US Home Prices Now Posting Biggest Monthly Drops Since 2009

(Bloomberg) -- Home prices in the US have taken a turn and are now posting the biggest monthly declines since 2009.

Median home prices fell 0.98% in August from a month earlier, following a 1.05% drop in July, Black Knight Inc. said in a report Monday. The two periods mark the largest monthly declines since January 2009.

“Together they represent two straight months of significant pullbacks after more than two years of record-breaking growth,” said Ben Graboske, Black Knight Data and Analytics president.

The housing market is losing steam fast with skyrocketing mortgage rates driving affordability to the lowest level since the 1980s. The Federal Reserve has sought to curb inflation, which has thrown cold water on the US real estate boom.

While prices are falling on a month-over-month basis, they’re still significantly higher than a year earlier when the buying frenzy was going strong. Values were up 12.1% from a year earlier in August.

The sharpest correction in August was in San Jose, California, down 13% from its 2022 peak, followed by San Francisco at almost 11% and Seattle at 9.9%, the company said.

IT BEGAN EARLIER THAN 2009

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US Housing Market Crash

When will the tsunami of foreclosures hit?

With millions of adjustable-rate mortgages about to reset this fall, experts expect a wave of foreclosures by Americans in every income bracket. Here's why they could soar in late 2006 and beyond.

Those easy-mortgage chickens are coming home to roost.

This fall the adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) that millions of Americans took out during the recent housing boom will be reset, and many homeowners will see their monthly mortgage payments shoot up by as much as 20%. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, of all mortgages financed in 2005, 36% were ARMs -- the highest ever.

National foreclosures up 24%

Property foreclosures nationwide increased 24 percent in August from the previous month and 53 percent from a year ago, marking the highest rate so far this year, a foreclosure service reported today.

A total of 115,292 properties entered some stage of foreclosure during the month, according to a report from RealtyTrac. The report also shows a national foreclosure rate of one new foreclosure filing for every 1,003 U.S. households, the second-highest monthly foreclosure rate reported year to date.

This report is much bleaker than numbers reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association today. In a survey of more than 42.5 million loans nationwide, homeowners appeared to be keeping up with their mortgage payments.

What will it mean for Canada. Well for one thing its going to kick the crap out of Softwood lumber exports. Leaving those who take Harpers deal wth cash in hand but no market to export to. All those jobs the BQ is counting on...gone...poof.

As the lumber bosses take their cash and run. Canadian Banks operating in the U.S. will take loan losses. The Canadian dollar will rise against the American dollar and our manufacturing sector will cry the blues, more layoffs.

Housing prices have finally outrun incomes."

Runaway real estate prices, which had been growing in double digits throughout much of the country, are now pricing potential homeowners right out of the market. The ability of Americans to afford a home is the worst it's been in two decades, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The past year has been rough on consumers. First, mortgage rates began to rise. Then, there was the jolt from sharply higher energy prices. And now the apparent end of the long real estate boom is at hand. It's all combined to make Americans feeling distinctly poorer, and less confident. Mirroring other recent surveys, the U.S. Conference Board reported last week that its consumer confidence index suffered its biggest one-month drop in August since the devastation of hurricane Katrina a year ago.

Think it all doesn't matter to you? Think again. For nearly a decade now, the United States has been the economic driver for much of the world -- Canada included. The United States has been sucking up excess savings and consuming everything in sight, from cars to homes and everything that goes in them.

"It's hard to imagine that a U.S.-centric global economy wouldn't be at risk in the aftermath of a bursting of the U.S. housing bubble," warned Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach, one of Wall Street's most outspoken worrywarts.

"The non-U.S. world remains heavily reliant on selling exports to wealth-dependent American consumers. As the United States comes to grips with the aftershocks of another post-bubble shakeout, so too must the rest of the world."

As he put it: "If the American consumer sneezes, countries in both the developed and the developing world could easily catch a cold."

Globally this is a major consumer market crash, not seen since the crash of 1984 when the FIRE market in Americas cities, and around the world crashed. Australia is reporting record housing foreclosures.

House-price inflation is faster than a year ago in roughly half of the 20 countries we track... Apart from America, only Spain, Hong Kong and South Africa have seen big slowdowns. In ten of the countries, prices are rising at double-digit rates, compared with only seven countries last year. European housing markets—notably Denmark, Belgium, Ireland, France and Sweden—now dominate the top of the league. Anecdotal evidence suggests that even the German market is starting to wake up after more than a decade of flat or falling prices... Calculations by The Economist show that in Britain and Australia the ratios of prices to rents are respectively 55% and 70% above the long-term average... By the same gauge property is “overvalued” by 50% in America."

Canadas housing market is cooling off too. And in hot Alberta, the boom bubble could burst with ominous results despite high wages. The market is overpriced, it is inflationary and it means well paid workers are overextending their personal debt. Once again putting conditions on us that we saw in 1984 when the Oil Boom bottomed out. Despite a labour shortage in no way are average wages keeping up with home costs.

Central Bank Warns Over [Canadian] House Prices (Globe and Mail, September 7th): "the central bank said yesterday that one of the key risks to the Canadian economy is that housing prices will continue to climb steeply here, exerting inflationary pressure, even as the entire U.S. economy is dragged down by its crumbling real estate market. The Bank of Canada surprised no one and left its key interest rate unchanged yesterday... Average home prices are expected to reach an all-time high in 2006, although the increase from 2005 is not as big a leap as the year before, said Gregory Klump, chief economist of the Canadian Real Estate Association. He expects average prices to rise 6.1 per cent in 2006 and 4.7 per cent in 2007. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. is forecasting a 12-per-cent increase in housing prices this year and 6.4 per cent in 2007."

The American economy will be a basket case, having to take out more loans to offset the crash in consumer spending which is the only thing holding up Wall Street. While Wall Street has made money off companies that layoff workers, that too will come to bite them in the ass.

WHEN THERE ARE MORE "home for sale" than "help wanted" signs, the U.S. economy may be mired in recession.

Most gauges are confirming that the housing market has hit the brakes and may be in a tailspin. Existing-home sales dropped a more-than-expected 4 percent in July and the number of unsold houses is the largest since 1993. New-home sales fell 22 percent from the same month last year. And construction spending fell the most in five years.

While higher mortgage rates and affordability concerns have been the bogeymen in the current U.S. housing decline, little attention has been paid to the combined demons of unemployment and adjustable-rate mortgages.

