Joe Boyles
Guest Columnist
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (PA), the Keystone State, figures to be instrumental in the coming presidential race. It is at the top of the list of a half dozen or so battleground or swing states. The race is currently tied, and could go either way. While Democrats are in charge of the legislature and Governor’s mansion, the state is purple, meaning it could swing toward either the Democrat or Republican party.
I have never lived in Pennsylvania, and only traveled along the southern tier. It is the fifth most populous state in the nation, with about 13 million residents. This year, the winner of Pennsylvania will collect 19 electoral votes. There are two major population centers, Philadelphia in the east, and Pittsburgh in the west. There is a lot of farming and mining in the remainder of the state.
At the founding of our nation in 1776, Pennsylvania was one of four large states among the original 13, the others being Massachusetts, New York and Virginia. The small states were concerned about being overwhelmed by the larger, wealthy states, hence our bicameral legislature and the electoral college system. Philadelphia was the center of colonial government, and the place where both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drafted.
It was steel and Andrew Carnegie that put Pittsburgh on the map. In the mid-19th Century, Pittsburgh was our nation’s leading manufacturing center. During the American Civil War, Pennsylvania was a key supplier to the Union, both of men and materiel. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, under the command of Robert E. Lee, invaded Pennsylvania once during the summer of 1863 and fought the pivotal battle at Gettysburg in early July. Lee’s strategy was to defeat the Army of the Potomic and knock the Union apart, bringing in Britain to the Confederate cause. He was unsuccessful.
Pennsylvania is the second leading state in natural gas production. Key to this production of energy is releasing the trapped gas from oil shale using hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. In a battleground state, this is a battleground issue. Nearly all this gas production is in the western part of the state, where the world’s oil industry began in 1859.
The question is, which party/candidate supports and will enable the production of natural gas through fracking? The state’s neighbor to the north, New York, does not permit this type of mining, and leaves billions of dollars of economic development behind as a result.
Not surprisingly, Donald Trump and Republicans support this industry with relish. Natural gas is a clean fossil fuel that runs power plants and gas appliances very efficiently.
Kamala Harris is on the record when she ran for president in 2019 saying she would ban fracking, beginning with federal lands. She says that her position changed after being selected as the vice presidential candidate in 2020, but if you listen carefully to her debate against Mike Pence, she says that the position of Joe Biden (and by inference, her) is to support fracking. Why has her position changed? Is it just political expediency of something more fundamental? No one has been permitted to ask her that question since she supplanted Biden at the top of the Democrat ticket, two months ago.
She passed over Pennsylvania’s popular Governor Josh Schapiro to select Tim Walz as her running mate. That move alone put the Keystone state back into the toss-up category. Senator JD Vance from neighboring Ohio has spent a lot of time campaigning in Pennsylvania, particularly the western part of the state. You might recall that the first assassination attempt on Trump was in Butler, a farming community north of Pittsburgh. He has announced that he will return to Butler to finish his interrupted speech.
Back to the issue of fracking. It is one thing to be able to release and capture the gas. It is another thing to transport it to where it is needed to produce the energy. The best and safest method of transporting natural gas is by pipeline. If the means to transport the gas to market is unavailable, the producers will simply leave it stored in the ground until more favorable conditions are present.
Pennsylvania’s farmers receive $173 million annually from gas leases that greatly help to make their small farms viable. Will they be able to thrive under the Republicans, or will Democrats bow to the extreme environmentalists and renege in order to shut down fracking and the natural gas economy like New York? Pennsylvanians have every right to know before they cast their ballots.