It seems that New Yorkers would rather listen to Natalie Merchant sing of happiness and sign feel-good petitions created by Yoko Ono than deliver real jobs to the more than 700,000 people out of work in their state.
That's what the anti-hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, stance boils down to — celebrity and emotion winning out over economic and scientific facts.
New York regulators are debating their stance on fracking, a drilling process in which chemically treated water is plunged underground to help shatter rock and free natural gas. New York holds the largest untapped reserves in the Marcellus Shale rock formation that runs through Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, and with that, a key to economic prosperity.
Fracking opponents cling to unfounded claims the process contaminates drinking water. They line up — about 2,000 last month — in front of the Capitol building to cheer on famous protesters like Merchant, and watch fictional movies like Matt Damon's "Promised Land" to gather their facts. Ono has developed a website called "Artists Against Fracking" to lure New Yorkers to sign an online petition urging Gov. Andrew Cuomo to ban the process.
Celebrity seems to be winning.
A Siena College poll last month showed an increasing number of New York voters, 44 percent, oppose drilling, compared with 41 percent in May. Opposition was 52 percent upstate, the location of potential fracking zones. The anti-fracking movement seems to be gathering momentum – or at least Merchant, Damon and Ono fans.
That's too bad. Upstate New York is in economic crisis and drilling offers a path to recovery.
In the Southern Tier, private-sector wages have declined by 1 percent between 2000 and 2011, whereas in New York City, income grew by 4 percent. Over the past decade, employment in New York City has risen by 9 percent, whereas in Binghamton and its surrounding suburbs, employment has plunged by 11 percent over the same period.
Fracking can help change this. Developing the Marcellus may create 37,572 new jobs annually in New York, according to the Public Policy Institute of New York.
To see the potential monetary advantage, one only needs to look at Pennsylvania, where fracking is permitted. Between 2007 and 2011, income surged 19 percent in counties with wells, more than doubling the 8 percent rise in counties without them, according to the Manhattan Institute, a New York think tank.
Now the science. There hasn't been one study conducted that concludes fracking contaminates drinking water. Not one.
That's not to say environmentalists haven't tried. The Environmental Protection Agency quietly dropped its study into water contamination in a Wyoming natural gas field last month after the science didn't support its initial findings that fracking may be linked to groundwater pollution. The EPA has also found no association between fracking and well contamination in Texas and in Pennsylvania.
Of the high methane levels found in some private wells in Pennsylvania, an investigation by Duke University found it was a result of the wells not being properly sealed, not fracking itself. The study was a follow up to the university's findings that some wells above the Marcellus shale had elevated levels of methane, the main component of natural gas — a finding environmentalists' clung to as proof fracking was bad, before the evidence could back it up.
Cuomo said he will make his decision on fracking based on science and facts. It's time for him to stop delaying and support fracking — the clean energy process that's been deployed safely in 29 other states and has a proven track record of generating wealth.
Kelly Riddell is native of upstate New York and a Washington-based writer. She previously was a reporter for Bloomberg News. Her email address is riddell.kelly@gmail.com.