WSJ Economist Survey -- Housing Slowdown to Continue; Recession a Possibility (Eli Hoffman in Seeking Alpha, September 8th): "In a recent survey of 52 economists, most believe cooling in the housing market will extend into next year. Housing forecasts: Many predict no change, or even a decline, in home prices next year. The average prediction for next year was a 0.43% increase in housing prices, well below the 2.7% forecasted CPI inflation measure. The last time housing trailed inflation was in 1996."

Risk of U.S. Recession Growing: HSBC (Reuters, September 8th): "Investment bank HSBC has revised downward its forecast for 2007 economic growth and cautioned that the risk of an outright recession is growing as a retreat in housing threatens household balance sheets... They now see gross domestic product expanding just 1.9 percent next year, down from an earlier forecast of 2.6 percent and from an expected rate of growth around 3.5 percent for 2006."

Like his daddy before him, George will have to either raise taxes or take out more loans from China. Either way just in time for the November election. Republicans lose both houses.

The Return of Saving
The U.S. savings rate has been falling for decades. But that downward trend will likely soon be reversed, as factors such as rising mortgage interest rates force Americans to start saving more. The change will ultimately be for the better, but in the short term it could cause serious problems for the United States and its trading partners unless they start preparing immediately.

Also See:

Housing Bubble

Economy



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Housing Crash the New S&L Crisis

When you build a house the key to the solidity of its construction is a well built basement. When you buy a house the key to its market stability is your mortgage. When you are poor and buy a house using a sub-prime mortgage you are buying on a weak foundation as the market is discovering in the U.S. this week.

As housing prices fall and interest rates increase those who bought over-valued homes in the U.S. on a variable mortgage will find themselves paying more for a home of less value.

And what they thought were sub-prime mortgages, that is below prime rates, are actually variable rate mortgages. The were sold as below prime due to being longer to pay back, but if interest rates increase they will increase to be above the prime rate. It is a classic bait and switch scheme. Already the U.S. is experiencing thousands of bankruptcies and foreclosures.

It is yet another example of business as usual which cheats the poor to line the pockets of the rich. In this case folks with bad credit were given credit by companies that had dubious funds themselves, who in effect once they had enough debt were able to be financed by the big banks looking to sink their profits into the market.

Then the market crashes, and the banks withdraw their funds from the sub prime market leaving the dubious credit companies without financial backing, and their creditors in foreclosure to the same banks that lent their creditors the credit in the first place. But only one of these crooked credit lenders is going to jail. And it ain't the big banks.

Instead the U.S. economy could tail spin, especially in light of massive layoffs recently announced by Chrysler and Hershey's, and other companies. The result will be massive foreclosures leaving banks and lenders holding declining valued properties that cannot be sold off fast enough to recoup their loses. And then they will come with their hands out asking for taxpayers to bail them out.

The market correction yesterday on news of the sub-prime crash impacted on global markets world wide even as far away as South Africa; US sub-prime crisis batters JSE

Sub-prime worries echo the S&L crisis

DID those troublemaking sub-prime US home borrowers actually know that their mortgage rates could (and in many cases certainly would) go up one day? Were they properly informed by sub-prime lenders? That's the startlingly mundane question at the core of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, which threatens global markets and may billow into a financial cataclysm to rival the 1980s US savings and loan (S&L) financial debacle.

Both the question - obvious though the answer might seem to most Australians - and the comparison are worth scrutiny.

There is a reasonable chance some of these poor and usually first time home buyers - with loans Wall Street likes to refer to as "trailer-trash mortgages" - didn't understand they were taking out variable rather than fixed-rate home loans.

After all, most US mortgages historically were flat rate - repayments were constant over their 20 or 30-year term, although the mix of interest costs and capital repayments obviously varied.

Just as Australian mortgages became a more diverse mix of fixed and variable rate loans through the 1990s, a minority of the US market has gradually shifted to variable rate loans. And thanks to the exceptionally low level of near-term interest rates in recent years, which made these loans appear stable and cheap, these were often the very loans that sub-prime lenders pushed hardest to less traditional home buyers, such as those in, yes, you already know where they supposedly live.

The S&Ls were pillaged of their best assets by the big Wall Street houses, which quickly figured out that a bunch of dusty Fannie Mae-supported mortgages snapped up at 60 per cent of face value from struggling narrowly based S&Ls in the flyover states could be pooled, securitised and resold as diverse, near federal-quality, mortgage-backed bonds at large profits.

Fears of US mortgage crisis as homeowners face 12% interest

· Shares fall on worries for wider economy
· Research predicts 2.2m defaults on homeloans

Larry Elliott and Jill Treanor
Wednesday March 14, 2007
The Guardian

The US central bank was under pressure last night to underpin the country's troubled housing market as figures showed an increasing number of US homeowners falling behind with their mortgage payments and having their properties repossessed.

The problems had a knock-on effect on Wall Street where the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 242 points to close at 12,075 amid fears the malaise in the housing market would infect the rest of the economy. There were signs of mounting problems for firms that have aggressively sold home loans to people with poor credit ratings - so-called sub-prime mortgages.

The US Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) yesterday pushed back its forecast of a rebound in the real estate market from the middle of 2007 until the end of the year after reporting an increase in both late payments and foreclosures in the final three months of 2006. It said defaults had risen for all loan types but were particularly marked for those with sub-prime mortgages with adjustable rates.

Borrowers with loans totalling $265bn (£137bn) are scheduled to have the interest rates on their mortgages reset this year and many of the poorest homeowners in the US could face interest rates as high as 12%. The Fed meets next week to set base interest rates but is expected to leave them unchanged at 5.25% despite the latest mortgage default figures.

Research by the Centre for Responsible Lending has predicted that one in five of the sub-prime mortgages made in the past two years will end in foreclosure, resulting in the biggest crisis for the mortgage market in modern times.

The centre said 2.2m sub-prime home loans had already failed or would end in foreclosure and that the losses to homeowners could be as high as $164bn.

The data from the MBA showed total mortgage defaults up from 4.67% to 4.95%, but sub-prime delinquencies rose from 12.56% to 13.33%.

The problems have most clearly been illustrated by New Century Financial, which is on the brink of bankruptcy without enough cash to repay its own lenders. Its shares have been suspended by the New York Stock Exchange and it has admitted receiving a grand jury subpoena as part of a criminal inquiry into trading in its shares as well as accounting errors. State regulators in Massachusetts yesterday ordered New Century to fulfil its promises on loans in process and barred it from making new loans. It was coordinating its order with several other states, including New York, New Jersey and New Hampshire.

