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I’ve been writing about New York State’s danse macabre with ruinous energy policies darn near since I started here. The last post I did that I can find on the subject was in June of this year when the state’s Independent System Operator (NYISO) issued their annual Power Trends Report.

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…One of the first things that should have jumped out at Green Gov Kathy Hochul and the climate cultists in the state legislature should have been the #mathz. That alone would have given a rational person pause, but who are we talking about, right? 

There’s only about 20M people counting on this daffy creature to keep the lights and heat on in their homes among her other gubernatorial duties, and she seems pretty overwhelmed as it is. No wonder little details like this slip through the cracks.

…New York has set a goal for 100 percent clean energy on its grid by 2040 to reduce carbon emissions and slow the progress of climate change. The effort that will require a wide roll-out of renewable energy and the axing of power plants fueled by fossil fuels like natural gas.

In the five years since New York set its clean energy targets, the state lost 5,207 megawatts of fossil-fired power supply versus gaining 2,256 megawatts of clean energy sources like wind and solar, the New York Independent System Operator said in its annual reliability report.

NY hasn’t “lost” anything. In its renewable zealotry, the state has forced the shutdown of 5200+MW of reliable power generation in the past five years. That’s the first point. In answer to replacing it, they have only managed to come up with less than half the “lost” capacity for generation, and what it does have consists of unreliable wind and solar.

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So the state is power-poor and is doing nothing to make sure they have reliable replacements for what they’re taking out of service thanks to “dirty fossil fuels” and their suicidal force march to NetZero. Even with tremendous natural gas reserves in their own backyards, the state banned fracking in 2014 under Andrew Cuomo…

When natural gas companies first pressed into New York in 2008, state environmental regulators barely understood the process of “hydraulic fracturing.” Today, six and a half years after ProPublica first raised concerns that the drilling could threaten both the state’s water supply and its residents’ health, Gov. Andrew Cuomo banned the process across the state.

The ban makes New York, which holds large natural gas reserves in the Marcellus Shale, the largest and most significant region to bow out of the nation’s energy boom because of concerns that its benefits may be outweighed by the risk. 

…and has passed a stricter fracking ban related to using CO2 for extraction this spring. I cannot find where Gov Kathy Hochul has signed that piece of anti-natgas legislation into law yet. But she and her climate cult allies have been at war with existing natural gas utilities, insisting on bans oion new gas heating installations and the retrofitting of existing gas pipelines to get to as close to carbon neutral as possible.

The problem with those literal pipe dreams, as with every Green scheme, is the price tag.

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…I mean, look what they’re up against.

If New York wants to meet its climate goals, the state’s gas utilities can’t stick to business as usual. Nor can they keep investing billions of dollars in maintaining and expanding the nearly 50,000 miles of gas pipeline they’ve laid over the course of the past half-century.

Instead, state regulators have to start acting now to force the nearly 150-year-old industry to undergo a “managed, phased transition” to a new carbon-free path — or the consequences could be catastrophic.

…That’s because gas utilities can no longer rely on decades of revenue from a growing customer base to pay off the costs of upgrading an aging and leak-prone pipeline network. Since the 2019 passage of New York’s climate law, the state’s gas utilities have spent $5 billion on infrastructure investments and identified $28 billion in pipeline replacement plans, the report states.

While those replacements reduce safety hazards and emissions from leaking gas, they also come at extraordinary cost, the report finds — between $3 million and $6 million per mile, depending on how costs are accounted for, or up to an average of $60,000 per customer served by the line being replaced.

Mandating someone spend SIXTY GRAND to make their nat gas line into the house ‘carbon-free’ will get you a certain amount of unfriendly pushback.

Hochul had been holding the no-fracking line pretty solidly until she was thrown a curve-ball by the recent Democratic presidential candidate’s epic flip-flop on the issue. Kind of put the ardent cultist governor in a tough spot.

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Gov. Kathy Hochul on Thursday insisted “we’re not fracking” in New York to boost the energy supply — despite Vice President Kamala Harris saying she now favors such drilling for natural gas.

“We’re not fracking, we’re not burning coal. We’re not going backwards,” the Democratic governor said during a “future energy economy summit” in Syracuse.

It came after Harris, her party’s nominee for the White House, said during her recent CNN interview that she would “not ban fracking” if elected president – a major reversal from her position during her first run for the Oval Office in 2020.

Awkward.

 So, post-election, this was kind of interesting. There are two New Yorks, and one of them wants the right to drill, baby, drill what’s right under their feet.

The 2024 election was a referendum on a wide range of issues, but there’s no doubt that increasing domestic fossil-fuel production—“energy dominance,” as Donald Trump now calls it—was on the ballot and won. Kamala Harris backed away from her past calls to ban fracking but nonetheless lost Pennsylvania, where voters seemed to doubt her sudden change of heart.

The pro-Trump vote in most counties outside Gotham suggests that pro-fracking sentiment played a role in the election in New York State. Trump won by overwhelming margins in the counties located above portions of the Marcellus Shale formation, which feeds natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Many of these counties are economically distressed and have lost population. The time has come to give them a voice when it comes to permitting natural gas fracking, currently banned statewide.

At least 22 upstate New York counties sit atop Marcellus Shale deposits. These counties typically lag the state’s median household income level. Median income in Broome County, which is located on the Pennsylvania border and which nearly flipped from Biden to Trump (as of current data), is $63,000 compared with the statewide figure of $81,000. The county has lost 2 percent of its population since 2010, and 19 percent of residents live at or below the official poverty line. In western New York, Cattaraugus County, which also borders Pennsylvania, has a similar profile, with a median income of just $56,000. It has lost 5,000 of the 80,000 residents it had in 2010, and 16 percent live in poverty. It, too, voted for Trump in 2024. Indeed, outside of cities like Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo, the entire 2024 upstate county vote map is red.

Yet, despite these counties’ poverty and population loss and potential mineral wealth, the state legislature, dominated by downstate environmentalists, has banned fracking since 2020. Indeed, legislators went even further this year, prohibiting specific fracking-related practices, including the use of carbon dioxide rather than water to extract natural gas.

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Hochul isn’t interested in jobs or state revenue…

…or more available, reliable energy sources.

But it sounds as if upstate voters – well, damn near anyone outside the city – is ready for a change. In their corner is the new Environmental Protection Agency head, Lee Zeldin. He knows how to speak directly to the hearts of depressed and economically challenged counties sitting atop the treasure, which could change their fortunes and ensure their energy security at the same time.

…It’s worth noting that former New York representative Lee Zeldin, Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, campaigned for New York governor in 2022 on a pro-fracking platform. “Jobs can be created, we can generate revenue, we can drive down taxes,” Zeldin told reporters in July of that year. “There’s a huge benefit for the state to reverse that safe extraction of natural gas ban that we have.”

In his loss to Kathy Hochul in 2022, Zeldin won virtually every upstate county, as did Trump in 2024. His portfolio at EPA would not give him control over New York State’s fracking rules, but it would offer a bully pulpit from which to make the case that local communities should have the right to decide on the matter.

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No, his agency can’t control NY fracking laws, but the EPA surely won’t stand in the way of communities who now choose to fight for the right to frack with an energy-friendly administration in the White House.

Maybe they can stop tilting at windmills one of these days.