A newly created anti-fossil fuel group traveled to the Capitol Tuesday and pushed legislators to halt all oil and gas related projects that are currently being discussed and planned in New York.
United Against Fossil Fuels, which is composed of several protesters and 76-year-old Hollywood actor James Cromwell, has become one of the chief protest groups etching out opposition to oil pipelines.
Cromwell, who is perhaps most famous for his Academy Award nominated role in “Babe,” a children’s movie about a talking pig, said he believes such actions are needed to avert economic catastrophe. “We are at the limits of suicide,” said Cromwell, who was one of several agitators opposing fossil fuel development.
Cromwell and his crew want to put the kibosh on several natural gas projects up and down the Empire State — they’re targeting projects such as the Crestwood Gas storage facility planned in the Finger Lakes, the Dominion Pipeline proposed for Central New York, as well as the Pilgrim Pipeline, which would carry natural gas from North Dakota to Linden New Jersey.
One of the areas Cromwell and the protesters are targeting — the Finger Lakes area — has had its employment numbers obliterated following the state’s ban on natural gas fracking, according to a report last year from New York’s comptroller.
The Southern Tier in New York, where most natural gas operations would be underway if the state lifts its fracking ban, as well as “Mohawk Valley, Central New York and North Country regions all experienced employment declines over the five years, with lower rates of total wage growth,” the comptroller’s report found, adding that overall labor participation in the region cratered as well.
“The Southern Tier is desolate,” Jim Finch, a supervisor for the upstate town of Conklin, told a local Fox News affiliate. “We have no jobs and no income. The richest resource we have is in the ground.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, officially banned hydraulic fracking in 2015 after New York’s environmental regulators reported that the “chosen alternative to prohibit high-volume hydraulic fracturing is the best alternative,” to the supposed public health effects created by fracking.
Cuomo’s move came shortly after the Environmental Protection Agency released a report on fracking, which found no “evidence that [fracking activities] have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.”
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