Fracking’s Broken Promise to Pennsylvania

First in a series about rising electricity prices in Pennsylvania.

In 2013, when the Appalachian fracking rush was still in its early days, then President Barack Obama extolled its benefits in his State of the Union address . Not only had natural gas already helped to lower America’s carbon emissions, it could protect Americans from the fluctuations of the global oil market, Obama said. And there was one more important benefit: “Nearly everyone’s energy bill is lower because of it.”

Obama’s words echoed fracking’s champions in politics, business and government, who boasted that natural gas would save Americans money—perhaps nowhere more fervently than in Pennsylvania, the epicenter of the boom.

“Having that kind of a resource and that kind of production of energy right in our own backya