Growth and Prosperity Report

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute, May 1, 2013

Andrew Gray

Executive Summary

In 2013, New York's state government will decide whether to permit extraction of natural gas by hydraulic fracturing or, instead, turn its current moratorium into a permanent ban on this technology. In weighing their choice, New York officials have an abundance of useful data from neighboring Pennsylvania. There, nearly 5,000 wells have been hydrofractured since 2002. If New York lifts its moratorium, companies will be drilling the same type of wells to exploit the same subterranean source of gas—the Marcellus Shale. Pennsylvania's experience is a good guide to what would happen in New York.

In this paper, we analyze the effect of hydrofracturing—at modest, moderate, and high levels—on jobs and income growth in Pennsylvania counties. We then use these data to project the benefits that New York counties stand to gain if the state again permits hydrofracturing.

We find that:

• Pennsylvania...

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This from the man who is not running for president. JLCpulse

Cuomo quietly ‘concedes’ 2016 race by FREDRIC U. DICKER in NY Post

Gov. Cuomo has quietly told associates that he is resigned to the fact that he can’t run for president in 2016 if Hillary Rodham Clinton enters the race, as is widely expected, sources told The Post.

“The governor has told people in recent weeks that there’s not a chance for him to run if Hillary gets in the race because she’ll easily wrap up the Democratic nomination,’’ said a Cuomo administration insider with direct knowledge of the situation.

“He knows that and he accepts that, and so he won’t even be thinking at all in those terms — unless Hillary decides not to run, which seems unlikely,’’ the source continued.

While Cuomo has repeatedly claimed he has no interest in running for president, his sharp turn to the political left this year after two years governing as a moderate convinced many Democrats and Republicans that he was laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign.

For now, Cuomo is expected to focus his political energies on trying to run up as huge a re-election victory next year as possible, with many on the inside saying he hopes to top his father Mario’s landslide margin over Westchester County Executive Andrew O’Rourke in 1986, when Mario got just over 64 percent of the vote.

But matching his father’s showing won’t be easy. Andrew...

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This bit of news goes with the DEP and EPA announcement on Franklin Forks like a horse and carriage. Our esteemed (??) state senators chose rabid activists to provide them with a professional tour of the highly publicised  but unjustifiably blighted gas wells that have been touted for two years as a blemish on the industry because Dimmock had already been removed from their stable of locations, by the EPA and the DEP. The fact that the homes in question were close to Salt Springs State Park did not phase the activists, no more than green dye dumped in the creek did. These folks will stoop to the lowest, slimiest levels to promote their false positions, the truth be damned and it seems like New York's finest like their company just fine on publicity tours with only one objective, publicity. There once was a time when people seeking good information sought out professionals in the feild of study they needed to understand. Seems in todays world experts are spurned for noisy technically ignorant activists. It is time for our senators to wake up to the real science and worry some about the land poor and unemployed residents of upstate NY. JLCpulse

29 April 2013 by Jon Campbell in Lohudblogs.com.

Sens. David Carlucci, Cecilia Tkaczyk and Bill Perkins all traveled to northeastern Pennsylvania on Friday for a tour organized by an anti-fracking group. And when they got there, a staffer for a gas-industry-funded group decided to tail along.

Energy in Depth, an...

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The PA DEP comments follow the EPA Article in this posting. JLCpulse

By Ben Wolfgang in The Washington Times 4/29/2013

Fracking, formally known as hydraulic fracturing, uses massive amounts of water combined with sand and chemicals to crack underground rock and release trapped gas. It is being used extensively in states across the nation and is credited with putting the U.S. on a path toward North American energy independence within the next 10 to 15 years.

While environmental groups likely will dispute the Franklin Forks findings, Pennsylvania officials are making perfectly clear that nearby fracking simply could not be responsible for the elevated methane levels.

“The water samples taken from the private water wells was not of the same origin as the natural gas in the nearby gas wells,” the DEP said.

Many in the

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By Kevin Begos   Associated Press  April 28, 2013

PITTSBURGH (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency has dramatically lowered its estimate of how much of a potent heat-trapping gas leaks during natural gas production, in a shift with major implications for a debate that has divided environmentalists: Does the recent boom in fracking help or hurt the fight against climate change?

