I'm Bethany McLain. This is making a killing in this show. I cut through the hype and handwringing to reframe the stories you thought you understood and uncover the ones you didn't know were important. In some ways, today's episode is a classic tale of innovation going hand in hand with destruction. Fracking is a technology that prioritizes big picture progress and short term economics over protecting the citizens in its path.
Just ten years ago, Congress was moaning about shortages of natural gas, and most people believe the price of oil was heading in only one direction higher. But at the end of twenty eighteen, the news broke that the United States was now the world's largest producer of crude oil, responsible for almost twenty percent of the world's oil production. That's more than Saudi Arabia and Russia for the first
time since the nineteen seventies. In other words, it's the so called shale revolution, which is better known as fracking, has changed everything. For decades, the US had this grand goal of energy independence. Now President Trump's administration talks about something even bigger, energy dominance. The ideas that our oil and gas riches will change the geopolitical game, both by weakening Russia and by disentangling US from the messy Middle East.
And yet there are many questions and even more controversy. Most of that focus is on the environmental cost. The truth is, there isn't anything pretty about fracking. Fracking basically involves injecting tons of sand and millions of gallons of water and an undisclosed cocktail of chemicals directly into the ground beneath our feet. This helps force oil and gas through rock that was previously considered too tight to yield it. So what does this mean for our markets, for our environment,
for us? Enter Eliza Griswold, my friend and New Yorker journalist whose book Amity and Prosperity does a terrific job of illuminating the environmental and human costs of the fracking revolution. Eliza's book just one the Pulletzer Prize for General Nonfiction, so it's especially exciting for me to sit down with her today to dig in on the controversy at hand.
Even if you think fracking is one of the best things ever to happen to this country, it's worth hearing Eliza's take because then you'll understand why there are so many people who are so determined to stop it. For my part, I'm deeply curious about the nuances of the economic, global, and political impacts of fracking. I wrote my own mini book which focused in on the fragile economics of fracking last year, but mine didn't win a pulletz er, so
please read Eliza's. I see the story of fracking on a grand scale is one of a technological innovation that is literally and figuratively fracturing our country, and yet it is also sustaining our way of life. Is anyone willing to live without access to energy which charges our smartphones and powers our electric cars? If there are good guys and bad guys here, is it always clear which one
is which. Before the book came out, I met this amazing young woman named Ronnie Coptis, and she is a coal activist who's from Appalachia, and she has the complicated identity that so many people do. You know, she's big on the Second Amendment, and she hunts for her own protein, and she's also fiercely anti coal. Her husband was a minor, so she's really engaged in what does it mean to move to the next generation of energy development? In America and she's big on how rural Americans have paid the
price for urban Americans energy appetites. So before the book came out, she and I were driving around you know, rural Appalachia, and she turned to me and she said, you know, resources aren't the only thing that can be taken from communities like ours. Stories can be taken to This is very familiar to me from the war zones I've worked in most of my career. You know, you can show up in a refugee camp and you can spend a day with people and become another level of extraction,
like become something else taking from them. And is that because you're bringing your own ideas of what the stories should be to them, or just because any kind of storytelling is taking their story. So I think it does have something to do with the ideas, but it has more to do with feeding the engine of the media.
I have some friends in Greece, and when the Greek economic crisis hit, these Greek journalists were saying that literally journalists had sat with them outside banks and been like, find me a family where the people are missing their teeth, where they sold their teeth for gold, Like casting stories and whether we're doing that in Iraq or Afghanistan or in Appalachia. It's something that as a journalist I really want to resist, and I think we're king in a
place over time has forced that to happen. This is a great place for you to introduce Stacy Haney, who's the character that forms the core of your book, and tell us how you found her and what her connection to fract Ponds are. Stacy Haney is a single mom and a nurse who lives in Washington County, Pennsylvania, which is about an hour southwest of Pittsburgh. Her family has lived on the same land for more than a century.
