Are Fossil Fuels Impoverishing Middle America?

Fixing the Future

I suppose it’s elitist and maybe even nationalistic of me but I was surprised to hear the phrase “resource curse,” which I associate with the developing world, used recently in a webinar in the context of a region of the United States. The region is northern Appalachia, comprising 22 counties in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and northern West Virginia. And the curse is, as it so often is in the third world, a surfeit of oil and especially natural gas, in this case extractable largely through the relatively new process of fracking.

Here to explain how the resource curse is impoverishing communities in the middle of the U.S. in the middle of the 21st century is Sean O’Leary. He’s a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute and the author of its recent report, “Appalachia’s Natural Gas Counties: How dreams of jobs and prosperity turned into almost nothing.”