Abundant American Energy is Boosting the U.S. Economy and Creating jobs

Mary Schaper
Posted November 8, 2013

Fred Siegel: Fracking, Poverty and the New Liberal Gentry

Wall Street Journal: The transformation of American liberalism over the past half-century is nowhere more apparent than in the disputes now roiling a relatively obscure section of upstate New York. In 1965, as part of his "war on poverty," President Lyndon Johnson created the Appalachian Regional Commission. Among the areas to be served by the commission were the Southern Tier counties of New York state, including Broome, Tioga and Chemung. The commission's central aim was to "Increase job opportunities and per capita income in Appalachia to reach parity with the nation."

Like so many Great Society antipoverty programs, the effort largely failed. The Southern Tier counties remain much as they appeared in the 1960s, pocked by deserted farms and abandoned businesses, largely untouched by the prosperity that blessed much of America over the past five decades.

Beginning about a dozen years ago, remarkable improvements in natural-gas drilling by means of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, seemed to promise a way out of poverty. The massive Marcellus Shale Formation under New York and Pennsylvania has proved to be "the most lucrative natural gas play in the U.S.," Business Week recently noted, because the shale produces high-quality gas and is easily shipped to New York and Philadelphia.

In Pennsylvania, a state long familiar with carbon production through oil drilling and coal mining, Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell backed fracking during his tenure from 2003-11, and the state has experienced a boom in jobs and income. Between 2007 and 2011, in Pennsylvania counties with more than 200 fracking wells, per capita income rose 19%, compared with an 8% increase in counties with no wells, as petroleum analyst Gregg Laskoski wrote for U.S. News & World Report in August.

In New York, the potential natural-gas bonanza has been stillborn. … Many landowners were being crushed by the heavy burden of New York's high taxes -- among the highest property taxes in the nation -- and by regulation that made it hard to eke out a living from small dairy herds.

The landowners have been no match for an antifracking coalition that drew on the liberal well-to-do and celebrities, including Yoko Ono and Richard Plunz, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, whose primary residences are in New York City but who also own second homes upstate.

Read more: http://on.wsj.com/1hrdrUJ

More industry news:

• Lord of the RINs? Vitol’s Ethanol Credit Bonanza: http://reut.rs/1c2zN88

• Trio of Texas Universities Win Bid to Launch Offshore Safety Center: http://bit.ly/1bawJIT

• VIDEO: Pennsylvania’s Shale Gas Experience: http://bit.ly/1acWgjq

• After 13 Years, Bucksport, Maine, Finally Gets Natural Gas: http://bit.ly/HDvQgJ

• Another American Pipeline Race – the Rush to Corpus Christi: http://on.wsj.com/1gwUuid