'I Am the Central Victim'

NEW YORK MAGAZINE
August 27, 2013

‘I Am the Central Victim’: Art Dealer Ann Freedman on Selling $63 Million in Fake Paintings
by James Panero

“I am as shocked as everybody, more shocked, as I am the central victim,” Ann Freedman, the gallerist at the center of an $80 million art forgery scandal, told me earlier this month. “Fifteen years. In my head, these paintings have been right up until five days ago. Horrible.”

Over the course of most of those fifteen years, Freedman had put all of her influence and credibility as the president of Knoedler & Company, until recently one of New York’s oldest and most respected art galleries, behind what she believed to be a treasure trove of newly discovered modern art by the biggest names in Abstract Expressionism. In May, federal authorities announced that the paintings — 63 in all — were fakes and charged Glafira Rosales, the obscure art dealer who supplied Knoedler and at least one other gallery with the paintings, with tax evasion. Earlier this month (five days before Freedman spoke those words), the feds spelled out the details of the long-running scheme in a follow-up indictment, charging that Rosales had never, as she claimed, represented the son of a mysterious anonymous collector. Rather, she allegedly paid an artist in Queens  (73-year-old Chinese-American painter Pei-Shen Qian,according to reports) as little as $5,000 each to create the counterfeit masterpieces. 

Freedman, who spoke publicly about the scandal for the first time in a series of recent conversations with New York, says that the results of the federal investigation prove she was an unwitting agent in the scheme. Under her leadership, Knoedler sold 40 of the fakes for an alleged $63 million. Before shutting down abruptly in late 2011, the gallery made a $20 million payment to Rosales.

This "Pollock" sold for $17 million

According to the indictment, the saga began in the early nineties when Rosales approached Freedman with a fabulous tale. She claimed to represent a foreign collector who “was of Eastern European descent, maintained residences in Switzerland and Mexico, wished to remain anonymous, and had inherited the works ... from a relative.” Based on this account, Freedman came to call the relative “Mr. X” and the anonymous seller “Mr. X, Jr” — of course, neither existed.

“The story was credible,” said Freedman, who is tall with tightly curled silver hair and a controlled, energetic manner. “Dealers often do not know the specifics of origin or background, or how the art left the artist’s studio. You cannot turn the pages of an auction catalogue or museum publication without seeing a majority of the works labeled ‘private collection.’ The chain of ownership is often out of order and incomplete.”

With time, the story of how Rosales obtained the paintings became more complex: The married Mr. X and David Herbert, a real-life gallery employee and owner who died in 1995, knew each other in the fifties; they were lovers, and Herbert offered Mr. X access to the studios of the Abstract Expressionists, through whom he could purchase paintings off the books; these works were hidden away until Herbert’s death to protect Mr. X’s secret. (Herbert, of course, had nothing do with any Mr. X or secret stash of paintings — since neither existed.)

Freedman says that she did her best to get answers from Rosales. “I went to Glafira and pushed and pushed to get more information, relentlessly,” Freedman said. "My ongoing diligence met more than the gold standard; there is plenty of evidence of that.”

Speaking with Daily Intelligencer last month, Freedman listed some markers that led her to believe that the paintings were genuine. “They were very credible in so many respects,” says Freedman. “I had the best conservation studio examine them. One of the Rothkos had a Sgroi stretcher. He made the stretchers for Rothko. They clearly had the right materials. I got a consensus. Some of the paintings were featured on museum walls,” she continued. “The Rothko went to the Beyeler [Foundation], and the Newman went to Guggenheim Bilbao for the tenth anniversary exhibition. The most knowledgeable in the art establishment gave me no reason to doubt the paintings.”

Experts seem to have been convinced, by and large, that the individualistic quality of the Abstract Expressionist paintings Rosales obtained could only have been achieved by the artists themselves. “The fact is that the entire Eastern establishment believed in them. I saw the paintings,” said Stephen Polcari, a scholar of Abstract Expressionism and author of Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience. “And they were very good. You wouldn’t think twice about them for a second. Ann did everything she could possibly do.”

