It’s now been five years since New York placed 🌃a moratorium on fracking.
It’s been a year since the state Health Department announced it🅷s review of the Department of Environmental Conservation’s blueprint for regulating hydraulic fracturing.
And it’s been seven months since the state’s health commissio🌼ner, Nariv Shah, promised that his department’s own review would be ဣfinished in “the next few weeks.”
Get the🐟ඣ picture? Deadlines come and go, but there isn’t the slightest hint from Albany that there will be any move to allow the people of New York — especially those in struggling upstate communities — to start enjoying the jobs and benefits that would come from allowing fracking to proceed here.
Even a visit by a Democratic president who boasts about how the increase in natural-gas drilling is benefiting America’s middle class and reducing our dependence on foreign oil has not embarrassed the state into action. In 2012, America produced more than 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas thanks to fracking — almost double what it was two years before. And the volume is only s💮upposed to grow.
But not in New York, where the watchw💜ord is: delay, delay, and then delay again.
Even worse is the way it’s been done. If the governor 🎀and the Legislature really believe fracking is bad and should be outlawed, let them do so — and face up to the political consequences. Instead, the foes of fracking have settled on a strategy of endless obstruction designed to drag out 🦹any decision as long as they can.
They have a friend in Gov. Cuomo, who’s quite willing to put off any decision. Now Common Cause has aligned with 11 environmental groups to ask the gover♌nor to starꦚt the whole Health Department review over because one of the consulting firms that participated in the study favors fracking.
The only positive note in this mess is that New York’s highest court has just agreed to hear an appeal of a lower-court ruling upholding the “not in my backyard” bans on fracking that many state municipalities have imposed. But even if the court does overturn the bans — which is hardly assured — its ruling is another year or so down ꧋the line.
All this may boost Cuomo’s standing with th𒁃e extreme green wing of the Democratic Party, and any plans he has to run for president. But the human price for the governor’s politics of delay is a high one: It’s tꦕhe lost jobs and dying communities upstate.