In the last year, New Yorkers have heard a lot about what celebrities think of fracking. Matt Damon isn’t a fan. Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Merchant think it could be hazardous to our health.
It’s more hazardous, though, to outsource our thinking on scientific and economic issues to people whose expertise is as artists, however much we might enjoy their movies and music.
Listening to the celebs, you get the impression that it’s a bad idea for the state to lift its four-year-old ban on fracking. Listen to the scientists and economists, though, and you’ll come away with a much different picture.
The consensus among people who study fracking is that it is environmentally safe and an economic boon. By opening up access to its copious deposits of natural gas, New York can create jobs and pull in tax dollars without posing a danger to people or wildlife.
“Fracking” is short for hydraulic fracturing, a technique that lets us reach the gas in shale, a type of rock. In short, a crew drills deep into the earth, then drills horizontally through gas deposits, and finally uses a pressurized liquid (water mixed with sand and some trace chemicals) to fracture the rock and release the gas.
Fracking has been used for more than half a century, but recent refinements to the technique have made it much more effective. In the rest of the country, the method’s now being used to extract billions of cubic feet of natural gas every day.
The most serious allegation that celebrities make against fracking is that it contaminates the air and groundwater. But there’s no indication that well-constructed, well-managed fracking sites have contributed to such pollution.
More than a million fracking wells have been drilled over the last 50 years, yet no evidence of groundwater contamination has ever surfaced. Lisa Jackson, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, testified before Congress that she’s “not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”
When the Ground Water Protection Council reviewed more than 10,000 wells, it found only one complaint about groundwater quality — and the EPA found that the problem wasn’t the result of fracking.
The anti-fracking movement’s most spectacular piece of visual propaganda, meanwhile, turns out to be pretty much a hoax: The documentary “Gasland” shows a Colorado homeowner setting his tap water on fire and blames fracking.
But as the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and numerous scientists have since pointed out, the flaming water phenomenon in that area is caused by contamination from naturally-occurring methane, and long predates fracking.
Nor do we have evidence that well-constructed, well-operated fracking wells contaminate the air. Federal and state regulations on air quality apply to fracking operations just as they do to any other activity. Reports, including the 2011 Fort Worth Natural Gas Air Quality Study, have found that the practice does not produce dangerous levels of air pollution.
Meanwhile, fracking does offer a clear-cut environmental benefit: Natural gas is cleaner than coal, emitting only about half as many greenhouse gases when burned. That’s one reason Scott Anderson, a senior policy adviser at the Environmental Defense Fund — one of the nation’s largest environmental nonprofits — spoke out in favor of fracking, calling fracked natural gas a necessary part of our energy future.
So New York’s fracking moratorium isn’t keeping any environmental harm at bay. But it is keeping away significant jobs, many of them union jobs.
Up to a fifth of the vast Marcellus shale formation lies under New York state. This resource is already enriching nearby states. A 2011 Manhattan Institute analysis found that the Marcellus fracking is responsible for more than 57,000 jobs in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
New York stands to reap similar rewards. That same report says ending the moratorium would generate $11.4 billion in economic output and increase state and local tax revenue by $1.4 billion.
Most important, it would create up to 18,000 jobs in western New York. That may not mean much to the celebrities who make their homes in New York City, but it’s an area that has lost about 48,000 jobs since 2000.
And fracking in other New York shale fields could create another 90,000 jobs.
Good jobs have been hard to come by in much of our state these last few years, as New York has failed to take advantage of the natural-gas gold mine — even as similar regions elsewhere have made a different decision and flourished.
For 4 1/2 years, this moratorium has kept New Yorkers out of work without helping the environment. It’s time to end it, no matter what our movie stars think.
Greg Lancette is the political director of the New York State Pipetrades Association, a group of 14 local unions whose 25,000 members perform plumbing, heating, cooling and sprinkler installations.