Liberals have unlimited capacity to compartmentalize issues and ignore their obvious interconnections. It would not be surprising to see The New York Times decry wage stagnation on Monday and income inequality on Tuesday; bemoan the low incomes of African Americans on Wednesday; attack carbon spewing coal-fired utility plants on Thursday; and then congratulate Andrew Cuomo for banning fracking on Friday. Never mind that fracking in New York would create high-paying blue-collar jobs in a depressed region, thereby raising median wages, reducing inequality and creating more jobs for African Americans—not to mention expanding output of natural gas which is “cleaner” than coal and raises real incomes by reducing utility bills.
Andrew Cuomo pretends he knows nothing about fracking and so left the decision to his health commissioner. Only Andrew believes that. His report banning fracking is a model of biased, illogical “analysis.” It cites “environmental impacts and health outcomes” potentially associated with fracking, such as:
- Air impacts that could affect respiratory health
- Climate change impacts due to methane emissions
- Drinking water impacts
- Potential surface spills that could contaminate soil and water
- Surface-water contamination resulting from inadequate wastewater treatment
- Earthquakes
- (This is the weirdest) Community impacts from “boom-town economic effects” such as increased traffic, road damage, noise, and stress.
These are issues worth considering. It would be great if we had many years of experience drilling thousands of hydro-fracking wells, to evaluate the health risks associated with fracking and determine how we can reduce them. But of course we do have such experience—in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, North Dakota, Ohio and nearby Pennsylvania. The report presents no hard evidence that fracking created significant health risks in these states. Even the EPA, sworn enemy of fossil fuels, has signed off on fracking.
And then one must ask, “compared to what?” We know that windmills slice up birds and create a racket that gives the neighbors headaches. Solar farms destroy thousands of acres of habitat and require lots of water to keep clean. Both wind and solar are expensive and require unpopular, disruptive power lines to transfer electricity from the source to the city. No energy source is perfect, including fracking and including all the alternatives.
Third, the report cites potential methane emissions (which can be minimized with careful management) but ignores the climate virtues of producing more natural gas to supplant coal.
Fourth, the report ignores the beneficial effects on health and overall well-being bestowed by stronger economic growth, more job creation, higher personal incomes and reduced poverty. This is a favorite tactic of environmentalists—measure health effects of pollution or pollution reduction while ignoring the beneficial economic effects of cheap energy, which in turn have positive implications for the health of average citizens. Poverty and high unemployment are not conducive to better health.
The notion that an economic boom would trouble western New York is particularly absurd. The population of Broome County (home of Binghamton) declined from 221,815 in 1970 to 200,600 in 2010. I seriously doubt a fracking boom that boosted the population 10% back up to the 1970 level would upset the citizens of this economically depressed county. As for the impact on tourism, the Southern Tier already has many natural gas wells, most of them tucked away in the expansive fields and forests of a beautiful and thinly populated agricultural region. Let each individual town decide whether it wants to put up with the disruption and prosperity of a fracking boom.
Enviro-colonialism . . .
What we have here is a rich urban and suburban enviro-gentry imposing its prejudices and misconceptions on poorer, less powerful rural folks. Consider the figures on median household income and poverty rates (2009-13) for the two regions:
- Three counties in the “southern tier” (Broome, Chemung, Chenango): median household income averages $39,193 and the share of people below the poverty level is 16.2%, on average for the three counties.
- Three counties in the New York City suburbs (Westchester, Nassau, Bergen): median household income averages $87,810 and the poverty rate averages 7.6%
So—even leaving aside the super-rich precincts of New York City—the affluent anti-fracking counties are more than twice as rich and have less than half the poverty of the poor counties denied jobs and prosperity by King Andrew’s edict. No wonder inequality is rising and wages are stagnating. If you want to prosper, go west to Texas and Oklahoma—which is precisely what workers are doing. Between 2000 and 2010 New York State’s population rose 2.1% and New Jersey’s 4.5%, while population growth was 20.6% in Texas and 8.7% in Oklahoma.
. . . could Split the Democratic Coalition
It’s not just King Andrew. Elizabeth Warren attacks fossil fuels while opining “if we commit ourselves to clean energy and energy efficiency now, in the long run we can reduce price swings and lower our overall costs.” As Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead. Right now the cost of heating houses in New England is about to soar because inadequate pipelines prevent cheap natural gas from reaching Senator Warren’s constituents. This is no big deal for wealthy professionals like Senator Warren; it matters a lot to average workers. Will she oppose the Keystone XL Pipeline?
And it’s not just energy. Democrats seem to be lining up behind the Reverend Al Sharpton against “racist cops.” They are attacking CIA patriots who (with the oversight of Congressional Democrats including Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein) water-boarded Islamic terrorists in order to protect Americans and eventually kill Osama Bin Laden.
Hopefully Republicans can find a candidate who—unlike Mitt Romney in 2012—will adroitly expose and exploit the rift between Democrats’ enviro-gentry and average workers of all ethnicities, genders, races, income levels, sexual preferences etc. The anti-capitalist environmental extremism of the Obama era has been a disaster for average workers—while the affluent have prospered.
Copyright Thomas Doerflinger 2014. All Rights Reserved.
