‘If it wasn’t for the gas business, none of these people would be working right now,” David Dalrymple said, pointing to one of his crews building a road in Athens Township, Pa. By “gas business,” he meant drilling made possible by “fracking” — a process for extracting natural gas that’s legal in Pennsylvania but not […]

THE NORTHERN TIER, PA. The people trying to keep “fracking” illegal in New York rely on our ignorance about the safety and environmental impact of this drilling technology. So I went over the border to Pennsylvania for a hands-on education on the subject. A gas-drilling site in the Endless Mountains is nothing like the plains […]

Just a three-hour drive from New York City, the economic devastation is some thing out of “Grapes of Wrath.” Across the Southern Tier, the gray scenes of the Great Depression come to life in the rusted and idled farm equipment and dilapidated barns that dot the countryside. In the faces of the hardscrabble people who have […]

To deliver on his promises to bring economic growth and jobs to upstate New York, Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo will have to rein in rogue state bureaucracies — which means confronting the powerful environmental lobby that controls them. In particular, he needs to end the de facto ban on development in the Adirondack Park — which covers a […]