EnergyFactor By ExxonMobil | Pespectives has a new home

New life for Youngstown – and New York?

Above-the-fold on Page 1 of The New York Times is valuable media real estate, which makes two stories from yesterday’s edition all that more meaningful.

Above the fold newspaperThe first is a dispatch from Youngstown, Ohio, with the headline “Boom in Energy Spurs Industry in the Rust Belt.” The article opens with a seemingly abandoned factory on the edge of town being brought back to life thanks to shale energy. The manufacturing company profiled – Youngstown Bending and Rolling – is looking to hire workers.

As the story relates:

The turnaround is part of a transformation spreading across the heartland of the nation, driven by a surge in domestic oil and gas production that is changing the economic calculus for old industries and downtrodden cities alike.

Also found on the front page is an article that details New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s plan to revive the sluggish state economy by expanding casino gambling. The aim is “to create jobs [and] generate upstate taxes.”

The two articles jumped out at me because they are far more connected than might at first appear, with lessons from one story applicable to the other.

I won’t speculate on whether the state’s push into casinos will help the Empire State’s economy.

But I would suggest that if state officials are genuinely interested in creating sustainable economic growth – and shaking the rust out of some of New York’s depressed upstate locales – then removing the de facto ban on hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale would be a far safer bet.

A Manhattan Institute report last year suggested that the income of residents in the 28 New York counties above the Marcellus could expand by 15 percent or more in just four years if the state’s moratorium were lifted.

Meanwhile the economic activity ramping up in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia – which allow safe energy production from their portions of the Marcellus – offers a glimpse of what New York is foregoing in terms of jobs, investment, and tax revenue.

Let’s hope the New York state policymakers who read the Times over breakfast yesterday morning read about more than the politics of casino gambling. Let’s hope they let their eyes drift a few inches to the feature on how energy development is creating jobs and revenue in Ohio – just another example of the ongoing renaissance in manufacturing flowing from America’s energy revolution.


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