Her family comes from two towns, and those towns are named Amity and Prosperity, which is the name of the ball. I was thinking, I love it when truth is stranger than fiction. That's one of my favorite things about business, and really, who needs fiction when you have towns named Amity and Prosperity. It's fantastic, totally, and I met Stacy
in the spring of twenty eleven. I went to southwestern Pennsylvania to look at America's crumbling infrastructure because I wanted to look at how our collective poverty I wanted to look at how our failing systems, our lifeline systems, roads, bridges, the grid we could go on are inadequate, and how that's costing us, right, the human cost of that. But when I got to southwestern Pennsylvania pretty quickly, the entire
conversation was the boom. It was the oil and gas industry's arrival, dating back a few years really to the late two thousands, right, And this was two eleven. So one day, you know, I was looking at locks and levees, as looking at river traffic, really everything you can imagine. And I became friends with this remarkable biologist named Rose Riley,
and she works for the Army Corps of Engineers. And one day she asked me if I wanted to go with her to hear how this new industry was impacting people. That farmers and other landholders were meeting at the airport in Morgantown, West Virginia, because another symbol of what I would call this public poverty is there's no meeting place in Appalacha like where you're going to meet publicly at
the airport, right. Wow. She knew nothing about fracking, and she was going down to learn about what was going on firsthand from people who had experienced it, and she asked if I wanted to go, and did you know what fracking as at that point? Absolutely not, you know, I mean I knew that it was this technological innovation.
I knew the buzzwords around fracking, but what it really entailed how one drilled more than a mile down into the earth and then out for a couple more miles to crack rock and harvest oil and gas from these ancient bubbles. I did not understand that at all. So we started driving south and she pointed out to me, like where mountains had flatlined, and I was like, what,
how is that happening? And she's that's mountaintop removal. So she pointed out to me how for more than a century, these communities in Appalachia had really been harvesting America's energy. So we got to the airport. I was sitting behind Stacy and her eleven year old daughter, who was still in her pajamas and was complaining to her mom she
was hungry. Her mom was being like, you should have eaten breakfast, right, I've been there, right, yeah, So you know I did what i'd do, which is like I carry these disgusting you know, all natural alf bars right, oh sugar exactly. So I gave her one of these like earnest bars, like all for the girl, and she very wisely was like, no, thank you. And then her mom got up and started to talk and said, you know,
she was Stacy Haney. She was a nurse, and she and her kids had benzine and tallyween in their bodies, and her fourteen year old son Harley, was really, really sick, and they knew a little bit about what was going on with them. They lost some of the animals on their farm, as had their neighbor, but it was really the beginning, and she was terrified. She was terrified to
speak out. This was the first time she spoke publicly because at that point the company was supplying her drinking water, and she was terrified that if she spoke against them, they would take the water away. And if they took the water, she couldn't afford to stay there. Because this is an area where again we get back to infrastructure. Drinking water is actually scarce. Some people have working wells. But what she had grown up doing, Stacy and her
family is doing something called hauling water. They'd grown up traveling ten miles with a pickup truck to a public water station to fill like a massive water tank called a water buffalo, and they filled basically a cement jug outside their house, a cistern, and that's what they used to bathe and to drink. So she'd grown up pour of water and pour in every way, and this farm that she'd bought had good water, and when fracking came, the loss of that water represented for her really really
a tragedy. And it's a result of this frac pund right, Yeah, So next to her house, unbeknownst to her, there was at least a six acre waste pond that was almost as big. They live on eight acres of land, so if you want to imagine it, it was this tar black. It actually, at one point many points actually went septic like a wound. It started to rot, it got infected, and was off gassing massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide. FRAC pond super basically is you know, you pump into the earth,
you pump a ton of water. As the technology advances, so too does the amount of water and chemicals we use. So at that point it was like two million gallons of water. Now we could look upwards of eight millions and millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals are
pumped down to the earth. What's in that pond is everything that comes back out, So it's all that waste, but it's also ancient bacteria that's been in the earth obviously for millions of years, along with radioactive material, so all of that and masses of salt because all of this area was an ancient inland sea, which is why it's rich in fossil fuels. So all of this comes back to the surface, and because of Pennsylvania's geology, it