But others in the art world see a pattern of lax, self-interested behavior on Freedman's part. “This has ruined one of the greatest galleries in the world. It has trashed a lot of people’s money. It seems to me Ms. Freedman was totally irresponsible, and it went on for years,” said Marco Grassi, owner of Grassi Studios gallery on the Upper East Side and a well-known expert on Old Master paintings. “Imagine people coming to someone and saying every painting you sold me is a fake. It is an unthinkable situation. It is completely insane. A gallery person has an absolute responsibility to do due diligence, and I don’t think she did it. The story of the paintings is so totally kooky. I mean, really. It was a great story and she just said, ‘this is great.’”

Over time, Freedman came to see the paintings’ lack of provenance as a challenge to overcome. What they were missing in the past, she would make up for in the present. By placing them in the best collections, she would give them a footing. Freedman saw a mandate to sell — and sell she did.

“The point is that I believed that these paintings were genuine, that it was my responsibility to place them into the best of collections,” she said. Once the paintings were out there and established, she hoped “to get many of these works to come back together for a major museum exhibition that Knoedler would take part in.” Establishing these discoveries as accepted works, she believed, would in fact be among her greatest accomplishments at the gallery. “I felt that I was going to create a legacy for Knoedler with these newly discovered paintings, a treasure trove of paintings to bring out into the world,” she said.

At Knoedler, getting paintings out into the world was Freedman’s speciality. She had started her art career as a receptionist of the André Emmerich Gallery in the early seventies but quickly discovered her natural talent for sales. “My enthusiasm for the art was contagious and won people over. André started seeing more and more invoices on his desk that he could not have imagined,” she said. “There was a sense of some disbelief, if not resentment — no one paved the way for me to sell, but I sought out the opportunity and never looked back.”

In 1977, at age 29, Freedman took a job at Knoedler — at the time, the oldest continuously operating gallery in New York. She continued to outperform and eventually took over the palatial central office of the gallery’s gilded-age Upper East Side mansion.

The paintings from Rosales proved to be enormously lucrative for the gallery. Among the sales were a “de Kooning” that went for $4 million, a “Rothko” for $8.3 million, and a “Pollock” for $17 million. She successfully built up a market for each of the paintings as they came in. “If something had been off or wrong on any one of the paintings, I would have put on the brakes,” she said.

She was so convincing, and so convinced, about the paintings that she even bought three herself — a “Rothko,” a “Motherwell,” and a “Pollock.” “I was a believer. Not to be stubborn, but I lived with three of those paintings,” she said. “I lived with them, and in the context of my personal collection.”

For over a decade as they emerged, the paintings were the envy of the art world. Art experts, conservators, and museum professionals praised what appeared to be a newly discovered collection of masterworks. But in 2009, forensic testing on two paintings supposedly by Robert Motherwell revealed paint chemicals that were historically inconsistent. Suspicion descended on the lot, and multi-million-dollar buyers agitated for their refunds. Meanwhile, the FBI began circling Rosales.

Freedman, coming off a battle with lung cancer, left Knoedler just as these suspicions began to emerge. (She describes her departure as a management dispute.) Two years later, the 165-year-old business closed up shop, with no warning, the very same week the buyer of the $17 million Pollock sued both the gallery and Freedman.

Even in cases of a forgery, art buyers don’t necessarily have a lifetime money-back guarantee (the Pollock sale was settled out of court). Owing to statutes of limitations, legal experts say, some buyers of Rosales’s 63 works may have limited recourse in recovering their money — a fact that may also insulate Knoedler and Freedman from additional litigation. “Purchasers of artwork in New York must be diligent and act quickly, otherwise they may lose important remedies,” says Raymond Dowd, a partner and art law specialist at Dunnington, Bartholow & Miller. “In essence, a purchaser who has been defrauded may have no civil remedies against the gallery.”

