The Human Side of Fracking

Living with the allure and danger of a lucrative, dirty industry

- By Sarah Smarsh

In January, President Joe Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and ordered a drilling moratorium on federal land. The following month, a historic cold snap and a failed power grid turned Texas into a disaster zone. Even as policy debates about events like these unfold, each one serves as a wake-up call. Our reliance on the fossil-fuel industry is by now so old and deep that overdue regulations, while crucial, will not stop consequences already set in motion. The man-made, carbon-wrought transformation of our climate is here.

As we grapple with this reality, rather than fixating on abstract concepts and quantitative measures— energy prices, geopolitics, emissions rates, climate-science projections—we would do well to zoom in, way in, on those doing and allowing the drilling. Their stories contain a common promise: You’ll make a lot of money. Yet many lose, as do we all, in other ways before the bargain is closed. We can learn a lot from their ground-level wisdom about the human motives and exploitative economies that got us into this mess, as well as about the dangerous and toxic business of siphoning oil and gas from the earth below.