How two-faced RFK Jr. politicized science in fracking fight that left New York poorer

Robert F.Kennedy Jr.

says he’s fighting the kind of “politicized science that drove Froot Loops to the top of the food pyramid.” President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services has made a national brand out of questioning regulatory capture, challenging false consensus and demanding transparency in public health.But when it comes to fracking in New York, Kennedy wasn’t the whistleblower.He was the mythmaker.Will he apply the same skepticism to the fracking ban he himself helped create?In 2013, Kennedy personally lobbied then-Gov.

Andrew Cuomo to abandon a modest plan to permit just 40 test wells for hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas in the state’s Southern Tier.His justification? A then-unreleased public health study from Pennsylvania’s Geisinger Health System, which Kennedy claimed would soon confirm the health dangers of fracking.That study was never published.But the myth it supported proved useful.Cuomo reversed course.

The test wells never opened.And the fracking ban — initially pitched as temporary — hardened into permanent policy.The damage was real: While neighboring Pennsylvania surged ahead with an energy boom, New York’s rural communities were left behind.Billions of dollars in energy resources went untapped.Thousands of good-paying jobs never materialized.Local economies that could have been revitalized instead fell further into decline.In 2009, the Southern Tier counties of New York had higher GDP per capita than their neighbors across the border in northern Pennsylvania.

Then New York banned fracking, while Pennsylvania embraced it.Over the next decade, the economic trajectories flipped.A recent Heritage Foundation study comparing these geologically similar “Twin Tier” regions found that New York’s ban cost its counties an estimated $11,000 per resident — or $27,000 per household — in lost economic output.While Pennsylvania saw a boom in jobs, small-business growth and tax revenues, New Y...