There's a fear in some circles that the transition to clean energy will someday kill off jobs in the oil and gas industry. It's not just former President Donald Trump. Environmentalists spend a lot of time talking about a “just transition.” Turns out, oil and gas companies are already cutting jobs in the oil and gas industry. As I reported this week, it's not that production is down. We're pumping more oil than any country in history and so much natural gas it's driving the price down. And it's not climate policy or increased use of wind and solar. Nope. This transition is just business. “You just need fewer workers to produce more oil,” Greg Upton, executive director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies, explained to me. Then there's the boom-bust cycle of oil and gas. And as busts go, the pandemic was a doozy. Oil production is up 5 percent since 2019, the last peak before the pandemic. In fact, just this week the industry marked a new record with last week's production clocking in at an average of 13.4 million barrels a day. But employment among the people who find that oil and pull it out of the ground is down nearly 20 percent from pre-pandemic levels. One thing about this trend, though. A lot of people don't know about it. Oil and gas still gets promoted as a job creator. “It’s still a very powerful claim,” said O’Leary, whose think tank focuses on expanding clean energy in Appalachia. “The narrative has legs of its own, quite removed from facts.” How’s it play in Pennsylvania? There's one place where this might matter more than anywhere else —Pennsylvania. It's the country's No. 2 gas producer, and perhaps the swingiest of swing states. The idea that candidates can't win there unless they support fracking has hardened into conventional wisdom. That just might be the reason Vice President Kamala Harris flipped her position recently. Fracking supporters say the hiring numbers miss the point. Many of the jobs supported by oil and gas drilling are a long way from the shale gas wells in the Keystone State. The Marcellus Shale Coalition, a trade group, says the industry in Pennsylvania supports 10 times the jobs that drilling wells create directly. But is opposing fracking the deal-breaker for Keystone State voters that it's made to be? Christopher Borick, a pollster and political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, said it's not a sticking point for most Pennsylvanians. But the ones who love it, he said, really love it and it shows up in the way they vote. “All the little things matter” in a state as politically even as Pennsylvania, he said. The downward trend in drilling jobs “could have implications, but it’s not clear what the implications might be.”
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