Robert K. Wittman, a former FBI agent who founded and led the Bureau's National Art Crime Team, told Daily Intelligencer that the buyers were taking a foreseeable risk. "With Abstract Expressionist and modern paintings, there was never any real cataloguing when the artists were alive, so things can pop up on the market that turn out to be legitimate," he said. "The problem is that because these paintings are modern, it is harder to authenticate them. What this does is put the buyers on notice. Unless a piece has really good provenance, forensics, and connoisseurship — the three-legged stool — the buyer shouldn’t buy on someone else’s word."

Freedman has continued to be an active dealer despite the scrutiny of the Rosales case. She recently opened her own gallery, FreedmanArt, on East 73th Street, where she now represents Frank Stella, Lee Bontecou, and the estate of Jules Olitski, among others.

With the revelation of the crime, even though she says she finds relief in knowing the truth of where the paintings came from, she feels most betrayed by the paintings themselves. “I am so angry and upset. It is shattering, as if a trusted friend deserted you.” She says the money she spent on her own three paintings is “a loss. It is a big loss.”

“How can we know the truth? You not only believe in your own instincts. You believe in others who believe.”

The View from Marcellus

CITY JOURNAL
Summer 2013

The View from Marcellus
by James Panero

Fracking brings breathtaking economic and environmental benefits—at least to places that welcome it.

Few people understand the ground better than Larry Fulmer, a soft-spoken man with flowing white hair pulled back into a ponytail. Fulmer, the hydrofracturing superintendent for Cabot Oil & Gas in Pennsylvania, knows just how much pressurized water and sand will liberate the natural gas trapped in the shale rock a mile beneath our feet. Here, in a small square field carved out of hill country in Dimock, Pennsylvania, his crew is mixing water and sand day and night. “They pull [the mixture] in at 35 to 40 pounds per square inch,” he explains, “and boost it to whatever our treating pressure is, anywhere from 4,000 to 9,000 pounds per square inch, and they send it back to the missile”—the final hose to the well. Like a traveling show, Fulmer’s people will be here for just four days before packing up and moving on to the next venue.

Over the last half-decade, workers like Fulmer have tapped immense quantities of previously unreachable energy from pockets deep underground. The economic and political benefits of this Shale Revolution, as it’s sometimes called, are enormous. Shale gas is locally abundant and easily transported to serve the heating and electricity needs of the East Coast. It diminishes our dependence on foreign oil and gas, generates domestic jobs, and pours money into poor rural areas. The hydrofracturing technology to extract, transport, and use it already exists, so there’s no need for decades of research and development before we can take advantage of it.

Shale gas is also far cleaner than oil and coal; indeed, environmentalists should be crusading for it. Instead, they have sought to smother the Shale Revolution, claiming that it’s harmful to the environment and promoting their cause through complaisant media. Their relentless work has begun to turn public opinion and has even influenced New York’s governor to delay the approval of fracking in his state. That’s why I’ve come to visit an active drilling community in rural Pennsylvania, atop the vast rock formation called the Marcellus Shale. I want to observe gas exploration in person. When you’re on the ground, it’s hard not to be awed by its promise—and worried that so many have become convinced otherwise.

The Marcellus Shale is a layer of gas-rich rock that runs northeast to southwest across several mid-Atlantic states. It extends from New York’s Finger Lakes district and Southern Tier through the western half of Pennsylvania and into eastern Ohio and much of West Virginia, covering nearly 100,000 square miles. The layer gets its name from a surface outcropping near Marcellus, New York.

Geologists became aware of the natural gas trapped in the Marcellus Shale decades ago. The problem was how to extract it. Some liken shale to the filling of an Oreo cookie: it’s a “pay zone” sandwiched horizontally between layers of limestone far beneath the earth’s surface. The shale is composed of thin sheets of rock packed too closely together to allow gas to move through. And even if you could free the gas somehow after digging a traditional vertical well, you would reach only what was directly beneath your drilling site—just as a straw punched through the outside of an Oreo might reach the filling at the straw end but would have little luck pulling in the cream around it.

