The battle over allowing hydrofracking in New York has become an increasingly embittered one, as the state Department of Environmental Conservation's missteps in managing the regulatory review of fracking. Its seeming disregard of the mass of substantive comments filed on DEC's proposals has convinced most opponents that state government is pro-fracking and is unwilling to seriously address the reality of their powerful arguments for a ban.
Then, for a moment this autumn, reality seemed to have a chance. For more than a year, health experts had pummeled state government over its refusal to do a health assessment of fracking prior to authorizing it.
Unexpectedly, the governor's office announced the health issues would be addressed. Combined with the governor's earlier commitment that, unlike pro-fracking state governments, New York would not try to block local home rule anti-fracking regulations, it seemed to anti-frackers that the state might finally be ready to address their concerns.
These hopes have now been upended. DEC has announced that, without waiting for the results of the health impacts review, it will try to proceed to finalize its fracking regulations. The state, instead of using standard health impact assessment protocols for carrying out its health impact review, has improvised a process to validate the truncated health analysis DEC had already undertaken, shifting the issue from health consequences of fracking to bureaucratic self-defense.
DEC's proposed final regulations incorporate so few changes from those DEC initially proposed — despite thousands of detailed expert recommendations identifying needed refinements — that the reaction has been a completely foreseeable one: DEC has sold out to the fracking industry.
Why has DEC done so?
The most plausible answer is that to continue on a path that sets up a merits consideration of a fracking ban means DEC will have to ban it. On the merits, how can an industry that is retrenching and loses money on a cash-flow basis on almost every well it drills be an engine of economic growth?
Moreover, fracking depends on massive, wealth-eating subsidies from public resources that will lower net New York wealth. For example, damage to state roads alone has been estimated by the state to cost tens of millions of dollars annually. Then there are the adjacent landowners whose property and business values fracking will crash, the environmental degradation of water resource, the lack of any offsetting tax revenues, and the disruptive effects on local services and housing markets of a transient oil patch work force.
Fracking also promises potentially devastating impacts on three critical economic development opportunities for New York: agriculture, tourism and green energy.
After decades of stagnation, the local food movement is giving an enormous impetus to the revival of New York agriculture, a fact that the governor recognized in his recent yogurt and beer and wine summits.
Similarly, tourism is currently on the rise in the very Southern Tier region that would be fracked. It is no accident that many of the stalwarts of the local agriculture and tourism industries are also determinedly anti-fracking.
Green energy has at least as important a potential. The Cuomo administration has a long list of praiseworthy green energy initiatives. Investing in those programs offers the state far more economic and energy opportunity than using those resources to promote a financially struggling shale gas industry.
Finally, of course, there is Sandy and the governor's prescient comments about climate change. How incongruous is it for a state that has suffered so from Sandy and Irene to decide at this time to double down on shale gas fracking, a fossil fuel source whose fugitive methane emissions will only add to global warming?
All of which make a powerful case that the ban sought by anti-frackers is the right course.
All of which mean the right course for the state is for DEC to address that issue on its merits. Otherwise, as the proverb says, after the beauty of autumn, will come winter.
Al Appleton is a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. He now is a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.