Fracking fuels Pentagon aggression

Seemingly out of the blue, fracking has become a hot button issue in the 2024 presidential election. At the Democratic National Convention in August, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, presidential and vice presidential candidates, even downplayed the danger of global warming. Despite appearing to oppose fracking when she ran for president in 2020, Harris is now embracing it.

Is this an indication that the U.S. oil and gas industries plan to further expand fracking? And, if so, why now? 

Since the 1991 end of the Soviet Union, the U.S. imperialists’ global agenda has aimed at controlling the world through military dominance and by limiting access of other energy-producing countries to global trade markets. U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were driven by Washington’s strategy to dominate energy trade, vital to developing countries like China.

The current NATO war against Russia and U.S. sanctions against Venezuela and Iran are part of this agenda. Fracking enables the rapid development of U.S. energy exports. That’s the game changer.

U.S. goal of ‘energy dominance’

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves the high-pressure injection of brine (liquid saline and often carcinogenic chemicals) deep underground to create cracks in shale layers to free up the flow of natural gas and petroleum. Fracking is linked to water and air contamination, earthquakes, higher rates of cancers and other diseases and methane pollution.

As fracking began to rapidly expand starting in 2009, environmental scientists began to question energy industry claims that high methane-emission natural gas and other fracking fossil fuels were the solution to climate change — the “green energy.” As time went on, the energy industry began to experience a production glut that could not be absorbed by domestic markets.

In 1975, since its economy was dependent on oil and gas imports from abroad, the U.S. government prohibited the export of gas and oil. Early in his second term in 2012, President Barack Obama appointed energy industry enthusiast Ernest Moniz to head the Department of Energy. Under Moniz, the DoE promoted the export of gas from fracking and lifted restrictions on the export of crude oil.

Just days after the Paris Climate agreement was reached in 2015, Obama signed a transitional budget bill that contained a provision to allow the export of U.S. crude oil for the first time in 40 years. On Jan. 4, 2016, ConocoPhillips became the first company to export U.S. crude oil following the reversal of the 40-year-old ban.

To enable natural gas from fracking to be exported, the process of converting gas to a liquid — liquified natural gas (LNG) — was developed. Critical to making LNG exportable was a network of railroads and the construction of pipelines and coastal export ports.

Elected in 2016, former President Donald Trump’s administration quickly capitalized on Obama’s fossil-fuel exports, sending U.S. LNG around the world, undermining efforts to fight the climate crisis. Trump pursued a policy he called “energy dominance,” and in just three years, the U.S. emerged as the top producer of LNG, exporting shiploads abroad.

Fast forward to 2023 and oil, gasoline, liquified natural gas (LNG) and other petroleum gasses are among the top five U.S. exports by value, according to Census Bureau data.

So-called ‘critical infrastructure bills’

Conspiring with oil and gas company lobbyists and CEOs, politicians in several states are now drafting boiler-plate legislation that severely penalizes activists protesting against fracking and the expansion of oil and gas pipelines and other infrastructure.

These bills, promoted as “critical infrastructure bills,” are increasingly popping up in states across the U.S. They were drafted by politicians affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group largely funded by the fossil fuel industry. ALEC has been cited as responsible for similar “model legislation” to place restrictions on protests around environmental standards, reproductive rights, the anti-Zionist Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and voting rights.

Ohio, already the sixth largest gas producing state, became one of the first to introduce ALEC model legislation in 2018. Ohio Senator JD Vance and other politicians wanted to greatly expand pipelines and fracking wells in the state. (Guardian, Sept. 26) In its analysis of U.S. anti-protest bills updated in February 2023, the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law found that 45 states have considered adopting anti-protest legislation since 2017.

Penalizing protesters

These legislative initiatives contain anti-protest provisions that punish civil disobedience with felonies, fines and long jail sentences. They have been used to penalize Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline.

The bills targeting climate and environmental activists concern “unauthorized entry” around pipelines and other oil and gas facilities. The 22 states that have actually enacted “critical infrastructure bills” include Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota and Wisconsin.  Georgia passed a bill in 2023 that carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison! (Guardian, Sept. 26)

Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Missouri and Wisconsin — states that adopted prohibitive infrastructure bills — do not currently have fracking. But what they have now or could have in the future are the infrastructures — pipelines, railroads or ports — critical to the export of fracked gas and oil.

For several years, climate and environmental activists have been protesting the construction and expansion of fossil fuel pipelines. Currently, one of the biggest concerns is the Mountain Valley pipeline that stretches across the Appalachian Mountains in the Virginias, expected to increase the volume of metric tons of planet-heating emissions per year by 90 million metric tons, the equivalent of 23 coal plants. (Guardian, Sept. 26)

Newest U.S. wars for oil

While oil and gas are its primary exports, the U.S. continues to be the largest exporter of weapons of war. The expansion of the U.S- armed and financed Zionist war in West Asia is not by accident. Israel is surrounded by oil producing countries. The Zionist state has also colonized Palestinian lands, including potentially wealthy, high-producing beds of natural gas discovered off the coast of Israeli-occupied Palestine in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. (workers.org/2023/11/74864/)

The expansion of the regional war in West Asia into a global war against Russia and China is clearly on the Biden/Harris administration’s agenda. And it would continue if Trump again became president. U.S. dominance over energy resources at home and containment of energy resources abroad is central to U.S. policy. Iran, which is both oil rich and resists imperialism, is a clear target of the drive to expand the war.

Impact of LNG on climate

It is well-known that the U.S. war machine is the biggest single polluter in the world. While China increasingly focuses on developing electric vehicles and other green technologies to reduce global warming, U.S. imperialists are intent on expanding wars and ecocide.

In just over a week, two major hurricanes whose size, power and enormous rainfall is linked to climate warming — Hurricanes Helene and Milton — wreaked havoc on several states in the South. Rather than dedicate time, money and science to find ways to curb deadly and destructive storms stemming from climate change, Congress voted for billions of dollars more for weapons to Israel, while simultaneously cutting funds for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Fracking has been blamed for leaking millions of tons of methane — a greenhouse gas considered more potent than carbon dioxide. According to a new major research study, exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal. The research by Cornell University environmental scientist Robert Howarth found that LNG is 33% worse than coal in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period. (Guardian, Oct. 4)

The actual burning of natural gas only accounts for a third of total emissions. The process of drilling, moving, cooling and shipping gas from country to country uses twice as much energy. The review, published in the Energy Science and Engineering journal concludes that “ending the use of LNG should be a global priority.”

Workers should demand that instead of passing laws to protect fossil gas fracking, legislatures across the U.S. should pass laws to protect the planet by outlawing fracking.