Other states, however, were reluctant to take action that could contribute to a lender filing for bankruptcy, leaving borrowers stranded.

US banks face sub-prime note inquiry

The fallout from America’s mortgage implosion continued yesterday when the state of Massachusetts said it is investigating the possibility that Wall Street firms had issued unrealistically upbeat research notes on leading “sub-prime” home loan makers to safeguard lucrative investment banking business.

William Galvin, the state’s commonwealth secretary, has subpoenaed Bear Stearns and UBS Securities for documents about their analysts’ recommendations of New Century Financial and other troubled lenders of high-risk mortgages made to people with the lowest credit ratings.

Mr Galvin said he was concerned that some investment banks may be violating terms of a 2003 global research settlement, reached in the wake of the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Under that agreement, investment banks paid fines and agreed to isolate their analysts from other businesses after regulators accused them of publishing biased research to win investment banking work from companies they covered.

Mr Gavin said: “Recent revelations that research analysts issued positive reports on mortgage lenders to those with less than solid credit ratings even as those companies faced more and more defaults suggests that the commitment of 2003 has not been met.”

See

China Burps Greenspan Farts Dow Hiccups

Housing Bubble

Housing

Economy



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RONA Vs Greenpeace

What is behind Greenpeace's attack on RONA three weeks ago? The Eastern Canadian home retailer, who has a strong base in Quebec.

Canada's largest home renovation retailer said yesterday it cannot comply with the more environmentally friendly lumber standards demanded by Greenpeace.

About 75 per cent of the lumber products sold at RONA Inc. stores meet the environmental standards of three certifying bodies, a company spokesperson said. But of that 75 per cent, only 15 per cent of wood meets the standards of the Forest Stewardship Council, often considered the most stringent certification program.

Earlier this week, Greenpeace blasted RONA and other retailers for using suppliers that chop down trees from endangered areas of Canada's Boreal Forest.

Canada's forest companies are no angels. For more than a century after Confederation they were, in fact, looters. But government-mandated reforestation and advances in silviculture since then make it hard to swallow Greenpeace's claims that Canada's boreal forest is "indisputably" sick.

What's indisputable is that the boreal forest is a massive storehouse of greenhouse gases that covers 58 per cent of Canada's territory. That 70 per cent of it is commercially inaccessible. That only 0.5 per cent is logged in any given year. That Canada has a deforestation rate of zero. And that in Ontario and Quebec, Abitibi and Kruger are cutting much less than their annual allotment in the face of slumping lumber prices.

What's more, forestry engineers - a group that indisputably loves the forest every bit as much as Greenpeace - marvel at the boreal forest's capacity to regenerate itself more than any other type of forest in the world. Experts are also finding that self-regeneration - whether after natural fires, insect epidemics or logging by humans - may be a more effective way to promote biodiversity than intensive replanting.

All of which makes Greenpeace's attack on Abitibi curious enough. But why does Rona get blacklisted and not IKEA or Home Depot? Greenpeace says it's because the latter two retailers have made specific undertakings to source FSC products. But IKEA conceded in April that only 4 per cent of the wood used in its Chinese factories - the source of most of its furniture - meets the FSC grade.

Much of the wood used in Chinese furniture manufacturing is illegally logged in Russia and Myanmar.

Massive deforestation in Russia, Asia and South America is a real, verifiable, contributor to global warming. And when reforestation occurs, it's on plantations, as in China or Brazil, where such monoculture is biodiversity's worst enemy. Yet, those are the same countries whose low-cost lumber, pulp, paper and furniture are decimating Canada's forest industry.

RONA (TSX: RON), the largest Canadian distributor and retailer of hardware, home renovation and gardening products, has been made aware of a document published earlier today by Greenpeace and wishes to make the following clarification.

Sustainable development has long been a priority at RONA. The Company has a responsible purchasing policy that applies to all of its products. With respect to forest products, the Company does not buy any product derived from endangered species and favours the purchase of products that bear Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Canadian Standards Association (CSA) and Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) as well as ISO 14001 certifications. Furthermore, RONA ensures that all of the goods it procures, whether forest products or other, have been produced in conditions that respect human rights and the environment. RONA applies these principles in its choice of suppliers, sub-contractors and other business partners.

Over the past 10 years, RONA has recovered 3.6 million containers of paint in Quebec, or over 30% of all paint recovered in the province. Left unrecovered, old paint may be poured out into nature - a real threat to the environment. By promoting the recovery of these products, RONA is offering the public an economical and ecological alternative to burial in landfills or incineration.

From collection points at stores across RONA's Quebec network, the old paint and containers are then sent to the RONA distribution centre in Boucherville. From there, the old paint is sent to Peintures recuperees du Quebec. About 80% of the old paint is reconditioned and put back on the market. Leftover latex and alkyd paint, stain and varnish are all accepted in the recovery and recycling program.

RONA (TSX:RON), the largest Canadian distributor and retailer of hardware, home renovation and gardening products, has announced a 9.1% increase in sales and an 11.6% increase in operating income for the second quarter of 2007. This increase in sales and income can be attributed to acquisitions made in the last 12 months and additional measures taken at the beginning of the quarter to stimulate sales and earnings growth in a business environment that was more difficult than anticipated.

Net earnings increased by $6.2 million or 7.7%, from $80.0 million in the second quarter of 2006 to $86.2 million in the second quarter of this year.

Operating income reached $161.8 million in the second quarter of 2007, an increase of $16.8 million, or 11.6%, over 2006. EBITDA margin rose from 10.8% in 2006 to 11.0% in the second quarter of 2007.

Net earnings for the second quarter of 2007 stood at $86.2 million, or $0.74 per share, diluted, compared to $80.0 million in 2006 or $0.69 per share, diluted. This represents an increase of 7.7% in net earnings and 7.2% in diluted earnings per share.

Well its a back handed attack on Abitibi which is in merger talks with American forestry products company Bowater.

In a recent report, Greenpeace cited logging and pulp companies such as Abitibi-Consolidated, Bowater, Kruger and SFK Pulp as being directly responsible for destroying nearly 200,000 square kilometres of boreal forest.

