I wholeheartedly agree with the headline of your editorial on May 25, “We need long-term answers to energy needs.” My solution is a rapid phasing out of fossil fuel production. It’s a solution I have come to by following the science on its impacts to the environment, health, safety, quality of life, and, yes, even the economy. I come to my solution by listening to the frontline community members I have met in the nearly decade and a half I have spent as an environmental advocate, several of whom are from Lycoming County and must take umbrage at reading that the harms they have experienced are dismissed by their county’s paper of record. I come to my solution by observing a climate crisis that is intensifying at a rate that is even shocking to the experts who warned us.

Since my earliest days as an advocate, I have heard the same arguments for more drilling and fracking that emphasize job creation. I have also followed labor statistics that contradict what the industry, our political leaders, and even editors have told us. I remember hearing early on about the vast number of vehicles crowding once-peaceful country roads, each bearing an out-of-state license plate.

In 2013, the Multi-State Shale Research Collaborative published a report looking at jobs numbers in six states that sit atop the Marcellus and Utica shale formations. Industry-financed studies had indicated that 31 jobs were being produced for each well when the number turned out to be only four. Shale-related jobs numbered 1 in every 795 while education jobs numbered 1 in every 6. The number of shale jobs in Pennsylvania was about a tenth of the number Governor Corbett was touting.

Nearly a decade later, the Ohio River Valley Institute found equally weak jobs numbers in Southwestern Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.

You claim that your region has enjoyed economic fortunes that communities in areas where fracking bans are in place have not. A quick look at unemployment figures tells a different story. From the beginning of the fracking boom in 2008 to March of this year, three of the counties in NY that passed local ordinances prohibiting fracking – Tompkins, Otsego, and Onondaga – had an average unemployment rate of 5.13 percent. The average for Lycoming, Bradford, and Susquehanna was 6.23 percent.

Although New York has fared better, the numbers are close. The big difference is that there are nearly 5,200 wells in the three Pennsylvania counties. Drilling and fracking have killed people, made countless others sick, contaminated private water supplies, polluted air, devalued property, and that’s the short list of negative impacts the costs of which we cannot ignore. Every one of the wells drilled today will contribute to the legacy issue of maintaining every well dating back to the nineteenth century in perpetuity. The taxpayers will foot a staggering bill for that that cannot be calculated.

So, yes, we need long-term answers based on the facts. There is no upside to continued fossil fuel development.

KAREN FERIDUN

Kutztown

Submitted by Virtual Newsroom