New York tried this before.
Back when horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing were unlocking the biggest domestic energy boom in a generation, Albany, worried about water tables and quakes, outright banned the shale beneath the Southern Tier. The ban held and production in New York went to zero.
Everywhere else, it didn’t matter. Pennsylvania kept drilling. Texas kept drilling. Oklahoma kept drilling. The industry didn’t slow down, it transitioned to multi-well pads instead of single wells, water recycling instead of waste, smaller footprints doing more work.
New York, for what it’s worth, opted out of the boom and had to watch it happen from the sidelines.
I mention this because Albany just did it again. Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order in July banning new large-scale data centers across the state for up to a year, and more than a dozen other state legislatures have introduced bills aimed at the same target. Some of the loudest opposition, reporting suggests, is not even coming from New Yorkers. It is coming from social media accounts tied to foreign governments with an obvious interest in slowing America’s AI buildout down.