had to be stored on the surface. And where these guys really went wrong is that, yes, these ponds exist in places like Texas, not eight hundred feet from somebody's house. So the pond itself was leaking, but also it was what was in the air was making them sick. And at one point you had it wasn't just the hydrogen sulfide that was rotting this pond. You had workers come in in hazmat suits applying a biaside that's a known carcinogen acroleine. They are wearing masks and white outfits. Right
where a few hundred feet away. You have Stacy in her neighbor Beth in cool lots right watering their goats for the fair. One of the oil and gas workers describe the smell as rotting beef jerky. Okay, to call it, I've smelled it. To call it sewage doesn't even do. It's like, it's an insult to sewage. It's an insult to sewage. It is ungodly the smell when this thing is rotting, Okay, So what does that mean for it
to be rotting and leaking? So, first of all, this is one of the problems with the pond, and this is one of the problems with the technology because these guys didn't understand when and they lined the pond with two layers of basically black garbage bag. Okay, the lining was compromised in all kinds of ways. First of all, wildlife deer and foxes got into the pond and ripped
up the lining. That could be how it leaked. There was a leak detection unit, a way to detect the leaks, but it was put under both of the liners of the pond, which means that by the time the thing is ripped, you already have groundwater. Being impacted by every element of what's what's in that pond, radioactive material, anti freeze, all kinds of carcinogens. So and it isn't that nobody
knew the pond was leaking. The Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency, the regulators issued what are called notices of violation that said very clearly, the pond is leaking. And again internal documents that came out in the course of the lawsuit from the oil and gas company there's one worker saying we all know they leak. So Range was using many of these ponds. When I finished the reporting, they still had a couple. And these ponds are a serious,
serious problem. Done right on the surface, but all wrong underneath. So it's a classic example of checking the boxes. You've lined the pond, you've got the equipment in place that's supposed to be watching this, but in fact the surface box checking does nothing for the underlying reality, does absolutely nothing. And who's designing that pond somebody who's come from landfills because you have such a demand for labor, and in
Pennsylvania you didn't have to know how. So again, I mean, just time and time again, the failure on every front is it's human like. The scale of this is tragedy, human tragedy, again and again, and it shows you how dangerous it can be these failures, even when it's done according to regulation quote unquote, what drew you from your previous work because going from the tenth parallel fought lines
between Islam and Christianity to fracking. You know, I was in rural Nigeria some years ago, northern Nigeria, doing what you do as a journalist. So I was riding on an empty oil barrel across a flooded river. I've never done that as a journalist. It sounds maybe fun. I think I see that in your future. So we were, we were crossing this river and a bridge had collapsed, and it was about two weeks after the bridge in Minneapolis,
I thirty five w had collapsed, killing thirteen people. And there was something about that moment where I thought, you know, I've been traveling the world for more than a decade looking at the problems that so much of the world faces. But it's time to look at the problems that America is facing. You know, since the nineties, liberal economists have
talked about something called the resource curse. Yes, right, that why is it that people who live on land richest and natural resources tend to be some of the poorest, right right. And there are a lot of complex causes. A lot of that has to do with corruption, But it doesn't just apply we look at that in Nigeria, you know, we cast that away from ourselves, but it applies in America too, and really nowhere so more than Appalachia.
And that's what I wanted to explore. And it's a great irony that it does apply in America because we tend to think of it as somebody else's problem, but it's actually right here, it's our problem too, exactly. A lot of what happened with fracking is that multinationals which had a practice of operating abroad came back to America and brought some of those practices, even those contracts that had safeguarded them while passing the cost on to others,
and they applied them here in the States. How given the lessons from elsewhere, what we think of as rules and regulations in the United States, how has that been able to happen here? That is the question. In different places, I think, because of different reasons. The term I would use as public poverty. You know, what do you mean by that? I mean, in Pennsylvania, basically a failure of the state to have enough sources to even safeguard regulations.
