a clear various to the 100-year-old soiled coal sector within the area. But it’s obtained skeletons in its closet, too.

I traveled to southwest Pennsylvania in a 15-passenger van earlier this month, waking up at 5 a.m. to make the journey with a bunch of native college students and activists. Once we arrived after a five-hour drive from Baltimore, we spent the day studying concerning the fossil fuel {industry}, which has gone from increase to bust within the span of a decade. Our tour information was Lois Bower-Bjornson, who’s the southwestern Pennsylvania discipline organizer with Clean Air Council.

Bower-Bjornson invited us into her residence, the place we met certainly one of her 4 sons. He had curly blonde hair and his expression was heat, particularly contemplating his residence was full of dozens of drained strangers simply hours earlier than he was set to go to a highschool dance. He appeared utterly wholesome till his mother later defined that previously 4 years, he’s been stricken by rashes and nosebleeds, which she suspects are related to fracking chemical compounds within the water.

Bower-Bjornson drove us round two totally different counties to satisfy individuals who have suffered dwelling within the coronary heart of coal-turned-fracking nation. One of them was Rose Friend, a former college trainer. We met outdoors her Washington County home, the place she was born 83 years in the past and which has been in her household for greater than a century. The land is deceptively vibrant: Purple and yellow flowers dot the grass and shrubs kind a skirt round her home. But not a lot of use can stay right here: Friend has lengthy dreamed of planting a backyard on her land, however she gained’t as a result of she’s nervous about consuming something grown on her land.

For many years, Friend’s family members powered the home with fuel from a neighborhood typical nicely. In trade for permitting its operator to run a fuel line throughout their household land, they’d an settlement permitting them to acquire gasoline without spending a dime.

In 2007, a consultant from an organization known as Atlas America knocked on Friend’s door. They had been trying to make use of a then-newfangled drilling expertise known as fracking on her property to acquire shale fuel from 1000’s of toes underground. Because they agreed to compensate her for the difficulty, Friend signed the lease. For 10 years, nothing occurred. But then, the settlement got here again to hang-out Friend, phantom-like. One day in 2018, she went outdoors to see staff chopping down her beloved 100-year-old Osage orange timber. Where the day earlier than had stood timber that bore spherical fruits which might be a part of the mulberry household now stood angular stumps.

By that point, Atlas now not managed the lease. The firm had sold its Appalachian property to Chevron after which to EQT Corporation. Yet due to an aggressively pro-corporate authorized construction, the previous paperwork was nonetheless legitimate. It turned out EQT deliberate to construct an entry highway and a man-made pond to fill with lethal wastewater proper beside Friend’s residence in its quest to entry the fuel rights that had been dormant for a decade.

In an try and ward them off, Friend’s daughter Karen LeBlanc known as native officers to remind them that her uncle had discovered the stays of an Indigenous man on the property 80 years in the past, that means the mission can be constructed on burial grounds. The household put out a name for local archaeologists to assist excavate the land, nevertheless it turned out that they had been too late; EQT had already employed an archaeologist to survey the positioning. The agency dug up our bodies and artifacts from the land. But due to a legal loophole, as soon as they eliminated all that historical past, they might proceed to construct.

Eventually, Friend and LeBlanc had been capable of stop the corporate from constructing the impoundment lake on their property and assemble it on a neighboring patch of land. But it’s nonetheless closeby and the {industry} remains to be throughout her residence, filling the air and land with demise.

Friend is hardly alone in watching the land she holds expensive disfigured. Dale “Mad Dog 2020″ Tieberie, a retired coal miner, saw the trees around his home chopped down in the mid-2010s. Wesley Silva, a pastor and former council president of his locale who said the sounds of industry kept him up all night for weeks, leaving him in a zombie-like state. The industry is threatening more than the land, too.

Dozens of kids are getting cancer, including rare ones that could be linked to radioactive fracking waste. Some of those kids have perished. Others have died because of respiratory diseases from the industry’s air pollution. Many have been hospitalized for skin conditions, too. This is the industry’s human toll for those living near the wells.

And then there’s also the slow economic death in a region that’s no stranger to collapse. The collapse of coal has hollowed out the region’s economy. Now, fracking threatens to do the same. The industry has seen mass layoffs in recent years. One recent study showed it will never be profitable again.

The next morning, my group woke up early to meet Hood from the Center for Coalfield Justice and learn about the coal industry. He pointed out coal infrastructure throughout the area that was still in operation. But it’s clear that the industry is a mere shell of what it once was, and what’s left of it is crumbling further.

The death of these fossil fuel industries may sound like a good thing, but for some Pennsylvanians, it could be a disaster if that decline is unplanned. Coal mines are shuttering left and right. Thousands of old gas wells have been abandoned, left to spew out methane. Workers who once had good-paying jobs could be left with few choices, save working at the local Family Dollar or Wawa.

“For my community, the end of [these industries] could mean death,” mentioned Hood.

But it doesn’t must be this fashion. The world wants to finish fossil gasoline use, however it might’t go away those who helped us prosper whereas the financial system was tethered to coal, oil, and fuel on life help or in palliative care. There are myriad methods to revive the land and communities of a area that has too usually been an afterthought. There are coverage proposals to herald new industries with new jobs, plug deserted wells, and wind down the fossil gasoline {industry} in a dignified method.

Doing so, though, will require politicians that champion those proposals and turn them into law. It will require federal investment. It will, in short, require a way of thinking and acting that seems all but impossible in our current political environment and commitment to growing profits.

Standing in Enon Cemetery below the shade of the Bailey Mine Plant, I couldn’t assist however consider the oft-quoted line, “the old world is dying and a new one struggles to be born.” For that new one to be born, we’ll have to not solely push fossil fuels to their demise—and throw a lifeline to these they’ve harmed.