Pataki: Marcellus Shale Creates Jobs

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For­mer New York Gov­er­nor George Pataki

For­mer New York Gov­er­nor George E. Pataki, who briefly flirted with a pres­i­den­tial run this year, before real­iz­ing the vot­ers weren’t flirt­ing back, penned an edi­to­r­ial in the Daily News this morn­ing sup­port­ing drilling in the Mar­cel­lus Shale formation.

The three-term Repub­li­can has posi­tioned him­self as an energy expert, and had planned on mak­ing nat­ural gas extrac­tion a cen­tral theme of a pres­i­den­tial bid.

Here’s the article:

The ben­e­fits of these nat­ural gas reserves for our econ­omy would be enor­mous, even trans­for­ma­tional. Domes­tic nat­ural gas wait­ing to be unlocked will give us the oppor­tu­nity to reduce our depen­dence on for­eign oil while mak­ing our air cleaner through the use of more nat­ural gas in elec­tric power gen­er­a­tion and transportation.

Then there’s this not-insignificant point: The devel­op­ment of the Mar­cel­lus Shale for­ma­tion means jobs and invest­ment through­out New York. Right now, these jobs are being cre­ated directly across the bor­der in Penn­syl­va­nia. Accord­ing to a recent report by the Penn­syl­va­nia Labor and Indus­try Depart­ment, from Octo­ber 2009 through March 2010 a stag­ger­ing 48,000 new jobs were cre­ated by the indus­try and its related sup­ply chain.

New York needs jobs. The April 2011 state jobs report esti­mates 259,400 upstaters are cur­rently unem­ployed. An influx of even half those jobs cre­ated in Penn­syl­va­nia would make a big dif­fer­ence to New York fam­i­lies. And these are good jobs; the same Penn­syl­va­nia report shows that the aver­age wage last year for jobs in the basic gas indus­try was $69,995, while the aver­age wage in sup­port indus­tries — such as con­struc­tion, steel and engi­neer­ing — was $63,967.