Oil and gas drilling companies had pushed for the change, but there have been differing scientific estimates of the amount of methane that leaks from wells, pipelines and other facilities during production and delivery. Methane is the main component of natural gas.

The new EPA data is "kind of an earthquake" in the debate over drilling, said Michael Shellenberger, the president of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental group based in Oakland, Calif. "This is great news for anybody concerned about the climate and strong proof that existing technologies can be deployed to reduce methane leaks."

The scope of the EPA's revision was vast. In a mid-April report on greenhouse emissions, the agency now says that tighter pollution controls instituted by the industry resulted in an average annual decrease of 41.6 million metric tons of methane emissions from 1990 through 2010, or more than 850 million metric tons overall. That's about a 20 percent reduction from previous estimates. The agency converts the methane emissions into their equivalent in carbon dioxide, following standard scientific practice.

The EPA revisions came even though natural gas production has grown by nearly 40 percent since 1990. The industry has boomed...

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Congressman Tom Reed on developing energy resources safely and responsibly to put American manufacturers in a competitive position to invest in jobs in the United States.

 

 

Here’s a quick video of a piece of Martens’ comments Friday:

 

BINGHAMTON –MARCH 25, 2013 – NY Landowners today announced that they are seeking contributions to fund the “Takings” lawsuit against NY State and ask all who share concern for state government seizing property rights to give generously to the fund.

Chemung Canal Trust Company in Binghamton, NY, will administer the fundraising account. Donations for the lawsuit can be made payable to “Landowner Defense Fund” and mailed to:

Donations can also be made by credit card by visiting the JLCNY’s website and clicking on the Landowner Defense Fund PayPal Link at www.jlcny.org   

The JLCNY is a 501(c)(6) non profit corporation. Contributions or gifts to the Landowner Defense Fund through the JLCNY are not tax deductible as charitable contributions.

“NY State has taken our property rights - we’re going to win them back,” said Dan Fitzsimmons, JLCNY president. “The southern tier has...

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Harvard's credibility went south when it was disclosed that they had admitted and promoted an academic fraud into their most high society. It is really hard to determine just who to listen to regarding the science of drilling, I believe my direction would not be accepting the data from a politically oriented institution of higher education, rather I would prefer to hear it from a well established engineering university. JLCpulse

By David Blackmon in Forbes 4/25/2013

Well, I guess we should have expected this.  “This” being the study released on April 23 by Harvard University, which is highly critical of the FracFocus system for disclosure of hydraulic fracturing fluids used by the oil and natural gas industry.

FracFocus was created to address a very specific issue that had been raised by environmental groups:  Several years ago, there was supposedly a hue and cry from landowners wanting to know the chemical content of the frac fluids that were going down oil and gas wells on their land or on adjacent lands.  The news media predictably latched onto this conflict story – which has turned out to have been grossly exaggerated. In any event, the oil and natural gas industry, working at great expense with regulators at the Interstate Oil & Gas Compact Commission and the Groundwater Protection Council, spent more than a year developing FracFocus to...

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By Robert Nelson in Forbes 3/26/2013

Many environmentalists are unhappy about President Barack Obama’s nomination of Ernest Moniz, a professor of physics and engineering at MIT, to be Secretary of Energy.

As Director of the MIT Energy Initiative, Moniz assembled an all-star cast of MIT physical and social scientists to produce a June 2011 report that pointed to natural gas as an abundant, low-cost energy source that could sustain much of the world’s energy needs over the next several decades while we transition to wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and other carbon-free energy sources. It would also offer large environmental benefits because gas emits few conventional pollutants, and only about half as much carbon dioxide as the main transitional alternative: continued coal burning.

Implicit in the MIT vision was an understanding that shale gas development, using the technology known as “fracking,” should and will occur on a global scale. While a few groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund have been supportive, this is unacceptable to many others in the environmental movement. So they are striking out to discredit Professor Moniz, his views, and the additional large body of academic research and practical experience proving the efficacy and safety of fracking.

In the environmentalist blogosphere, for example, the discussions of natural gas and fracking take on a decidedly hostile tone. “Fracking is madness, a sign of a society gone completely insane and bent...

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