Last week, Kamala Harris went on the record to confirm that as president, she would not ban natural gas fracking, admitting to CNN’s Dana Bash that she had changed her mind about her 2019 campaign pledge to do so.
That’s good news for Pennsylvania, where fracking is an estimated $41 billion industry, supporting 123,000 jobs.
But it should also be good news for New York, where natural gas is found in 22 upstate counties.
Now that her party’s standard-bearer has switched her view on fracking, so should Gov. Kathy Hochul — who is instead not even including natural gas on the agenda of her Clean Energy Summit this week, ignoring that this vast New York natural resource is cleaner than coal and can be developed without the government subsidies required for wind and solar power.
Crucially, lifting the state’s ban on development of the relatively clean-burning fuel would revive the moribund economy of upstate New York — Hochul’s own home region — which has long suffered from the loss of key industries and outmigration of its young, should they want to do something other than work at the Wegman’s grocery chain, the closest the area has lately come to a major economic success.
New York natural gas could keep them in the region and at the same time help the world replace Russian gas and sustain US energy independence.
It’s hard to exaggerate upstate New York’s steady decline: Since 2010, 83% of its 868 municipalities have lost population, including counties such as Erie (Buffalo), where population peaked in 1970, and Onandaga (Syracuse), where it peaked in 1950.
The decline includes Broome, Allegeny, Tompkins, Otsego and Seneca counties, all rich in natural gas deposits that are going untapped.
According to the Empire Center’s EJ McMahon, “from 2009 to 2018 … only five states experienced lower personal-income growth than upstate New York” — and the counties where income was most stagnant are those where the most shale gas is found.
But the industry’s development has simply not been possible since former Gov. Andrew Cuomo banned it in 2014, after years of supposedly objective study.
It would be an exaggeration to say that natural gas fracking would reverse the longtime decline. But there’s no doubt it could help.
A 2019 American Economic Association research study tallied the benefits and costs of permitting natural gas drilling, and the benefits are substantial.
“Counties with high fracking potential experience a natural resources boom,” the report found, including $400 million in gas and oil annually and increases of up to 6.1% in total income, 5.5% in employment, and 11% in salaries. Local government coffers swell by 15.5%.
To be sure, researchers found some “deterioration in the noneconomic quality of life” — more noise and, in some places, more crime.
But the paper concluded that the overall net impact is positive: an increase of 4.9% percent in average annual income, or about $2,500 per household.
With fracking banned, upstate New York is a supplicant, relying on redistributed tax revenues from New York City and its suburbs.
Cash-strapped upstate regions receive more than 60% of the state’s total operations expenses, according to the Rockefeller Institute — with New York City getting about 22% of the budget pie and the downstate suburbs 18%.
In other words, Gotham taxpayers support the hospitals, prisons and state parks that provide the bulk of upstate employment.
Perhaps downstate environmentalists — keen to emphasize the costs of fracking over its benefits — prefer an upstate that is a pastoral stage set of cornfields and aging small towns to a dynamic, economically healthy region.
Instead, the “progressive” solution for rural New York is cannabis cultivation — an industry that cannot match the wealth that could be gained by tapping the state’s mineral rights.
As for keeping the lights on, New York seems content to import our power from states like Pennsylvania that permit drilling.
There was a time when the state’s approach to innovation and development was dramatically different.
Consider the Erie Canal — dug from 1821 to 1825 by immigrant labor to link Buffalo to Albany and, via the Hudson, to New York City.
That bold state-funded investment made New York City the nation’s greatest port and wealthiest city.
This was infrastructure investment that worked.
Today, two centuries later, the state spends some $290 million a year to sustain the canal for recreation.
Yet tourism jobs are hardly a match for the benefits of industrial investment — and of course one does not have to mean an end to the other.
It’s hard to imagine an Erie Canal gaining the required permits today; environmentalists would sound the alarm about invasive species from the Great Lakes and the impact on marshland habitats. In the same way, there would be costs as well as benefits to fracking.
But allowing fracking to proceed would boost the 21st-century upstate economy just as much as digging the Erie Canal did centuries ago.
New York should follow Pennsylvania’s example and tap its extensive natural resources.
One should not have to live in a swing state to enjoy such economic growth.
Howard Husock is an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and the author of “The Poor Side of Town — And Why We Need It.”