A new method of drilling for natural gas is one of the best opportunities for economic growth in New York, especially drilling in the Marcellus Shale in the western part of the state. But Gov. Cuomo has put Joe Martens, who apparently has never seen a development project he liked, in charge of writing the make-or-break regulations.
Confirmed by the state Senate yesterday as Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner, Martens is responsible for drafting and implementing the rules that should replace a drilling moratorium that’s set to expire June 1.
“If Gov. Cuomo is going through so much effort to correct [New York’s] fiscal crisis through the budget, the other side is looking at the regulatory regime and whether it impedes or promotes growth,” notes Adirondack-area attorney Karen Moreau, founder of the property-rights nonprofit Foundation for Land and Liberty.
But will Martens impede or promote the economic-growth opportunity that gas drilling represents?
Since being tapped for the DEC, he’s mostly sounded pro-growth — declaring, for example: “I intend to make sure that the DEC is responsive to business and that we work together to avoid regulatory stalemate.” Martens also suggested that the DEC would issue new drilling regulations before the expiration of the moratorium this summer.
But anti-drilling ideologues have used concerns that the new drilling method, hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” could contaminate water supplies for much of the state, including New York City — and Martens has played to them, too: “We won’t undertake drilling until we’re confident it can be done safely. And protecting water supplies is, at the essence, our highest priority.”
More important, Martens’ background — including what he said on the topic before heading to DEC — suggests that Cuomo may prefer to impede drilling. As head of the nonprofit Open Space Institute (a group devoted to buying up land to keep it “forever wild”), Martens was critical of using natural gas as an alternative-energy source, and severely opposed to fracking.
In remarks at Schenectady’s Union College in July, he was perfectly clear. “It’s the potential scale of drilling within the Marcellus Shale that is the real concern,” he warned. “If DEC decides to give the gas industry the green light, there could be thousands of new gas wells drilled in the Catskills and the southern tier . . . [and] the potential for problems multiplies dramatically with each well that is drilled.”
He even questioned the focus on natural gas: “Shouldn’t we be doing everything possible to reduce energy consumption and do everything possible to increase the use of renewable resources before we make a major decision to exploit the Marcellus Shale and possibly damage, perhaps irreparably, the land, air and water resources that sustain life itself?”
John Hanger, who just left the same position in Pennsylvania that Martens now holds in New York, urges that Martens be realistic. “New York has to make its own decision, but I would encourage as they consider things that [Martens realize that] New York is consuming a lot of gas right now and if they don’t drill they are going to be using more and more oil and coal,” which are much worse for the environment — in terms of extracting, storing and burning — than natural gas.
Yet fracking foes are growing more extreme, vocal and powerful. The anti-fracking film “Gaslands” was nominated for an Oscar this year, while The New York Times just published a series on drilling that Hanger describes as a “deliberate” effort to distort and ignore Pennsylvania’s good work regulating gas drilling in order to agitate against any drilling in New York.
The final decision about natural-gas development in New York belongs to Gov. Cuomo, however. Come June, we’ll know better whether Martens was chosen to serve as a bridge between business interests and environmental concerns — or to put the brakes on progress.
Abby Wisse Schachter edits The Post’s politics blog Capitol Punishment (nypost.com/ blogs/capitol).