Did you know that New York state has a moratorium on fracking? Most of us haven’t had to think about it because we believed that we had been protected from fracking’s harms. But there are other activities related to fracking that are still allowed. We import fracked gas in pipelines through our state from Pennsylvania.
This means that people living in Pennsylvania are hurt by fracking so that people in New York and beyond can have the advantages of natural gas products. There are dangerously noisy and polluting compressor stations in some New York state communities. When this infrastructure is not in our neighborhood, we can ignore it.
If we continue to allow these ancillary activities, it puts us behind in working towards a future run on renewables. The industry and our government say that natural gas is a clean-burning fuel.
They say it’s a cheap fuel. Drilling and other activities are only cheap because subsidies exist; health and safety impacts aren’t figured into the price we pay when the natural gas is delivered to our homes.
Some of the people most affected are children, the elderly, the chronically ill, and poor and minority communities. We pay for it one way or another.
Google the Solutions Project to see what a 100 percent renewable energy mix would look like for New York and the 260,000 jobs that going renewable would create. Even Forbes magazine finds that solar energy employs more people in the United States than oil and gas combined. You can’t beat that.
Florence Carnahan
Schenectady
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Categories: Letters to the Editor, Opinion