The activists charged pulp manufacture, SFK Pulp, with purchasing wood
chips from destructive logging operations. Two of the main suppliers of wood
chips to SFK Pulp, Abitibi-Consolidated and Bowater, log in the last remaining
intact areas of the Boreal Forest, in the habitat of threatened species as
woodland caribou, and in areas where industrial logging is opposed by local
First Nations.
"Logging companies like Abitibi-Consolidated and Bowater continue to deny
that there's anything wrong in Canada's forests," said Ferguson. "But anyone
who's seen the satellite images showing massive fragmentation, the scientific
reports showing species extirpation, and the news reports describing closure
after closure of mills and towns knows different."

A detailed new Greenpeace report,Consuming Canada's Boreal Forest: The Chain Of Destruction From Logging Companies To Consumers, traces the journey of clear-cut trees from virgin boreal stands to retail store shelves.

The group fingers what it calls the worst despoilers of northern timberland: Abitibi-Consolidated Inc., Bowater Incorporated and Kruger. The first two merged last month, creating a corporate colossus with cutting rights to an area of the Ontario and Quebec boreal as big as the state of Nebraska.

Also named are a list of retailers buying products from the three – part of a campaign to get firms to buy forest products made either from recycled material or from logging operations certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

Consuming Canada's Boreal Forest: The Chain Of Destruction From Logging Companies To Consumers,

The report release follows on the hanging of a massive banner from the Montreal headquarters of Abitibi-Consolidated two weeks ago. Canada’s Boreal Forest stretches across the north of the country, from Newfoundland to the Yukon. It represents a quarter of the world’s remaining intact ancient forests and stores 47.5 billion tonnes of carbon in its soils and trees. Ontario and Quebec's intact Boreal Forest represent 14% and 18%, respectively, of the entire country’s intact forest areas.

The demands of the Logging Companies are to:
o Cease logging in all intact forest areas, caribou habitat, and mapped endangered forests immediately, and work with governments and nongovernmental organizations to formally protect these areas;
o Shift to FSC certification across all tenures to ensure environmentally and socially responsible management of these forested areas, and ensure all products are FSC-certified;
o Commit publicly to not pursue licensing and new logging activities in currently unallocated areas of the Boreal Forest; and
o Refrain from logging without the prior and informed consent of First Nations whose territories are affected.

Left Nationalists like Mel Hurtig and Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians may want to ask Greenpeace if this really helps Canada. Attacking indigenous capitalist industries like Abitibi and Rona.

While we ponder the silence over the sale of Abitibi to Bowater in the MSM and among the politicians. You see that was yesterday's news. Before Alcan and Stelco.

A union representing forestry workers said the move by Abitibi and Bowater should cause concern in government and community circles.

"There are many issues underlying this announced merger which should raise alarm bells in Ottawa," said David Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada. "Our forest-based industries and communities are already in crisis with the loss of some 10,000 jobs over the past few years.

"Our history with mergers and acquisitions has been that so-called 'synergies' really mean more mill closures, job losses and devastation in our communities," he said.

The deal continues a wave of consolidation in the forestry sector as companies try to get bigger to deal with increased competition and to cut an increase in operating costs due to higher fuel, transportation and raw material costs and the rising Canadian dollar.

For example, Montreal-based Domtar (TSX: DTC) is expected to soon close a $3.3-billion deal to muscle up its operations by merging with the fine paper division of U.S.-based Weyerhaeuser, one of the world's largest forestry companies.

The marriage of Abitibi and Bowater is just the latest move in a tectonic shift that sees North America forestry players jostling to grow and compete with the rest of the world, said Bowater president and CEO David Paterson, who will move to Montreal to head the new corporate entity.

"This is a continuation of what I see as a long-term trend of a globalization of the market, that North American companies have to be able to compete with Asian, South American and European producers and they have to do that from a low-cost platform and that's what we're trying to create here."

However the merger is still in the works. Abitibi-Consolidated and Bowater Provide Merger Update

And with the high dollar and housing crash in the U.S. comes the warning of more plant closings.

The double blow of slowing home construction and falling newsprint demand is hitting wood and paper companies and forcing them to try to adapt quickly. The strategies of choice: consolidation and cost-cutting.

Shareholders of Montreal-based Abitibi-Consolidated Inc. (nyse: ABY - news - people ) and Bowater Inc. (nyse: BOW - news - people ), based in South Carolina, approved a deal last month to combine the two companies. U.S. regulators still need to give approval before the two can become AbitibiBowater Inc., which would be the third-largest forest products company in North America.

The deal could close by the end of September, and may lead to plant closures.

"U.S. regulators are expected to require mill closures in order to let the merger go through," Banc of America Securities analyst George Staphos told investors in an industry update last week.

Since May, Abitibi shares have dropped 21 percent, Bowater fell 23 percent, International Paper by 16 percent and Weyerhaeuser 21 percent.

But in Roberval–Lac-Saint-Jean it was a crucial issue, leading to the election of a Mayor who can get things done. Grease the palms, bring in a bit of largese; some federally funded development projects to offset in some small way the devastation occurring in primary forestry in the region.

Quebec experienced the greatest decline in the country, as production decreased by 20.4 per cent to 1.18 million cubic metres, or 19.1 per cent of total Canadian output.

Quebec's production has declined monthly by double digits since July 2006.

Producers face reduced overall harvest quotas from the provincial government. They have also reduced volumes to fit a quota agreed to under option B of the softwood lumber agreement with the United States.

As Jean Paul Blackburn has in the neighboring riding. After all Abitibi is the major employer in that region.

The new mega forestry giant Abitibi/Bowater will face a tremendous responsibility to employees and their communities as the planning now begins to integrate the two paper companies.

Abitibi-Consolidated and Bowater will now put the troops to work planning detailed integration of their global pulp and paper and lumber business. Both company’s Canadian mills are being bled by high energy and fibre costs and especially by the Canadian dollar’s surge – as all products are sold in U.S. dollars. “Costs will have to be cut right across the system,” said David Paterson, Bowater’s CEO who will become CEO of the new Abitibi/Bowater. John Weaver of Abitibi-Consolidated would not comment on possible rationalization in eastern Canada, where the highest cost mills are located.

While Bowater has to pay for a less than stellar environmental record.

Bowater Inc. will pay $42.5 million to Weyerhaeuser Co. to settle a dispute over costs at a Canadian pulp and paper plant Bowater sold to the company in 1998. Bowater and Washington-based Weyerhaeuser (NYSE:WY) have been arbitrating a claim regarding the cost of environmental matters related to the mill.

And while the Conservatives assert a lassiez faire attitude to corporate takeovers, try and pawn the disaster that their Softwood Agreement onto the Charest government, they realize that Quebec expects state capitalism in some form. And that is how you keep seats.

 MONTREAL, Sept. 7 /CNW Telbec/ - A new Leger Marketing poll commissioned
by Greenpeace reveals that 86 per cent of Quebecers support the suspension of
logging in the last remaining intact areas of Boreal Forest in the province.
Additionally, only 18% per cent of respondents believe that forest
companies and the government of Quebec are managing forests in a way that
serves the public interest and forest workers.
"The public's lack of confidence in the government and logging companies
is significant," said Melissa Filion, a forest campaigner with Greenpeace.
"Without taking quick and concrete action to protect the forest, the
government and logging companies will not regain the public's trust."

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How Greens in Government Are Tackling Homelessness

Samir Jeraj
APRIL 2021

From Helsinki to Brighton, Greens in local governments have been working to find lasting solutions to the persistent problem of homelessness, often drawing inspiration from pioneering policies from around the world and calling for a shift in understanding and response measures. Green proposals have brought about significant progress at many different levels of government, yet the current climate threatens to set back these efforts. Although the onset of Covid-19 was an impetus to find solutions, many of the policies addressing homelessness during the pandemic are temporary and thus liable to be rolled back, while funding cuts imposed by recovery policies risk worsening the situation.

More than 700,000 people sleep rough across Europe on any given night, according to data from the European Parliament. This figure has risen by 70 per cent in the past decade, as rents in cities spiralled, social housing shrank, and governments grappled with the impact of the 2008 financial crash. Millions more live in temporary housing, informal shelters, and on couches and floors of friends, family, and acquaintances.

The profile of people who are homeless varies across Europe, and it is difficult to get a clear picture as there is no cross-EU data. However, a comparison of national data reveals that some groups are more at risk than others, and that picture is changing. Undocumented migrants, who do not have access to social protection are at high risk across Europe, and make up over half of rough sleepers in some cities in Europe, such as in the Spanish capital of Madrid. By contrast, in Portugal, of the 1386 homeless people supported by the NGO Assistência Médica Internacional (AMI), 79 per cent were born in the country. In Austria, there is growing concern about the impact of rising rents on “middle class” people in employment. In the UK, an increasing number of younger people under the age of 25 have become homeless. In Brussels, a count in 2016 revealed that of the 3386 people who were homeless in the city, 35 per cent were living on the streets, 25 per cent were in temporary accommodation, and 39 per cent were living in inadequate housing.

The coronavirus pandemic has given urgency to tackling of homelessness. Governments have taken unprecedented steps to protect the homeless against the risk of infection and death. In the UK, for example, the government briefly funded the “Everyone In” programme in March 2020 to bring rough sleepers into the hotels that had emptied. By contrast, rough sleepers in Brussels were issued “curfew passes” that allowed them to stay on the streets. In Paris, Doctors without Borders found that four in ten people who were in homeless hostels were testing positive for Covid-19, with rates as high as 94 per cent in one hostel.

“How can you stay at home if you don’t have a home?”

Progressive alliances for ambitious policies in Brighton

Over the past six years, several Green “waves” have swept through countries in western Europe and brought more Greens into power at the local, regional, and national levels. These new (and sometimes older) Green and Green-led administrations are having to deal with the growing homelessness as part of their policy agendas. To do so, they have often taken inspiration from innovative approaches to housing provision, while building up emergency hostel services, creating more social housing, and seeking to strengthen the rights of people who are most at risk of homelessness.

Brighton and Hove on the south coast of England have many of the problems faced by seaside towns, which have suffered from the loss of traditional industries and now have a lot of more low-paid seasonal tourism work. It has a long waiting list for social housing, hundreds of families in emergency housing, and rough sleepers on the streets. During the coronavirus pandemic, the council has worked hard to get rough sleepers off the streets as part of the “Everyone In” scheme. The local council has been led by a minority Green Party administration since last year, and housing and homelessness are one of their priorities.

David Gibson is the joint chair of the city’s housing committee. He explained that the administration is working at different levels: increasing the supply of council housing and expanding the “Housing First” provision. “Since we took over the council, we’ve produced as many additional council homes in a year than the previous administration produced in four years,” he explains.

Under the Greens, the council has accelerated its programme of buying up housing in Brighton to add to those it has commissioned, using a mix of loans and their own money to do this. “Part of the package is that we need to tackle the supply side,” Gibson added. It is a policy that they have been able to pursue even as the construction industry ground to a halt due to the pandemic.


Without increased funding from the central government and with the prospect of the ban on evictions in England being lifted the council will still find it challenging to house everyone.

As a minority administration, Gibson explained that the Greens work with councillors from the Labour Party on a joint housing and homelessness programme to pass the necessary policies and budgets, and on setting more ambitious goals.

The council has also bought several of the better buildings being used for temporary housing, with the aim of turning them into long-term housing in the future. They have recently bought a 38-flat scheme in Gibson’s ward, which means housing that would otherwise have been in the for-profit market is now being let through the council.

A “considerable success” for Gibson and the Green administration is the expansion of “Housing First” homes from 20 to 60, with more in the pipeline. Based on the approach pioneered in New York in the 1990s, Housing First emphasises getting people into stable housing and meeting their holistic needs for support such as mental health or addiction on an ongoing basis. This is a complete reversal of the prevailing thinking that people should have addressed these issues before they can access housing, which is near impossible when someone is living on the street or in insecure housing.

The expansion is fortuitous for Brighton and Hove, as many of the people being sheltered in hotels due to the pandemic are exactly the people for whom Housing First can help. However, without increased funding from the central government and with the prospect of the ban on evictions in England being lifted (the ban has now been extended until May), Gibson predicts the council will still find it challenging to house everyone in need. “There’s this problem in the long run that at the moment, without funding, we haven’t got a prospect of resolving.”
Bureaucratic barriers undermine Amsterdam’s local solutions

In Amsterdam, the Green-led administration is facing similar challenges with their central government, explains Marijn van der List who is the GroenLinks (Green Left) spokesperson on homelessness in the city. As the capital city, homelessness is particularly acute and the local government has had to respond to Covid-19. “It’s quite contradictory that we were told to ‘stay at home’ but how can you stay at home if you don’t have a home?” she observes. Locally, the lack of available housing causes blockages throughout the homelessness system, “you would like people to get a house as soon as possible to start their lives again or with a little bit of help, or step by step doing it on their own again, but there are no houses,” she explains.


Efforts by local governments are not being matched by policy change and support from the central government

At the national level, anti-immigrant policies passed by successive governments mean many undocumented people are homeless and cannot access services. Marijn first became involved in politics, resisting policies such as denying undocumented people the right to a shelter and a fair asylum system. “Cities were always providing shelter in some way to people without documents,” she explains. There is currently a national shelter programme running in five local governments, including Amsterdam, and the Green-led administration there has added funding to expand the shelter capacity. It provides 24-hour shelter for around 500 people together with support for their asylum cases. They are also working with other parties to look at a “city ID” card for residents of Amsterdam, including undocumented people, modelled on efforts in New York, Paris and other European cities to ensure some basic rights such as access to bank accounts and access to state buildings.

Van der List is frustrated that efforts by local governments are not being matched by policy change and support from the central government on the causes of homelessness and on funding for mental health services. “Sometimes I find it very hard to look at the numbers we spend on this system, where we try and help people once they hit the bottom, because if you’re ‘too well’ you’re not helped,” she says. Long waiting lists for housing and local connection rules on access make it more difficult for people who have had to move around a lot. The Dutch welfare system also discourages house-sharing by cutting benefits to people who share a home, including parents with adult children. These are policies developed at a national level that create challenges for local governments. “You can’t solve everything as a city,” says van der List.
Greens in Finland – leveraging power in government to shift policies

Finland is already a leader in reducing homelessness. In 1987, there were around 18,000 rough sleepers. Their strategies throughout the 1990s and early 2000s used the “staircase” approach where, in theory, a homeless person moves from street to shelter, to temporary housing, and eventually to permanent housing. However, the staircase approach failed to tackle long-term homelessness. In 2007, the government and municipalities like Helsinki embarked on their own Housing First policies: 1250 homes were built or made available in Finnish cities to people who were long-term homeless by converting existing shelters accompanied by intense support around their health and social welfare. In parallel, the government improved its efforts on prevention and continued to build more general needs social housing. By 2017 the number of people who were homeless was 6600 – it now stands at 4600. It is in stark contrast to other parts of Europe, such as the UK where there has been an increase of 141 per cent in the past ten years.

As part of the agreement with the five parties that form the government, the Finnish Greens negotiated including the target of halving homelessness by 2023 and eliminating it all together by 2027. The current minister for environment, climate and housing responsible for making this happen is Green MP Krista Mikkonen. The government has introduced a new Homelessness Cooperation Programme between the state, municipalities, service providers and NGOs. This program focuses on providing funding and support for municipal work on homelessness.

Alongside this, the government is steering through legislation to make housing counselling statutory. This would make it a requirement in every municipality and bring together services, enabling them to intervene to prevent evictions and negotiate issues such as rent debt.

In common with many countries, homelessness in Finland is concentrated in cities and particular in Helsinki, where housing costs have risen beyond people’s ability to pay. The Finnish Greens in Helsinki hold the vice-mayor positions on health and social care along with housing. They have worked to integrate different services to help people with multiple and complex needs such as homelessness, addiction and mental health, and are also proponents of “Housing First” as a principle in their housing policies. In contrast to the New York model of Housing First, tenants in Finland pay the rent entirely themselves (drawing on the benefits system) and the relatively well-funded health and social services mean there is less of a need for the large multi-agency support meetings used in the US.
Progress and prospects at the EU level

The issue of spiralling housing costs in cities is something Dutch GroenLinks MEP Kim Van Sparrentak has been working on in her role as rapporteur for the EU Parliament on access to decent and affordable housing for all. The rapporteur draws up a report which recommends new EU legislation to the parliament which is a key stage of the legislative process in the EU. Van Sparrentak’s housing report has taken a year to put together and covers a broad range of issues such as affordability, homelessness, discrimination, speculation, investment in public housing, and evictions.

The main recommendation of the report was creating an EU level target of eliminating homelessness by 2030, and the Greens/EFA group in the parliament are running a petition in support of this goal. However, Van Sparrentak believes that while governments stick to austerity policies, this will be difficult to achieve. “Homelessness is not a fact of life, it does not have to be considered as one,” she says, highlighting the success in Finland. “There are solutions that exist, if we dare to invest in them, and if we dare to take a different approach to social support.” She adds that there is a lot of support for tackling homelessness in the EU and that there are steps that can be taken to enable national and local governments to take action, and to tackle the root causes such as speculation.

The work builds on the European Pillar of Social Rights, adopted by the EU Commission in 2017. Principle 19 is about housing assistance and homelessness, and mandates the EU to work on the issue. The Commission published its action plan at the start of March, and while it does not go far enough, it is an important step. Alongside this are plans to launch a “collaboration platform” in June for EU states to work together and share information on homelessness. The EU can also play an important role in improving the quality and availability of data along with developing a common set of concepts and policy language for homelessness.

Van Sparrentak’s report also calls for all EU member states to have a homelessness strategy, with the EU providing coordination, and that the main solution is providing permanent secure housing – basically a roll-out of Housing First across Europe, the MEP explains. Intersectionality is another key part of the Green approach to homelessness, with specific attention being called for to meet the specific needs of groups such as LGBT youth and women, particularly as the range of people who are homeless has become more diverse. One area where the Commission could take stronger action, according to Van Sparrentak, is on the criminalisation of homelessness. In Hungary for example, sleeping rough is a criminal offence something which breaches EU law.

The big challenge, and where the EU could potentially have the most impact are the underlying causes of the rise in homelessness. Austerity policies mean there is now a 57-billion-euro gap in investment in affordable and social housing across Europe, this is happening alongside the privatisation of public housing and deregulation of private rented housing. “What you see is a lot of people falling between the cracks in the social housing market and the private rented market,” Van Sparrentak explains. They are neither able to access a dwindling social housing stock nor afford private rented housing. While national governments hold much of the power to tackle homelessness, the EU can play a role in it too by supporting national and local governments. EU fiscal rules currently focus heavily on balanced budgets and eliminating deficits, which does not allow for the level of investment needed in housing and other infrastructure. These rules, however, have essentially been suspended until 2023 due to the pandemic and could inspire a generous attitude towards investment to help EU economies recover.

On a broader level, the EU can help tackle housing speculation. Big institutional companies such as Blackstone have bought up housing and used the value of the homes and the stream of rental income to borrow and buy up more housing. What the arrangements mean in practice is that these companies can earn money from the resale, rental income, and borrowing against both of these through bonds. The EU can use its powers on banking and financial rules to have an impact, drawing from existing policies and ongoing research. “This is one of the big stories in what is driving up prices and is causing the housing crisis,” says Van Sparrentak. In 2019, the then UN Special Rapporteur on Housing and the Working Group on Business and Human Rights wrote to Blackstone outlining their concerns about the role of the company in the financialisation of housing. Blackstone robustly defended itself in response.

