Fracking, New York Taxes and Twitter

Have you ever sat down to write a brief, polite reply to an email and ended up writing a page and a half instead? Oh, c’mon…  you know you have.  It’s very therapeutic, isn’t it? When it happens to me, most often I have the good sense not to press the Send button.  Sometimes, not.

It all started with a Tweet.  I came across this graphic on the Business Insider website.  It shows changes in population by state and county.  Here in New York State, we are losing jobs as indicated by the orange color.  That Navy blue spot at the top of North Dakota indicates that lots of people are moving there.  ND has permitted hydraulic fracturing (fracking), creating energy jobs and an influx of population. 

So, I tweeted, “No fracking in NY, people move out. Fracking in ND, people move in. Whose economy is booming?”

I got a long reply from an employee of the New York State Department of Labor.  (I don’t believe he was replying in an official capacity and I won’t reveal his name.) 

“I took five minutes and pulled up why I don’t want to see NY and Rochester’s economy to go boom,” he started.  Five whole minutes!  Wow!

“Duke Energy has been charged with environmental violations eight times in less than a month
Residents told the Philadelphia Daily News they were awakened shortly before 7 a.m. by the sound of a huge blast from a natural gas well that Chevron was drilling using hydraulic fracturing techniques.”  He goes on to cite several other examples of citizen complaints and accidents and even ventures into a discussion about train accidents that have caused oil spills and death.

After a careful reading, I set out to make a brief, polite reply.

“First, I would like to thank you for your thoughtful reply to what was just a Tweet. I enjoy engaging in conversation with people of diverse backgrounds and points of view,” I began. 

“Before I respond to your comments about fracking, I would like to make an observation more generally about the business environment in NY. In my work, my clients are CEOs and business owners. I can tell you categorically that they feel unwelcome. Universally, they view the Governor's ‘Open for Business’ campaign as a joke.” 

You can see that I was in the wrong mood to be brief and polite.

“Why?” I asked rhetorically. 

“An extraordinarily high tax burden and a regulatory regime that is unresponsive to the needs of business.”

I cited examples of business owners and CEOs who are considering expanding into other states.  Banks, transportation companies and real estate developers would all like to avoid the cost of doing business here.  New York may be ‘Open for Business’ but business owners are walking through the door in the wrong direction.

As for fracking – on which New York has imposed a ban – I suggested that, “The environmental lobby has scared the crap out of everyone on this issue. And fear is a more powerful motivator than anything else. 

“Every source of energy production has had its disasters -- from coal mine collapses to Three Mile Island to the Exxon Valdez. There isn't a month that goes by without one. If you're interested Google ‘oil spills train accidents’. 

“I lived in Philadelphia for six years. It was rare that a year went by without a major oil fire. Google ‘Philadelphia oil refinery fires’.”  I figured if he could spend 5 minutes feeding his confirmation bias, he could spend 5 minutes feeding mine.

Fracking was introduced in the 1940s and there are over 1 Million instances in the US where fracking is used to extract natural gas. “How many accidents?” I asked. 

“President Obama is no slave to the oil lobby. His Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, has pronounced the risk associated with fracking as ‘manageable’. So, let's MANAGE it! 

“As a native New Yorker, I grew up during a time when New York was the ‘Empire State’ for real. The Governor can keep saying we're ‘Open for Business’ all he likes. But, our 35-year track record of job and population losses tells a different story. If you take Wall Street out of the picture, the state economy is pitiful. 

“You can take each regulation and rationalize its reason for existence. But the overall effect of the state government's burden is destroying us.” 

A week later I read that, once again, New York topped the list of states with the heaviest income tax burden.

I signed the email “respectfully” but I am not sure that was true.

WHO WILL LEAD?