What do wealthy progressives in New York and California share in common? Both groups are happy to exploit poor people as part of their self-identification. In California, that has involved not vaccinating their children, instead letting poor kids get vaccinated to provide herd immunity for their special snowflakes, while in New York it means adopting a veil of environmental sincerity, by going after both nuclear power and natural gas, while quietly buying all the fossil fuel energy they can get to prevent brown-outs. Let poor people in Pennsylvania have health risks, say New Yorkers.

The environmental lobbyists who control the New York Department of Environmental Conservation - yes, there is a state department devoted to being against science - issued the 'final' report of a seven year study whose conclusion was preordained; fracking is bad, they said. Meanwhile, another part of New York government is preparing to buy energy they will need from over the border in Pennsylvania, which will come from...fracking. Because activists also want Indian Point nuclear power closed this summer and they cannot meet their energy demands without Pennsylvania fracking.

If environmental policies were enacted, without a hypocritical back door like this, air conditioners would stop working, but only for poor people. Wealthy elites in Manhattan are going to find a way to get energy. Knowing this will have no actual impact, it is an intellectual placebo for voters, Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Joe Martens, founding chairman of the "Catskill Mountainkeeper" group, created specifically to protest hydraulic fracturing, rubber-stamped the report saying, basically, there is no risk known but there may be, so let's ban it. He was not chosen just because he is against fracking, of course, there is also some crony-ism: He was "environmental liaison" for the current governor's father.

The ethical stand would have been to take their lumps and suffer brown-outs so the public could see what environmental zealotry really means. A New York environmental activist has chosen the opposite and feels fracking is bad for water, but as long as the people being harmed are in Pennsylvania, that is okay.