BRADDOCK, Pa. _ About a year ago, Chardae Jones finally had enough money to pay off some student loans and move out of her parents' house into a third-floor apartment across the street from a steel mill that helped build America.
When Jones, 31, looked out her window at night at the mill Andrew Carnegie built 145 years ago, she wrote down what she saw and heard:
Jones grew up in Braddock, a town of 2,114 people about 11 miles southeast of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River, and last year became mayor. She was used to the pollution. What she found more troubling was U.S. Steel's plan, in the works now for more than two years, to lease 10 acres to a New Mexico-based oil and gas company to extract natural gas a mile beneath the surface using a controversial drilling technique known as fracking.
"A lot of this area is in a flood zone," she said. "We're near a river. It just seems like a recipe for disaster."
As word spread, others grew suspicious of what the proposal might mean for public health. Some of them got elected to local and state office. And in January, a neighboring town revoked the gas company's permit to build part of a well site on its land.
Opponents hope that might kill the proposal altogether _ something that one prominent local Democratic politician, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, warns could cause U.S. Steel to shut down the mill and force mass layoffs, even as the company promises to invest more than $1 billion into the mill and another Pittsburgh-area facility to make them more energy efficient. The company says the on-site natural gas source would significantly reduce its costs at a moment when the steel industry has faced new struggles.
More than a decade into a natural gas boom that has driven down energy costs for consumers and literally reshaped the landscape with thousands of wells and pipelines carrying gas across the state, this pocket of southwestern Pennsylvania is facing a reckoning over the issue. It comes as one of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, has proposed a federal ban on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique for unlocking natural gas from rock formations like the Marcellus Shale with high pressure injections of water, chemicals, and sand.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic front-runner, has resisted a ban but called for no more drilling on federal land. "We've got to take on the fossil fuel industry," Sanders chided Biden during Sunday's debate. "Your plan doesn't do that."
Some Democrats warn that a fracking ban would clear the way for President Donald Trump to again win the critical electoral battleground of Pennsylvania.
The debate over fracking has "turned into this binary choice: Either you're pro-fracking and you're evil and you want the world to burn, or you're against it and like virtue-signaling," said Fetterman, who once campaigned as a fracking opponent but supports the proposed drilling here and warns its defeat would jeopardize 3,000 "family-sustaining union jobs."
"The truth is messy," he said, speaking in his living room where steam rising from the mill was visible through the window. "The biggest collision of those two (positions) in American politics is right here in Pennsylvania. It's happening across the street there. And it's happening anywhere else where you have a fringe of our party claiming you can walk away from all of this, and then at the same time lamenting, 'where did all the jobs go?' Where did all the union jobs go?' Or you wonder, 'why are they voting for that crazy man in the red hat?' Because he's not trying to run my job out of existence."
As with much else in American life, tribalism and mistrust exacerbate tensions, especially when the stakes seem so high. Jobs might be at risk. If climate change is an urgent threat, the fracking opponents wonder what it says if their elected officials won't take a stand in their own backyard.
"We can't even have a conversation about the health impacts without you being accused of hating jobs," said State Rep. Summer Lee, whose district includes Braddock. "That's disingenuous. ... While these towns, while these people, while these workers who are in the midst of it may not be able to afford to think more long term, your politician is supposed to."
Shale industry jobs in Pennsylvania jumped from 9,143 in 2007 to 20,146 in 2016, an increase of 120%, according to a 2018 analysis by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That doesn't include jobs indirectly linked to drilling. However, a glut of natural gas has driven down prices and slowed production. Chevron said last month it was getting out of the Appalachian basin and would eliminate 320 jobs in Pennsylvania.
The politics of fracking and energy policy in a state that sits on the second biggest natural gas reserves in the country is more nuanced than absolutist positions might indicate. Last year in historically Republican Chester County, for example, Democrats took the courthouse for the first time ever, in part because of public anger over the Mariner East pipeline, which carries natural gas from southwest Pennsylvania.
In Harrisburg, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf's biggest second-term initiative _ a $4.5 billion infrastructure plan that would borrow money against future tax revenues on natural gas drillers _ is facing opposition from progressives who say it underwrites the state's future on fossil fuels. The GOP-controlled legislature has long opposed a severance tax on drilling. The industry is one of the most powerful interest groups in state politics, having spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions.
And in Philadelphia, the sale of Philadelphia Energy Solutions' bankrupt and shuttered oil refinery divided building trades unions and workers against progressive Democrats and climate activists.
Perhaps nowhere is the intra-party divide more pronounced than here in Allegheny County, where the Democratic mayor of Pittsburgh ignited a storm of controversy late last year by opposing "any additional petrochemical companies coming to Western Pennsylvania."
And the fight in Braddock is laced with tensions over racial and social justice, as some in the minority communities surrounding the proposed well say they have missed out on Big Industry's supposed economic benefits even as they have endured its health hazards.
It also shows how the grassroots energy on the left activated across the country by Trump's election sometimes results in conflict with old guard party structures.
All of this is unfolding as Trump campaigns for reelection declaring he has "ended the war on American energy," as he put it in a speech in Pittsburgh last fall. In 2016, Trump told Pennsylvania workers he would unleash an energy revolution and bring back coal jobs. He hasn't revived coal. And however improbable some of his promises may have been, they are central to his message that he stands with the white working class voters who helped elect him.
Pennsylvania voters are split on a fracking ban, with a narrow plurality (42%) opposing it, according to a February Muhlenberg College/Morning Call poll.
Fetterman, in the interview, motioned toward the steel mill and its two blast furnaces. "Look over there," he said. "You think you can power that off solar panels? It's time to get real."