I mean before I began this project. And certainly they're a husband and wife legal team in the book, you know,
and they're no hand ringing environmentalists. The wife, Kendra Smith, is a corporate defense attorney who mostly handles asbestos and exposure cases for railroads, and she defends them, right, and she defends railroads, and yet for this case, she decided to take on her first plane off case and to switch sides, and both she and her husband the reason they did that is they, like so many of us, had assumed that the regulations were not only in place,
but they were also being enforced. And the truth is neither of those is accurate. So it was really you know, one of the things that I think we have to do a better job at is you know, when we see people talking about fracking, they're usually talking about the abuses of the corporations themselves. But Kendra, who's a corporate defense attorney, would make the case that that's what corporations do.
They protect their own interests, that it's really the failure on behalf of the state that is most shocking in this case. And is it a failure on the state's failure. Is it a failure to put in place the right regulations or is it a failure to enforce those are in place that are in place, or is it both? It's absolutely both. So when it comes to how they even think, how they even come up with the adequate with the regulations at all, what they're doing is they're
usually working with the oil and gas company. That's not new. That's how regulation is made. You know, the regulation from the beginning can be compromised because corporate interests are involved in establishing what the regulation should be. But in this case, there are two other problems. One is that these sites are so isolated, they're so protected that the regulators are dependent on the companies for knowing what the hell is going on there. You know, they they don't have the expertise,
they don't have the instrument it's to test. They need the companies themselves to tell them what's going on. And that is obviously a problem. On top of which they just have inadequate numbers of people. They don't have enough bodies to go out there and do the kind of regulation that needs to be done. Is that a microcosm of regulation in America? In other words, what you just
said is perhaps exacerbated by the conditions in Appalachia. But on the other hand, it reminds me a lot of what happens in Washington, DC with the finance industry, right, government being dependent on business to write the laws. That's exactly right. And on top of that, I think one other parallel there to draw. You know, a friend of mine who's a bnchor is always talking about who she's
meeting as regulators. One thing that happens here is that, you know, the regulators themselves, these guys who are going out and doing basically monitoring these sites, are not making enough money. And you know in the book, one of the things one of the people who is harmed in the course of the book is standing there at one of these sites and the state regulator asks the gas company representative if their jobs available? Right? So then who's
to blame there? You know, when we say in Pennsylvania State Impact, the MPR station has done some excellent reporting on the revolving door between public interests and private industry and I think that kind of one day I'm a regulator, the next I'm working for a corporation that definitely applies
in the financial industry. I never forget. I was sitting with Dan mud who was the CEO Fanny May during the financial crisis, and we are in front of a room full of students, and they were complaining about Fanny May's behavior and how the regulators hadn't reined it in. And Dan looked around the room and said, Okay, raise your hand if you're here going to the University of Chicago planning to be a regulator. Right of course? Right?
Not a single hand went up, right. And even people who do go into regulation are doing that with a short term thinking, well, I'm going to get the expertise to flip sides, and are they to be blamed for that? You know, we'll have families to support. Isn't another part of the complexity with what happens with natural resources though, that there is a very real trade off here, right The business itself may exploit people, and yet it provides jobs.
