Will Hochul Let An Anti-Fracking Bill Quietly Die? Election Results Should Tell Her What to Do ... But It's New York.

Guest Post by Jim Willis at Marcellus Drilling News.

As we’ve pointed out a number of times this year, the New York legislature (both chambers controlled by radical Democrats) passed a ban on “CO2 fracking” (uses carbon dioxide instead of water) back in March of this year (see Radicals Win in NY – Senate Passes Permanent Ban on CO2 Fracking).

Yet, as we told you just two weeks ago, NY Gov. Kathy Hochul has still not signed the bill into law (see 8 Mo. After NY Legislature Passed CO2 Frack Ban, Gov Has Not Signed). Time is quickly running out for her to sign it before the next session of the legislature convenes in January. At that point, the bill would have to be reintroduced and passed again.

Is there a sliver of a chance she won’t sign it? Is there an even smaller sliver of a chance that Dems will reconsider their position and allow upstate counties to frack, given their shellacking not only nationally but here in Upstate, where Trump won almost every single county?

We don’t want to offer false hope. We always try to be brutally honest in our assessments. Traditional water-based fracking was outlawed under Gov. Andrew Cuomo when he slipped a ban on fracking into the state budget law in 2020 at the height of the pandemic scare when nobody was paying attention (see Cuomo PERMANENTLY Bans NY Fracking in Now-Adopted Budget).

Along came Southern Tier Solutions in late 2023, offering upstate landowners hope for drilling and fracking by using CO2 instead of water (see Company Seeks to Lease New York Mineral & Pore Rights for Flat $10). That prompted extreme radicals to rise up and demand a permanent ban on CO2 fracking. The obsequious Democrat legislature obeyed and passed it. But Hochul has not yet signed it into law.

Here’s a map of how every county voted for presidential candidates in the 2024 election:

Surprised? We were! New York is turning RED! As in Republican. ALL of the counties along the border with Pennsylvania (where the most Marcellus/Utica shale gas would be located) voted for Trump. The only county with major gas deposits not voting for Trump was Tompkins County where the strange creatures of Planet Ithaca live. No mystery there.

Still, even Long Island and Staten Island voted for Trump! If not for the geographically small (but population large) New York City and Hudson Valley area voting for Harris, Trump would have handily won New York. Democrats may be twisted, but they’re not stupid. They look at the map and tremble.

It is New York City Democrats who are blocking Upstate counties from fracking. What harm would it do to allow counties to individually decide whether or not to frack? That’s the point of the following City Journal column by Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

Dare we begin to hope that NY may one day see fracking?

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.

State legislators should consider a compromise: permit fracking in rural counties that badly need economic uplift but not in those where majorities are dead set against it. Like most states, New York has local option laws, which permit cities and counties to vote on whether to adopt controversial practices. Historically, local option laws have been the rule for permitting the sale of alcoholic beverages or gambling. In 2021, the same “opt-out” rule was applied to allowing marijuana retailers. About half of municipalities (751 of 1,520) opted out.

Local control of fracking could allow jurisdictions such as counties to opt in. As a first step, non-binding local referenda would let Albany know how local residents view the issue.

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.

As the Ukraine war grinds on and Europe remains desperate to import natural gas rather than rely on Russia, New York State—like Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Dakota, and Texas—could become part of a natural-resource arsenal of democracy and promote American energy dominance. Local voters deserve the chance to make that happen.

Editor's Note: The New York election results show a very good reason for Hochul to quietly let the anti-fracking bill die and it’s not the Upstate votes. No, it’s much more important to her politics than that. It’s the New York City votes, as the far-left Guardian reported:

The Bronx, which has a large Latino population, saw the largest swing towards Trump in the state: Joe Biden won 83% of the vote there in 2020, compared with Trump’s 16%. This time round, Harris won by 73% to Trump’s 27%. In 2016, Trump won just 21.8% of the vote in Queens, his home borough, but this week 38% of voters there cast their ballot for the former and now future president.

In fact, every single county in the New York City metropolitan area swung towards Trump compared with four years ago, Gothamist reported.

Yes, even the belly of the beast is a lot redder these days and that should tell Hochul something.

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