Gov. Cuomo’s double standard on environmental impacts is on full display Tuesday, as voters are asked to approve casino gambling in the state even as he keeps fracking in limbo, banning it under the pretense of studying it.
Not that fracking doesn’t have an environmental impact of sorts: You can see it all over the city: sidewalks ripped up, streets pitted with diner-sized cavities — all because of fracking.
By driving down the price of natural gas, fracking has spurred hundreds of buildings to tear up our streets in their haste to convert from oil.
Gas burns cleaner, too — and the Bloomberg administration is requiring some 10,000 buildings to switch to gas or lighter oil. But they have until 2030; it’s the price that’s driving the rush. In the latest figures from the federal Energy Information Agency, heating with No. 2 fuel oil costs $29.12 per million British thermal units; with natural gas, just $7.54.
What’s driven gas prices down so low is fracking that’s going on all over the country, creating untold wealth and countless jobs.
Of course, the fracking revolution could provide even greater benefits to New Yorkers. We could be drilling and producing gas from the Marcellus Shale, as they’re doing with great success right across the border in Pennsylvania. But Cuomo still stands in the way of what his own administration says would be thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenues.
Instead, he’s pushing casino gambling as the economic engine to revive many of these same communities — though “gaming” can’t possibly deliver as much prosperity, and has a real “environmental impact” downside.
No, Cuomo’s choice of gambling over gas is all about politics. He kowtows to the likes of Yoko Ono — nonscientists using nonscience — who warn of toxic groundwater contamination from the injection of chemicals into wells, though for 60 years there has not been a single instance to support this charge. Even the latest green warning, that fracking might release large emissions of toxic methane, has been laid to rest (by a large University of Texas/Environmental Defense Fund study, among others).
While Cuomo is happy to hand over fracking jobs and revenues to our neighboring states, he wants to steal gambling revenues from New Jersey, Connecticut and other regional casino sites.
You see, bringing casinos into New York is a net win only if we snag tourists from gambling elsewhere. Otherwise, studies have shown, casino revenue comes at the cost of local restaurants or places of entertainment, like theaters. When Atlantic City introduced casinos, the number of local restaurants dropped by 40 percent. Is New York City better off attracting tourists with cheesy casinos than with Broadway hits?
The first New York casinos would be upstate. But outside of Las Vegas or Atlantic City, most casinos attract visitors from a 75-mile radius — which suggests these joints would live off elderly retirees and other low-income people in our rural communities.
That’s not the end of the social impact. Study after study has found that a small percentage of problem gamblers account for a whopping share of total gaming revenues — a key reason casinos bring a rise in bankruptcies as well as crime.
Matt Damon may worry about damage to our drinking water from fracking, but who’s looking out for the safety and quality of life in the towns that may host these casinos?
The economics are simply not persuasive. No less an analyst that Nobel economist Paul Samuelson described gambling as “creating no new money or goods” and said it “subtracts from the national income.” It’s hard to make that charge about drilling for oil and gas.
On Election Day, voters will be asked to approve a constitutional amendment to allow up to seven casinos to open in the state. The dishonestly phrased ballot item shamelessly parrots the gambling industry’s promises of “job growth, increasing aid to schools and permitting local governments to lower property taxes.”
Too bad fracking approval isn’t on the ballot; New Yorkers could choose actual growth and income like that generated next door in Pennsylvania, not some fantasy spun by gambling interests.
And by the way, if gambling is so terrific, why are New Jersey’s property and income taxes right up there with New York’s, among the highest in the nation?
Liz Peek is a columnist for TheFiscalTimes.com and a former energy analyst with Wertheim Schroder.