And so there's a willingness perhaps on the part of governments, or an inclination maybe to look the other way because of this very real issue of jobs a thousand percent. And this is especially true in Pennsylvania because of the
two thousand and eight crisis. The financial crisis really was massive, crazy, the ways in which the financial crisis reverberated in all these ways we don't think about, right whether giving birth to fracking, which will come back to, but in this way too, making Pennsylvania need a fracking revolution economically absolutely, and making basically making politicians willing to sign off on vast tracts of land for oil and gas interests where
they wouldn't have been otherwise because they had to plug a budget shortfall. And I just want to note that that was a Republican governor who did that. That was Ed Rendell. That was a Democrat. So when we get into like the easy polarization on fracking in Pennsylvania, it's much more complex, and that's one reason it's so interesting,
well so complex everywhere. If you think about it, it's President Barack Obama who overturned the ban on exports, right, So it's a Democrat, a democratic administration arguably somewhat friendly to environmentalists, who overturned a forty year ban on fracking. I'm sorry on oil exports a thousand percent. I mean time and again in this book didn't take place under
the Trump administration. This is all on Obama that if you think about other industries that are resource extractive, whether coal or iron mining, where I grew up, you had a sort of alliance among the people who live there in the sense of unions and everybody. Kind of maybe I'm oversimplifying, but it seems to me that people felt the same way and were unified in the sense of
better conditions for the miners. But fracking uniquely has divided communities in a way that I think these other industries haven't. And what's the other side of this divide? Why were some people in amity and prosperity extremely supportive of fracking. Yeah, we're an r We're an our supportive of wrecking. And it's really important to say that because for some of
the people in the community. I'm thinking of a farmer named Ray Day in particular, fracking not only has allowed him to repair the roof on his farm and buy new tractors, it allowed him to put a first floor basement into his mother's farmhouse, which allowed her to die at home. Ray lives on one of the larger farms in Washington County, and he and his brothers signed a very very lucrative deal pretty early on. And they too have a frackpond. They're frackpond leaked. They have all kinds
of emphasis, but he doesn't care. He believes very strongly that the company was responsible in how they handled that leak. And did they handle it differently than they handled Stacy's leak? Or is it simply he was also getting money from the royalty riots he sold, whereas Stacy was getting very little. It's so hard to know. Ultimately, I think there are ideological pieces of why Ray supports fracking that go beyond
that paycheck. He's an honorable man, and I don't think he would deliberately put people at harm just for a paycheck. That said that money has changed the course of his family's life. Ray hates the federal government, and I, being an outsider coming in, you know, well, regulation has to be good. And he just explained to me he and a pig farmer, Jason Clark, who keeps his pigs on Ray's farm, just said, let's tell you how this works. So according to federal regulation. Every time I got to
give a pig a shot. I have to have a vet come out that costs one hundred dollars. But I say my shoulder hurts, I go up the road. I get a prescription for oxy at the little clinic that's for free. Right. And so you tell me what kind of government has my interest at heart when they regulate my pigs more heavily than they regulate me. Right. And while there isn't a direct link between that and a pro fracking stance, you actually can see the links. You
can see how the progression builds. Right. This is another thing that I think rarely gets told in stories about the evils of fracking. So often the people who live in these communities are painted as naive in some way, and the opposite is true. Ray and Stacy and these families have been signing mineral uses for a century. They have extraordinarily sophisticated understandings of mineral rights and what they
make from what. And with coal they've made nothing. I mean, the coal rights on this land have been sold away for since the Civil War in many cases, so the coal mine can come underneath your land without even any You get no benefit, and you usually lose your water. It's a kind of industrial coal mine and long all mining. So Stacy and some of her neighbors actually signed these oil and gas leases to protect themselves from coal mining.
Well that's an irony. Yeah, So again with understanding what's really at stake for these communities and why they're making the decisions they're making, it's to tell a story that begins ten years ago is simply not good enough. We got to start a hundred years ago. One reviewer wrote this about your book because she wrote, Stacy Haney's journey is to remember a core truth. Exploiting energy often involves exploiting people as their way around that. I definitely agree
with that. You know, I really did start this book from as neutral a position as I could. I just didn't want to be preaching to the choir one more time. Right that said, after seven years of reporting, I have seen this to be a lived reality for thousands of people. Do I think there is another possible model? I do? Is that because I remain an idealist? Yeah? Yes, But I also think that when we are seeing a future of renewables, which you and I have talked about a lot,
like when would that be viable? Is it? Now? How do we model that out. I do think there are solutions that are more mutually beneficial. I think we have come to the end of an era. That is where I'm hopeful. I'm excited by these new voices, even if their ideology isn't always where I am. I'm excited because they're thinking outside of the box, and I do believe there could be solutions outside of the box. And I do see my job as a reporter as trying to
go find what they are. In oil and gas, it's more complicated than other things because in certain things that we think of as scen areas, you can say, okay, well I don't smoke, so but we all use energy, and eighty percent of the world's energy still comes from fossil fuels. So given that dynamic, it is simplistic to say this is the fault of a lack of government regulations, or this is the fault of business that's gone wrong, right, because we're all feeding it. We are all feeding it.
