An excellent commentary in today’s New York Post by Abby Wisse Schachter addresses the fear mongering and just plain kookiness heard from anti-drillers. From the opening:

New York state just announced another delay in what has become a more-than-four-year process to approve widespread natural-gas drilling. Over that time, the state has lost tens of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars of business — and the opposition to drilling has only gotten more entrenched and radical.

Gov. Cuomo should not be swayed by such hysteria.

An Oct. 6 New York Policy Forum panel on gas drilling is a case in point. At it, Binghamton Mayor Matthew Ryan participated in a discussion of hydro-fracking, the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock. He argued that New York doesn’t need natural gas to power its economic future.

“You can do other things … You can save so much energy just by switching to wood pellets,” Ryan claimed. “If you combine that with retrofitting all the rural properties … you’ll produce thousands of jobs.”

Wood pellets. What century does Ryan think this is?*

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