The Gov’s Feeling the Heat
Gov. Cuomo has grown so desperate to dodge the blame for the natural-gas shortage hitting Long Island and parts of Brooklyn that he’s gone on the attack against his own Public Service Commission. You wouldn’t know it from the gov’s letter Thursday to John Rhodes, the PSC chair, but the commissioners are his own appointees. Yet that doesn’t stop him from diving deep in conspiracy theories.
As the utility warned far in advance, its moratorium is necessary because a key proposed pipeline got blocked — by another agency that answers completely to Cuomo, with a New Jersey agency then agreeing.
Why, Cuomo demands to know, did the PSC let National Grid avoid making other plans to handle the potential shortage?
It’s simple: Because there was never any good reason to block the pipeline: The pretext for doing so — a supposed threat to the water purity between New Jersey and New York — is patently absurd, since it would run right next to an existing pipeline, installed years ago with no problems.
The gov makes a big deal of ordering the commission to look at the alternatives now
— but all of them are well-known, with obvious problems that make the pipeline by far the best option. (Switching to oil or trucked-in natural gas means higher carbon emissions and other environmental risks; no major source of alternative energy can possibly be ready in time, or at anything like the low cost; etc., etc.)
Cuomo rails about National Grid’s “overreliance on a highly complex and controversial pipeline project.” Hah! Only the rapidly escalating demands of extreme environmentalists made it “controversial,” and industry mastered any “complexities” decades ago.
The gov then makes noises about revoking the company’s license and/or holding it liable for damages — once again (as he regularly does with Con Ed) using the utility as a scapegoat to avoid taking any blame himself.
He hasn’t yet gone as far as to rap the halfdozen Long Island Democratic state senators who, after long opposing new pipelines, suddenly requested an exception in this one case once their constituents started screaming.
But Cuomo is plainly feeling the heat, and rightly so — since his policies are literally leaving innocent consumers out in the cold.