Are we willing to change? Are we really willing to change in convenience and cost? We need to as America, let's say, right, as the developed nations, right, we need to be willing to say that we will take a hit. Once again, we are passing the costs of our consumption of energy all to you know, the woman in Bangladesh who's living on a coast right who climate change is having lived impact right now. This is not news to anyone.
But in order to change this model, we're going to have to give up more and we're going to have to be willing to let others develop as they choose, which is both hard perhaps to have a broader notion of who bears the cost. It seems in some ways the progression of our society has been to narrow the pool of those who bear the costs and increase the burden on them over time, and maybe that that burden needs to be shared a little more without a question,
not even again, we're not talking about like handwringing. We're talking about our survival and how practically that's going to happen. So what do you think about all of this in the face of this notion that Pennsylvania is going to reinvent itself as the land of plastics. Every time I hear that, I think of that great line from the graduate. The guy is speaking about what's this future? And it's just one word plastics. That is such. That's a perfect
terrifying metonym. It's a really frightening time if you look at Pennsylvania because very very quietly, Pennsylvania is gearing up to be Yeah, it's future is in plastics. You know, we have Carlisle Group coming in and buying the largest refinery as I understand it in the United States, coastal refinery. Once private equity gets involved, come on, right, industry and Wall Street together, just the blind engine that that is driving this business forward, not like oh again, not oo
pooh pooh business, but against its own interests. Right. That notion of a blind engine is really powerful because one of the big debates in the business world is short term versus long term, right, And I think the short termism in the business world is it's a blind engine. Right. That's a perfect way to describe it. How is the market already reflecting the reality of climate change? Right? And the answer was it's not because it's not even thinking
eleven years ahead. It doesn't have that capacity. And that I wonder if that could change. Yeah, there's been discussion for years, as long as I've been covering business. The discussion has been the need to be more long term in nature, that that would solve a lot of the problems we have, whether it's the financial crisis or whether it's a lack of ability to think about climate change. And each year, this is the pessimist in me, But each year we become more short term oriented instead of
more long term oriented. And I don't know if that's a function of the world moving at a faster pace or if that's Wall Street. It's simplistic to move at a faster pace, right. Short term is easier because you can measure in metrics, and the long term it's perhaps more complicated in some ways. I also wonder if that favors kleptocracy, because you know, again, like if you look at Nigeria, right, and you think, well, what drives this
resource curse? Right? What drives corruption? If I think I'm going to be out of power tomorrow, I will absolutely take everything I can today and put it in a Swiss bank account. And when we look here in America, you know, we look at our own kleptocrat in the White House, we see that same pattern. You know, we see take as much as I can get today, because who knows what will happen tomorrow? Right, So about a year after your book came out, there was a twist
on the story coming out of Pennsylvania. Tell us about that. Yeah, so this is just happening now and it's super exciting. So the Attorney General of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, who brought to light the abuses within the Catholic Church, has just launched a criminal investigation looking at environmental crimes committed by
the oil and gas industry. Particularly it seems in relation to Stacy and our family to think that this company and the subcontractors may be held responsible for not only what it did, because a lot of what happens in the course of this book isn't just a leaking pond, and it's not just a spill that isn't cleaned up. All those are essential and the impact that people who
live next door, it's the cover up. To think that there may be some accountability here is really exciting, not just for me, but I'd imagine for the people who've lived this, lived this and shouted into the wind for a decade now and watch their animals die, and watch their kids get so sick that they think they're going to die, not have the money to move because they can't cover two mortgages. Not get the company being able to respond, get the company to say that they're crazy publicly.
You know, all of these things have happened. I mean, this has just been This has been a period of outrage for the families in this story in a way I can't really imagine living. So to think just even that there may be accountability, I can imagine, would be hugely life changing. It's hard not to be on the side of Stacy Haney and her family. And yet there is this very real tension between jobs now and our energy needs now and the long term cost of those
jobs and those energy needs. How we struggle through that will define the next decade and much more. Making a Killing is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Talking Blade. It's produced by Ruth Bards. My executive producers are Alison McClean no relation and Megan Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Lobell. Engineering by Jason Gambrel, Mixed by Adam leebertch Dick. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin. Everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McLean. Thanks so much
for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve