JOHN HANGER

Many people believe candidate Bernie Sanders when he thunders that a fracking ban is the right thing to do. In an ideal world it would be, because gas drilling is an industrial process that cannot be done without some damage to the environment.

Yet, as someone with a home in the Three Mile Island nuclear evacuation area, I sadly know that the real world of energy choices offers no perfect options but just unavoidable, uncomfortable trade-offs.

If fracking were banned everywhere, the supply of natural gas would plummet and prices for gas and electricity would skyrocket – because 33 percent of America’s power is generated by natural gas (slightly more than by coal) and because gas generation is also often the price setter for the power market.

Many consumers would pay about $500 more each year on their power bills. Half of the nation’s families, those who also use gas as a heating source, would pay about $1,000 more annually.

Higher energy costs would be especially devastating for the poor, who often spend 20 percent or more of their incomes on energy. A fracking ban would worsen economic injustice and cause many utility shut-offs, a particularly ironic result given Sanders’ focus on economic inequality.

Apart from higher energy costs, a fracking ban would paradoxically put into the environment more soot, mercury, sulfur and nitrogen as well as carbon. Why? With gas made uncompetitive with coal, much dirtier coal-fired power plants would recover large chunks of the market share that they had lost to cheap gas.

Gas drilling and fracking since 2008 contaminated about 300 water wells with methane, including the water supply in Dimock, Pa., the subject of court cases and the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland. Yet decades of coal mining have left Pennsylvania with 5,000 miles of streams destroyed by acidic water discharges from coal operations and three dozen underground coal fires. The environmental risks from coal greatly exceed those from gas.

In addition to more pollution, a fracking ban would inescapably cost jobs. In Pennsylvania alone, the natural gas industry created about 72,000 jobs directly and indirectly in the third quarter of 2015, according to the latest state data. A fracking ban would eliminate half of them or more.

Instead of banning fracking, shale gas development should be strongly regulated, properly zoned and reasonably taxed. Tragically, the industry opposes all these policies.

For the next 20 years, renewables and gas will combine to power America more cheaply and cleanly. By then, energy storage could be economical enough to allow renewables to work around the clock. At that point, a fracking ban could be possible – without today’s nasty trade-offs of more pollution, fewer jobs and higher consumer bills.

John Hanger is a former member of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission and former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.