The Kooky Things Anti-Drillers Say
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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Now that New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Joe Martens has let the cat out of the bag that Marcellus and Utica Shale drilling permits will likely not be issued in 2012, the mainstream media has come along to prop him up with excuse stories for why New York will continue to delay drilling—to give Martens political cover for the coming firestorm. The simple fact is, the longer drilling is delayed, the more likely it will never happen—and anti-drillers know it. MDN believes these delays are by design, not an “aw shucks, things are jest turnin’ out this way” as Mr. Martens wants us to believe.
A list of 250+ physicians and other health care professionals, along with the usual group of opposition groups, sent a letter to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo yesterday requesting more study of shale gas drilling’s affects on health before approving new regulations and issuing permits to drill. A copy of their letter is embedded below.
MDN recently reported about two lawsuits filed (so far) in New York State that will set precedent in the state on the issue of whether or not local municipalities (i.e. townships) can ban gas drilling altogether within their borders.
Every time MDN writes about our observation that those who oppose drilling do so from an ideology, we get pushback from the man-made global warming true believers. If you want to believe that man causes global warming, be my guest. But don’t expect me to “go green” so you can feel good about yourself. I don’t believe it—not a word of it. It’s not been proven by any kind of science that stands up to scrutiny. It’s all ethereal theories and conjecture—not real, testable, measurable, objective and verifiable science.
Early today, Norse Energy, a Norwegian company with gas drilling operations in New York State, issued an interesting press release about laying off half of their employees (see the full release below). Norse holds some 180,000 net acres of natural gas leases in New York, of which 130,000 are in the Marcellus and Utica Shale zones.
As many of you have heard via the national media, the Binghamton, NY (Broome County) area—where much of the drilling in New York State is likely to occur once drilling begins—was just hit with the worst flooding in its history, after the previous “worst ever” flooding occurred only five years ago, in 2006. This type of flooding is referred to as a “100-year flood” and it causes the government to re-draw floodplain maps to indicate where such areas are capable of extreme flooding.