Dr. Jacoby Wilson

My father was a pipe fitter, right?

So when I was looking at the public health impacts of fracking in Maryland, we banned fracking in Maryland some years ago.

I was in West Virginia doing research on the environmental impacts of fracking and the social impacts of fracking.

My dad was in the man camp building a pipeline.

Did that money stay in West Virginia?

No, I'm from Mississippi, y'all.

That money was sent back home to Mississippi.

But it's similar.

You bring these folks in with expertise to build the operational facility, and that's construction phase.

Then they leave.

That money doesn't cycle 20, 30 times in that community.

So that's part of the law that's been sold to politicians and the politicians are selling it to the residents.

And also on the Community Benefits Agreement, what ends up happening is folks will get a soccer field.

They get some T-shirts, some scholarships.

I call it getting turkeys and trinkets.

They're not getting real benefits, right?

So that's both a representative justice issue.

In this discussion we're talking about, it's also a distributional justice.

You know, we want to minimize the harms and maximize the benefits.

Most of the benefits are going to the politicians.