The scale of homelessness is likely to grow in cities and beyond as governments decide on how best to respond to the economic damage created by the pandemic. In the UK, the government has already signalled that it will likely embrace another set of austerity policies and cut public spending. This will undermine progress made by local governments to tackle homelessness through building social housing and Housing First-type policies. They will put future generations at a greater risk of becoming homeless. Greens can play a vital role in resisting these trends at a national and European level while making a difference locally where they have power.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/how-greens-in-government-are-tackling-homelessness/

ON THE GROUND
In Pennsylvania, fracking might not be the winning issue US presidential candidates think it is

Issued on: 13/10/2020 - 

Lois Bower-Bjornson, southwestern Pennsylvania field organiser with Clean Air Council, points out a fracking well site just over the hill from her home in Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania. © Colin Kinniburgh

Text by:Colin KINNIBURGH

In the battle for the White House, Pennsylvania and fracking have become all but synonymous. Yet in one of the state’s largest gas-producing counties, FRANCE 24 found residents’ relationship with the industry to be far more vexed than the national debate suggests

Rose Friend’s family has a long history with natural gas. For decades, the family’s home in rural Washington County, Pennsylvania, got a free supply of the fuel from a local conventional well, as compensation for one of the several active gas lines running across the property.

It was a straightforward, convenient arrangement for the family, and a testament to the region’s longer-running relationship with fossil fuels. Alongside coal, which powered the area’s iconic steel mills, oil and natural gas production in southwestern Pennsylvania dates back to the late 19th century. For Friend, who grew up ploughing the land with horses, and whose nephew worked in the coal mines, the benefits of the area’s abundant energy reserves were obvious.

Then, around the mid-2000s, a new variable entered the equation. In Friend’s case, it was a company called Atlas America, which was looking to capitalise on a lucrative new industry: hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking. The technology allows drillers to extract oil and gas from deep inside underground rock formations by injecting them at high pressure with water and a cocktail of chemicals.

Atlas was an early player in what would soon prove to be a fossil fuel resurgence. In 2007, when Friend first signed a contract with the company, it was one of the many companies seeking to gain a stake in the Marcellus shale, the gas-rich formation on which her home sits.

Since 2014, fracking has allowed the United States to become the largest oil and gas producer in the world. Pennsylvania alone produced more natural gas in 2019 than any country besides Russia and Iran – some 195 billion cubic metres, according to figures published by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and Enerdata.

The site opposite Friend’s home, however, lay untouched for a decade after Atlas first approached her. By that time, the company had been sold to Chevron and then again to EQT, now the largest gas producer in the country. And that’s when the trouble started.

“They just moved in,” said Friend, who is in her eighties. “It was totally crazy. I looked out my window one day and they were cutting all my hedges down!”

 

Rose Friend has spent has much the last two years battling with a natural gas company that she says built a road across her property without her agreement. Still, she says fracking is “necessary”, and plans to vote for Donald Trump. © Colin Kinniburgh

Without warning, she says, the company started chopping down decades-old trees along her road, in order to clear access to a well pad on the neighbouring property. That began a more than two-year-long battle between Friend’s family and EQT, as the company sought to build an “impoundment” – a kind of storage pond for fracking wastewater – on her land, as well as the road.

The family says the company’s activity threatened not just their immediate environment, but also a Native American burial ground on the site, which had been registered with the state’s historic preservation commission since the 1980s and prompted multiple archaeological teams to intervene in their dispute with EQT.

Standing on the gravel road that EQT built across their land, overlooking the Hunter well pad, Karen LeBlanc is furious with the company and politicians alike over what she describes as their dishonesty. She plans to vote for Trump, but says, “Truly, it’s not to do with the fracking”. © Colin Kinniburgh

Ultimately, Friend and her daughter Karen LeBlanc were able to prevent the company from building the impoundment, but not the gravel road that now cuts across what they describe as the “best” of their farmland. The access road is essential for EQT, as the fracking process requires hundreds if not thousands of truck trips per well to bring materials in and out.

One day, LeBlanc says, one of those trucks blocked her mother’s car in when she needed to go to chemotherapy for her colon cancer. Another day, she says, a bulldozer ran over the active gas line that supplied free gas to the family’s home. The line cracked, cutting off Friend’s gas and leaking all night.

To this day, the family says, they haven’t reached an agreement with EQT or received any compensation for the damage to their property. LeBlanc’s anger at the company is palpable.

“It was important that they let [my mother] retire here with some kind of dignity, and putting this road here didn’t allow that,” she said.

EQT did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Fracking is necessary’

Still, Friend doesn’t harbor any ill will toward the industry as a whole.

“I think that fracking is necessary,” she said. “But done the correct way and regulated.”

Leblanc agrees.

“If they can find some way to stop contaminating the water, stop contaminating the air… that’s what they need to work for,” she said.

That’s essentially the position of local Democrats, several of whom FRANCE 24 interviewed just a few hours before meeting LeBlanc and Friend.

Yet both mother and daughter support Donald Trump, as a Trump-Pence yard sign outside Friend’s house makes clear. When asked why, she stressed the president’s signature campaign themes.

“I just don't like the way Biden’s headed... with Kamala Harris, and all the socialism,” Friend said.

“They want to take away your guns, and I have lots of guns,” she continued, with a laugh. “They’re very pro-abortion, and that is a big thing with me.”

A Trump-Pence yard sign outside Friend’s home. The house has been in her family for over 100 years. © Colin Kinniburgh

LeBlanc agreed, calling Trump the “lesser of two evils”. She said she’s not a single-party voter, and previously supported Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Tom Wolf. But her distrust of the political class pushed her towards Trump.

“Truly, it’s not to do with the fracking,” she said. Her mother agreed.

‘JOBS!’

In the increasingly fevered battle for the White House, Pennsylvania and fracking have become all but synonymous. The state went to Democratic presidential candidates from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, but flipped to Trump by 0.7 points in 2016 – a key step to his Electoral College victory.

The result there could prove just as decisive this year. And if there’s one thing Trump and Biden’s campaigns agree on, it’s that they can’t win the state without standing by natural gas.

“How does Biden lead in Pennsylvania Polls when he is against Fracking (JOBS!), 2nd Amendment and Religion? Fake Polls. I will win Pennsylvania!” he wrote on October 6.

