New York Gov. Kathy Hockle insisted Thursday that “we don't do fracking in New York state” to boost energy supplies, even though Vice President Kamala Harris has now said she supports fracking for drilling for natural gas.
“We're not fracking. We're not burning coal. We're not going backwards,” said Democrat The governor said At the Future Energy Economy Summit in Syracuse.
This comes after Harris, the party's White House nominee, said in a recent CNN interview that she “would not ban fracking” if elected president, a stark shift from the position she took when she first ran for president in 2020.
“As vice president, I did not ban fracking, and I will not ban fracking as president,” Harris said in her first interview since taking over as the Democratic nominee for President Biden.
Fracking creates jobs and is popular in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state for the White House.
But Hoeckle made it clear he doesn't want to do “fracking, baby fracking” in the southern part of New York state's natural-gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation, which borders Pennsylvania.
“I'm very excited about the All Above Approach, except for fracking and coal,” Hawkle said at the end of his speech.
Instead, she touted carbon-free electricity generated from offshore wind, solar, geothermal and other sources.
Some of her energy officials also promoted nuclear power during the summit.
Hydraulic fracturing is a drilling technique that injects high-pressure fluid into underground rocks to force open existing fractures and extract oil and gas.
A report published a decade ago by the Manhattan Institute think tank estimated that allowing fracking could create 15,000 to 18,000 jobs in the Southern Tier and Western New York, generating up to $11.4 billion in economic output and $1.4 billion in state and local tax revenue.
After years of study and controversy, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo banned fracking in 2014 after a health department study found it posed a public health risk due to possible groundwater contamination.
There is little support for revisiting the issue in the Democratic-run Congress.
Fracking has provoked fierce opposition from the environmental left and from celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Sean Ono and actor Mark Ruffalo.
Vintners in the growing wine industry in the nearby Finger Lakes region of New York state also opposed fracking.
