But Trump’s consistently strong support for the practice – and Harris’s past opposition to it – have led some voters in the largely rural Republican county of Washington to conclude that the former president would be better.

“I absolutely adore Trump, but I think he’s very contentious,” said Jennifer McIntyre, a 47-year-old sales and operations representative for Keystone Clearwater Solutions, which provides water transfer services for the fracking industry.

McIntyre, who is active in the local Washington County Republican party, told AFP she thinks the former president is “incredibly pro-oil and gas,” and that Democrats at both the state and national level have put up regulations that make it harder for the industry to succeed.

“I think that sometimes those regulations are not necessarily appropriate,” said McIntyre, 47, in an interview at the company’s offices in the suburban business park of Southpointe, where many fracking businesses are located.

Pennsylvania’s embrace of new fracking and drilling techniques in the first decade of the 21st century kicked off a boom in natural gas extraction which has pushed the state’s annual production higher than Canada or Qatar.

There are currently more than 2,000 active so-called “unconventional” gas wells in Washington County, and close to 13,000 across the state, according to data from Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection.

At Diversified Energy’s site in South Franklin Township in southwestern Pennsylvania, seven 10-year-old wells hum quietly as they extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale thousands of feet below.

The gas is first cleaned, and then sold into a nearby pipeline, generating profits for Diversified, royalties for landowners, and revenues for state and local government.

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Together, these seven wells produce more than four million cubic feet of gas per day, on average, (approximately 113,000 cubic meters), Jason John Mounts, the company’s director of operations in southern Pennsylvania, told AFP during a tour of the site.

Asked whom he supports in the 2024 presidential election, the 40-year-old, who grew up nearby, said he backs “whoever is going to be driving our business.”

“At the end, it’ll take care of itself,” he said. “Every four years, it always takes care of itself.”

Unlike some of the largest players in the fracking sector, Diversified Energy does not do the actual fracking – an expensive and dangerous process in which water, sand, and chemicals are pumped thousands of feet underground at high pressure to create fractures in the bedrock and release the gas trapped inside.

Instead, it buys operating wells from other companies once they are up and running, and then fine-tunes them to increase production.

Diversified expects its existing portfolio of wells across the United States to continue producing gas for the next 50 to 75 years on average, according to the company’s vice president of investor relations, Douglas Kris.

“This is going to be part of our economy here for as long as we need it,” he told AFP.

Scientists, environmentalists, and public health experts around the world have called for fracking to be banned, citing the health and climate impacts of the fracking phase of the extraction process, and the long-term environmental damage caused by the continued burning of fossil fuels.

In response to these concerns, governments across Europe – including France and Germany – have either banned or suspended the process, as have several provinces of Canada, and US states that include New York.

But in Pennsylvania, support for fracking has grown over the past decade, with 48 percent in favor and 44 percent opposed, according to a 2022 poll from the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion. When asked if fracking was good for the economy, 86 percent said yes.

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Across the state, where coal was once the dominant source of energy, fracking supported more than 120,000 jobs in 2022, paying an average of around $97,000, according to a study commissioned by the Marcellus Shale Coalition (MCS), an industry trade group.

“Those jobs are across the spectrum,” MCS president David Callahan told AFP in an interview. “Many blue collar jobs. But many white collar jobs as well.”

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris has upcoming events scheduled in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin as her campaign focuses spending on the “blue wall” states with the Nov. 5 election nearing.

On Tuesday, Harris will sit for an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia. Two days later, she is joining Oprah Winfrey in Michigan at her “Unite for America” livestream event with 140 different grassroots organizations. Harris’ visit to Wisconsin on Friday will be her fourth since she launched her White House run in July.

Harris’ campaign has a large operation in the states with hundreds of staff and on-the-ground outreach efforts. Supporters in Wisconsin have knocked on more than 500,000 doors and that since last week’s debate with Trump, the campaign has signed up more than 3,000 new volunteers.

Overall, Harris’ team is on pace to outspend Republican Donald Trump’s campaign 2-to-1 in television advertising over the next two months. Even before Democratic President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign and made way for Harris, the Democrats wielded superior campaign infrastructure in battleground states.

Harris’ team, which includes her campaign and an allied super political action committee, has more than $280 million in television and radio reservations for the period between Tuesday and Election Day, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. Trump’s team has $133 million reserved for the final stretch, although that number is expected to grow.

Pennsylvania has been fertile ground for sleaze on both sides of the political aisle: Abscam, Bonusgate, Kids for Cash, et al. But those past embarrassments are nothing compared to the potential disaster on the horizon.

Here’s why: The villains in those past scandals weren’t voted into office by an already alerted electorate. Those voters could not have anticipated the level of greed and depravity that would follow. Today, millions in this commonwealth fully intend to vote for Donald Trump, a man whose total moral rot is no longer debated by serious people.

This begs the question, when did character stop mattering?