From the campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

Here's your host, Scott Bertram.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome

in to another edition of The Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On this episode, we'll talk with Gary

Wolf from Hillsdale Economics Professor, about the push to ban fracking in the United States.

Christopher Caldwell's senior fellow at the Claremont Institute will tell us about the European

model of socialism.

Barbara Bushy from Hillsdale's Art Department on The Creation of Adam.

And Becky Holland joins us again from the Barney Charter School Initiative to talk about teaching science at home.

We're joined now by Dr. Gary Wolfram, William Simon, Professor of Economics and Public Policy,

director of economics, and professor of Political Economy at Hillsdale College. Dr. Wolfram, thanks for joining

us. Well, thank you for having me. Talking today about the push on the left that among

some of the presidential candidates, I'm not sure if Joe Biden will make this a cornerstone

of his campaign, but much talk about an all-out ban on fracking

in the United States. Give us a little background first. You're not an engineer, but how does

fracking or hydraulic fracturing work? Why is there even this sort of controversy around it?

Well, actually, hydraulic fracturing has been around since 1947.

So it's been around for a long time.

And basically what it is is that you inject water and some sand into existing wells or new wells.

And what that does is it creates some pressure which releases natural gas

and releases oil that is bound up in the rock. So rather than only being able to get oil out of places

where there's a big oil reservoir and you drill in and get that out, There's all sorts of oil and natural gas that are caught up in the rock. And so what this did was it allows you to release this gas and oil. And that resulted in a massive expansion eventually, not right away, but about starting in the

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