It is done: New York has officially banned high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the state’s shale formations.
State officials announced their intention to ban high-volume fracking back in December, but they also said that they needed to complete a few steps to finish out the environmental review. That’s done, and today, the Department of Environmental issued its findings statement. The 40-plus-page long document includes a lot of history and explanation, but here’s the passage stating the DEC’s decision:
“In the end, there are no feasible or prudent alternatives that would adequately avoid or minimize adverse environmental impacts and that address the scientific uncertainties and risks to public health from this activity. The Department’s chosen alternative to prohibit high-volume hydraulic fracturing is the best alternative based on the balance between protection of the environment and public health and economic and social considerations.”
In 2008, when New York started talking about horizontal wells and high-volume hydraulic fracturing, nobody knew a thing about them. Now, it’s really hard to go even a day without hearing about fracking’s role in the domestic energy boom and fracking’s potential to cause severe environmental damage. It’s also crept into popular culture, just like the Alaskan Gold Rush and the Texas oil boom. You know you’ve hit the big time when The Simpsons spends an episode satirizing your industry.
But the many New Yorkers who fought hard against fracking need to keep something in mind: this is a permanent ban only until someone reverses it. A future governor could tell the DEC to conduct a new environmental review, and the outcome may not be the same.
It’d be silly to pretend that political and public pressure don’t influence these types of high-profile reviews, when they clearly do. To ensure that the ban remains in place, fracktivists and their many allies will have to keep pressure on their elected officials.
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2015.
“It’d be silly to pretend that political and public pressure don’t influence these types of high-profile reviews, when they clearly do.”– pretty much says it all, but hey, who needs fracking, or coal or nuclear, for that mater when you have an electric car or subway? What do I know anyway? I never went to college like all of the “smart” people
Instead of focusing on energy options for New York in a time of Climate Change, this critical dialogue was hijacked for six long years by one of the worst options—Fracking, another fossil fuel option.
During that time we could already be moving forcefully towards 100% renewables by 2030, which many groups are now just starting to press their representatives on. (I’ve attended some of those meetings myself.)
One of the fundamental problems with the whole Fracking issue is how the NYS Department of Environment understands its mission: “based on the balance between protection of the environment and public health and economic and social considerations.”
Although this may seem the obvious to most folks, the role of our environmental agency is fundamentally flawed. Our environmental agency should have one mission only, as does Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality “DEQ’s mission is to be a leader in restoring, maintaining and enhancing the quality of Oregon’s air, land and water.”
Our DEC’s mission should not be to balance anything but the integrity of our life support system—especially as we rush headlong into Climate Change. There are other agencies, businesses, and groups who can and should fight for their slice of our environmental pie.
But if our state authority continues to see its mission as a balancing act for everyone and everything who wants a part of our very compromised environment, we are in deep trouble. As the public weighs in on our energy options as our region is more and more affected by Climate Change (we are already experiencing a 71% increase of heavy rainfall in the Northeast since 1959) our environmental authority should only be focused on how those options will affect our environment.
Let every energy option proponent prove their option will do no harm.
More on Fracking in our area:
http://rochesterenvironment.com/Fracking%2…
“based on the balance between protection of the environment and public health and economic and social considerations” — it is not possible to honestly strike such a balance in the presence of an accounting model that sets the value of natural resources and the health of our life support system at zero. That the DEC suggests otherwise indicates a very high degree of ignorance and/or magical thinking.