“The fracking revolution, by reducing heating costs for poor families in the US, saved about 12,500 lives annually, mostly in places with concentrated poverty,” notes journalist Dylan Matthews, citing a study by three researchers. As the study explains,
The price of home heating affects mortality in the United States. Exposure to cold is one reason that mortality peaks in winter, and a higher heating price increases exposure to cold by reducing heating use. Our empirical approach combines spatial variation in the energy source used for home heating and temporal variation in the national prices of natural gas and electricity. We find that a lower heating price reduces winter mortality, driven mostly by cardiovascular and respiratory causes. Our estimates imply that the 42% drop in the natural gas price in the late 2000s, mostly driven by the shale gas boom, averted 12,500 deaths per year in the United States. The effect appears to be especially large in high-poverty communities….lower heating prices reduce mortality in winter months….the 42% drop in the price of natural gas in the late 2000s averted 12,500 winter deaths per year….this effect does not just represent a short-run postponement of mortality. We also show that the effect, which is driven mostly by cardiovascular and respiratory causes and is larger in high-poverty communities, is robust to several stress tests of the empirical specification.
Fracking adds 7.7 million jobs and $1.1 trillion to the U.S. economy, according to an Energy Department report. It remains unpopular with the Democratic Party’s progressive base, though. “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” said Kamala Harris in 2019.
Twenty years ago, people many wrongly wrote off the oil industry as a dinosaur. Oil production fell after 1970, so people wrongly predicted that oil production would continue to fall ever thereafter — the “peak oil” theory. Based on this prediction, there was even a weekly newspaper column called “peak oil“, written by Tom Whipple, the husband of Democratic politician Mary Margaret Whipple, which ran until a few years ago.
But then the fracking revolution began. By 2003, fracking was being used on a massive scale, and oil production later boomed as a result. The “peak oil theory was effectively falsified when United States oil production began to increase in 2009 and surpassed the 1970 peak in 2018.”
Technological change has continued to expand oil production in the U.S., making America the world’s biggest oil producer by a substantial margin. “Oil Was Written Off. Now It’s the Most Productive U.S. Industry,” reports Bloomberg News.
