Opinion

Energy firm threatens suit over Cuomo fracking moratorium

Maybe the courts will finally force Gov. Cuomo to do something he should have done five years ago: make a decision one way or the other on fracking.

It never should have come to this. People elect governors to make decisions, not kick them down the road until elections (or presidential primaries) are safely passed.

But the governor continues to dither, and an energy company that has gone bankrupt while waiting says it’s going to sue unless the governor and his agencies release the environmental-impact statement the governor says will guide his decision yea or nay.

The company is Norse Energy, which has leased 130,000 acres for gas drilling upstate. Earlier this year, the Norwegian based company pulled the plug on its New York operations, filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The company says it lost $30 million here because its leases became all but worthless once the governor started ­delaying.

So Norse has notified Albany that unless Environmental Protection Commissioner Joseph Martens announces within two weeks when its long-overdue fracking review will be finished, it’s prepared to take the matter to court.

Not that the governor or his people seem inclined to act. It’s been 10 months, for example, since state Health Commissioner Nariv Shah publicly promised that his own agency’s health-impact review would be finished in “the next few weeks.”

Just recently, he was quoted as saying he had no timeline for a decision. Not only that, “new data” coming out of Texas and Wyoming, he said, makes it “premature” to reach any conclusions.

It’s true the state’s moratorium on fracking predates Cuomo’s governorship. Yet despite promises to the contrary, and notwithstanding President Obama’s own embrace of the technology, Cuomo’s made no effort to move the process to a conclusion. And that’s just dandy for the governor’s green supporters, because it gives them time to raise their own legal and political obstacles to fracking in this state.

Meanwhile, the experience of every other state where fracking has been given the green light shows that ordinary New Yorkers as well as private companies who made good-faith investments here are paying a high price for the government’s deliberate indecision. That’s especially true in hard-strapped Upstate, where people could really use the jobs and revenue fracking would bring.

Normally, jobs and revenue are a winning combination. But as the folks at Norse Energy can tell you, not in Cuomo Land.