If you want to understand how ideological environmentalists think, consider that the argument for Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recently announced ban on modern techniques for natural-gas extraction (the feared and hated “fracking”) contained a litany of risks, some of them legitimate (managing fracking waste-water is a challenge) and some of them less so. One of the items on the “con” side of the ledger: increased traffic.
The gas exploration in question would have happened largely in New York’s “Southern Tier,” the counties adjacent to Pennsylvania. The Southern Tier is one of the most economically depressed places in these United States, bleeding population (especially young people), with the poverty rate topping 20 percent in many communities. Which is to say, expanding natural-gas production might have breathed some economic life into these declining post-industrial ghost towns, and Governor Cuomo’s exquisitely considered environmental analysis is that this is a bad thing, because in places that are not economically dead people and goods move about.
The usual inclination of unimaginative Cuomo-style hacks is to throw a casino or two at struggling communities, but New York just rejected the Southern Tier on that count, too.
In 1980, New York was almost twice as populous as Florida, which just displaced it as the third-most-populous state.
New York State is utterly dominated by New York City, and consequently by the sort of urban consumer liberalism found among people who believe that chickens come from Whole Foods rather than from henhouses. So nobody is thinking too much about where the state is getting its power. New York is largely dependent on natural gas, but it has to import much of that gas from out of state, and it does not have an adequate pipeline infrastructure for meeting all of its electricity-generating needs. So New York will make up the shortfall in the usual way: with coal.
Well-to-do Manhattanites charging up their Teslas, perhaps to take a spin through the depopulated Southern Tier, should keep in mind that Governor Cuomo’s ban on fracking means that those precious electric cars are in fact going to be coal-powered cars to a greater extent than they would have been without the restrictions on natural gas.
But the kids in Brooklyn can cheer for the fracking ban. They can afford it.