New York state just announced another delay in what has become a more-than-four-year process to approve widespread natural-gas drilling. Over that time, the state has lost tens of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars of business — and the opposition to drilling has only gotten more entrenched and radical.
Gov. Cuomo should not be swayed by such hysteria.
An Oct. 6 New York Policy Forum panel on gas drilling is a case in point. At it, Binghamton Mayor Matthew Ryan participated in a discussion of hydro–fracking, the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock. He argued that New York doesn’t need natural gas to power its economic future.
“You can do other things … You can save so much energy just by switching to wood pellets,” Ryan claimed. “If you combine that with retrofitting all the rural properties … you’ll produce thousands of jobs.”
Wood pellets. What century does Ryan think this is?
Cuomo has pursued a slow and steady approach to natural-gas development. Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Joe Martens issued draft drilling-permit rules in September. The industry is now assessing the draft regulations, with the public-comment period open for 90 days. Martens also announced on Oct. 25 that a procedural change would postpone permitting indefinitely.
But as soon as the draft regulations were published, green groups began complaining, and they haven’t stopped — criticizing everything from a lack of health and flood-plain protections to insufficient waste-water disposal. Cities including Albany and Buffalo, meanwhile, have banned fracking. Opponents of gas drilling are hoping that a groundswell of opposition will sway Cuomo to reject hydrofracking.
That seems unlikely. But the obstructionists may push the administration to write such stringent regulations that large-scale drilling never materializes.
The New York Policy Forum chose panel participants to represent both sides of the hydrofracking debate: those who support extraction with proper regulation and oversight and those who have serious environmental concerns. What they got was one reasonable set of arguments and then a lot of irresponsible rhetoric.
Ryan wasn’t even the most extreme voice. Former New York City Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Albert Appleton put it simply: “Gas fracking is the mortal enemy of green energy.”
Mortal enemy? Natural gas is a green energy. Burning cleaner and more efficiently than oil or coal, it doesn’t emit as much greenhouse gases and is cheaper. Now that we can cost effectively extract natural gas from the Marcellus shale, which sits under West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York’s Southern Tier, it is plentiful. So plentiful, in fact, that the federal government estimates that natural gas could provide all of the nation’s energy needs for more than 100 years — maybe more.
Appleton’s argument that fracking materials could spill into the environment and cause “some public-health emergencies” has been refuted by US Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson, who told Congress that no such contamination has occurred because of fracking, which has been going on for decades.
Marcellus shale expert Terry Engelder and Stuart Gruskin, a former executive director of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, tried to counter Appleton calmly, stating, in Gruskin’s words, that “the fact that there can be those impacts doesn’t mean that there will be those impacts” and that “the regulator’s responsibility is to do an objective and comprehensive review to assess the impacts.”
That’s exactly what the Cuomo administration has been doing. But even a meticulous approach isn’t enough for drilling opponents.
Meanwhile, New York is losing business because of the years of delay. S. Dennis Holbrook, executive VP of Buffalo’s Norse Energy Corp., said recently that his firm’s plans “to double [its] staffing and employ more than 100 people directly with hundreds more indirect jobs” are on hold.
Lamented Holbrook: “Now, instead of additions, we have been forced to subtract — reducing our workforce by more than half since the beginning of the year — because expected opportunities went unrealized.” Great.
Abby Wisse Schachter is author of Capitol Punishment, The Post’s politics blog.