My hardworking, fair-minded liberal parents raised my sisters and me with a healthy sense of sympathy for the poor and the voiceless. So I can’t help but feel for the denizens of upstate New York, where a long-faltering economy continues to struggle against the whims of faddish activists, invertebrate politicians — and, most recently, a troubling decision by the state’s highest court.
In Norse Energy vs. Town of Dryden, the Court of Appeals ruled that local governments can, if they wish, use zoning laws to ban hydraulic fracturing, which involves blasting fluids deep into the ground and extracting vast amounts of oil and gas that were formerly inaccessible. The court’s vote wasn’t even close — five of the seven judges upheld the ban — but the underlying principle was one on which reasonable people could easily disagree.
Generally, zoning agencies are allowed to regulate broad categories of land use. The more complex power to regulate industry is normally reserved to state agencies that possess far more expertise and monitoring capacity than a town board.
The oil and gas industry argued that, by designating wide swaths of land as off-limits to fracking, the boards of tiny towns like Dryden (pop. 14,400) and Middlefield (pop. 2,100) are in effect overriding state law and regulating the energy business. The justices read the law differently.
Expect a stampede of towns and counties across the state now hastily voting on fracking bans, including in parts of the all-important downstate watershed where drilling never would have been allowed in the first place.
Fracking, which goes on in most states, long ago metastasized into one of those issues where New York activists express a level of vehement certainty only partly tethered to the known facts.
When I first talked with actor Mark Ruffalo and filmmaker Josh Fox about the issue in 2010, the alarming information about the potential dangers of fracking raised by Fox’s movie “Gasland” were well worth debating. Somewhere along the line, unfortunately, many activists made the short but crucial leap from informed concern to near-hysteria. It’s now part of the progressive catechism that all fracking is evil and unsafe.
Formerly depressed sections of states that allow fracking, like North Dakota, Ohio and Pennsylvania, are seeing an economic boom, with truck drivers in Williston, N.D., reportedly earning more than $100,000 a year and Walmart offering flat-screen televisions and signing bonuses to attract workers.
In New York, meanwhile, instead of creating a set of safety regulations and getting on with the task of unlocking billions of dollars in potential commerce, a moratorium has been in place since 2008. Gov. Cuomo, elected in 2010, has been dithering on the issue for years, engaged in what my colleague Bob Hardt at NY1 aptly calls a “fracking filibuster.”
Last November, Cuomo said he would make a decision about the moratorium before this year’s election. (That promise was caught on a video you can see here.)
Then the backtracking began. Cuomo’s health commissioner at the time, Harvard-trained Dr. Nirav Shah, who was assigned the task of reviewing the risks of fracking, first said he’d have a decision within weeks. Then Shah refused to say where he was visiting or what sources he was consulting to make a decision. Then Shah resigned, with no decision made.
New York is paying a steep price for all this dawdling. During the time the Dryden case worked its way to the Court of Appeals, the original plaintiff, Norse Energy, declared bankruptcy.
And upstate, where unemployment in the Southern Tier remains over 8% and more than 20,000 jobs have been lost over the last decade, residents have to wonder if their towns, lives and hopes will ever register even a blip on the radar screen of New York’s proud progressives.
Louis is political anchor at NY1 News.