How does Biden lead in Pennsylvania Polls when he is against Fracking (JOBS!), 2nd Amendment and Religion? Fake Polls. I will win Pennsylvania!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 6, 2020

Vice President Mike Pence also pressed the issue at last Wednesday’s vice-presidential debate with Kamala Harris, insisting that Biden would ban fracking if elected. Biden has made it clear he has no such plans – bucking pressure from environmental groups and the progressive wing of his party, who say that continued oil and gas drilling are incompatible with a livable climate. Yet the Republicans have succeeded in putting their opponents on the defensive, forcing Harris to repeat twice that Biden “will not end fracking”.

Bob Sabot, supervisor of North Franklin Township, a suburb of the county seat of Washington, says that fracking has become a “dangerous issue” for Democrats, “because Donald Trump has politicised it so much”.

Biden’s official climate plan does not mention fracking explicitly, but says that if elected, he would ban “new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters”. Sabot stands by this position.

“He wants to make sure it’s clear that in the future we are going to move in a different direction,” he said. “Cause … if we don’t start to deal with climate issues, we are going to continue to see wildfires and hurricanes, and oceans are going to continue to rise.”

Bob Sabot, supervisor of North Franklin Township, a suburb of the county seat of Washington, says that fracking has become a “dangerous issue” for Democrats. 

© Colin Kinniburgh

“Joe Biden wants to use fracking as a change of type of fuel to the future,” he continued. “Biden does not want to throw people out of work. He does not want to close the fracking industry and the coal mines.”

The actual number of jobs that fracking brings to the Pennsylvania are highly disputed. The Trump campaign says that shutting down the industry would “kill 609,000 jobs” in the state, citing a study from the country’s largest business lobby, the US Chamber of Commerce.

However, the national Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counted less than 20,000 jobs directly linked to shale industry in Pennsylvania in 2019 – just 0.3 percent of all jobs in the state.

Industry proponents typically argue that such figures do not account for indirect or “induced” jobs supported by the industry, which are notoriously difficult to count. (The Chamber of Commerce provides no sources or methodology for its job estimates.)

What’s clearer from the employment numbers is the boom and bust nature of the industry, which shed some 10,000 direct jobs in just two years when oil and gas prices crashed in 2015-16. They haven’t recovered since.

Larry Maggi, a Democratic Commissioner for Washington County, is confident that the energy sector will bounce back.

“We are just in a down cycle since one or two years,” he said. “No matter who is president, we are going to come out of it.”

As for environmental concerns, Maggi maintains that fracking today is “done safely” in the state.

“We’ve been able to collaborate with the energy sector here without sacrificing our environment,” he said.

‘Lies and lies and lies’

LeBlanc, the Trump supporter, doesn’t share his assessment.

“They don’t need to preach how safe it is when you can see how many other lies I’ve caught them in,” she said of EQT. “We’ve seen video of the emissions coming from there. We’ve seen the water leaking out… It’s lies and lies and lies.”

Lois Bower-Bjornson has seen the videos too – a lot of them. A school classmate of LeBlanc’s, she is a dancer by trade and an anti-fracking activist by “necessity”. She now works as the southwestern Pennsylvania field organiser with Clean Air Council, serves on the board of the Washington County-based Center for Coalfield Justice and gives tours of local fracking sites to anybody who’s willing to listen.

She’s collected testimony from a wide swath of her neighbours who’ve been harmed by fracking, and brought their stories to state and national regulators. Besides Friend and LeBlanc, she’s worked with people like Janice and Kurt Blanock, who lost their son to a rare bone cancer called Ewing’s Sarcoma in 2016, when he was just 19; his case and a string of other diagnoses of the same cancer in the area led the state to open an investigation into possible links to fracking.

Bjornson’s own children have experienced a range of symptoms that she attributes to the many gas wells within walking distance of her home in the town of Scenery Hill.

“My third son has the absolute worst health impacts, because he was the youngest and he grew up in it more, she said. “He will have severe nosebleeds, sometimes two a day, to the point that he has clots coming out of his nose and out of his mouth.”

Lois Bower-Bjornson says she has become an anti-fracking activist by “necessity”, after seeing the impacts on her own family and the surrounding community. Yet she believes it’s unrealistic to think that fracking could be banned in the area. © Yona Heloua

Studies conducted in both Pennsylvania and Colorado have linked headaches, nosebleeds and respiratory symptoms to local pollution created by shale gas wells.

Bjornson is disgusted with the way the natural gas industry operates in her state, and at the ways that it has influenced politicians of both parties, including Biden himself. But she agrees with pro-gas Democrats on at least one thing: “They’re not banning fracking here. It’s not happening.”

She agrees that calling for a ban would doom Biden’s chances in the state, too. And she cautions liberals from states like New York, which have banned fracking, and want to “shame” Pennsylvania for not doing the same.

“You can sit up there on your little high horse, and say stupid stuff like that, but this is what we have to work with,” she said. “And that’s not our fault.”

Economics could trump politics

The sentiment may sound surprising coming from someone who has been wrangling with the industry for the better part of the past decade. Yet for Bjornson, it makes sense that the fracking fight doesn’t fall along straightforward partisan lines.

“People want to make this political when it’s not a political issue. It’s a human rights issue. It’s a, hey, species issue,” she said, referring to the threat of climate change. “Do you want to live? That’s what it is.”

Statewide, a CBS/YouGov poll conducted in August found that a slim majority (52 percent) “oppose the process of fracking”, with Black, Democratic and young voters most likely to oppose it.

Bjornson has seen that split even in predominantly rural, white, conservative Washington County, where she says the issue is “straight down the middle, completely divisive”.

Those divisions may only deepen if the industry’s current financial woes continue. Over the years, Bjornson says she’s encountered a few people who have profited handsomely from fracking, whether by finding a high-paying technical job or earning hefty royalties from drilling underneath their land. Others “made a lot of money, and now aren’t making any money because of the price of gas”.

Wall Street is flashing warning signs, too, as author Bethany McLean and others have explained. Oil giants Chevron and Shell are in the process of selling off their assets in the region. EQT disclosed a major writedown of its assets in January.

That was even before Covid-19 hit, contributing to an unprecedented oil price crash in April and casting further uncertainty over the market.

Ultimately, it’s these economic forces, not politicians, that may decide the future of fracking in the state. The question is: if Pennsylvania’s gas industry goes the way of coal and steel, will either party be able to offer a viable alternative?