The problem was solved by Texas oilman George P. Mitchell, who spent millions of dollars and nearly two decades trying to extract the natural gas trapped in the Barnett Shale formation in his native state. What did the job, Mitchell eventually discovered, was a combination of two technologies: hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Hydraulic fracturing—otherwise known as hydrofracturing, fracing, or (most popularly, though it was originally pejorative) fracking—is the fracturing of rock with pressurized fluid. The technology has been around since the late 1940s, when companies used it to release additional oil from spent wells. Horizontal drilling has existed even longer but became prevalent in the 1970s, with the development of advanced surveying tools and the directional “mud-motor” drill head, impelled by pressurized mud that is pumped down a well and passes over a screw-shaped rotor.

Mitchell’s horizontal fracking came online about 15 years ago and launched the Shale Revolution. Once drillers reach the right depth, they bend their well hole horizontally, so that it runs through the middle of a shale formation. Then, after punching additional holes through the sides of the horizontal well, they pump in pressurized fluid, which pushes through the holes, forces the layers of shale slightly apart, and releases the gas trapped inside, which can then flow up the well. Water and sand make up 99 percent of the fluid; the rest consists of biocides and softeners to reduce friction and contaminants. The sand’s job is to keep the fissures about a millimeter open after the water is removed so that the gas can continue to flow. The drilling stage of this process can take several weeks, with the pressurized-fluid treatment lasting four days.

On the northern Pennsylvanian Marcellus, the wells link up with the underground infrastructure of gas pipelines that crisscrosses the eastern United States, making on-site gas storage unnecessary. The gas flows to power plants and urban distribution lines. Once the drilling and fracking are completed, the energy firm removes all the equipment from the site and restores the topsoil. All that’s visible is a tiny wellhead and storage tanks to collect the small amount of fracturing fluid that returns to the surface, which the company will reuse in future jobs.

Since the first modern hydrofracturing wells pushed down into the Marcellus in 2007 and 2008, the estimates for the recoverable gas content of American shale have kept rising. In 2000, shale produced only 2 percent of our domestic gas supply. According to the federal government’s Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, 50 percent now comes from shale and other unconventional sources, a share expected to rise to 80 percent by 2035. Pennsylvania may sit on the second-largest natural-gas field in the world; significant deposits also lie beneath Arkansas, Louisiana, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. In 2012, the International Energy Agency predicted that the United States would surpass Russia to become the world’s largest natural-gas producer by 2015. A 2011 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) estimates that America’s supply of gas will last more than 90 years.

The Shale Revolution has brought enormous economic benefits to American producers and consumers. According to a 2012 study by the consulting and forecasting firm IHS Global Insight, shale oil and gas combined generated $87 billion in domestic capital investments in 2012. These investments will rise to $172.5 billion annually by the end of the decade, IHS says, and could total $5.1 trillion by 2035. Much of the investment has taken place in struggling rural economies. Shale developers not only lease drilling sites from their owners; they also pay the owners of the distant plots whose gas is being tapped. Gas distributors pay people to run underground pipelines through their properties. Drilling firms share the returns of each well with the landowner.

The advantages aren’t confined to the gas industry and its direct beneficiaries; savings on energy ripple through the broader American economy. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that the shale-gas boom has pushed down the price of natural gas in America to one-third of its 2008 level. The lower costs of shale gas, PricewaterhouseCoopers reports, will yield 1 million domestic manufacturing jobs by 2025 and add 0.5 percent growth to the nation’s gross domestic product. From 2012 through 2015, American households will save an average of $900 per year—2 percent of median household income—on their heat and electricity bills thanks to shale gas, IHS estimates.

The development of a ready source of domestic energy directly improves America’s geopolitical position, too, given that unsavory states currently govern much of the world’s energy supply. Shale gas even helps protect the environment by replacing coal in power plants, since gas produces far less carbon dioxide, sulfur, carbon monoxide, and ash than coal does. For years, coal drove more than half of all American energy production, but its share dropped to 42 percent in 2011, the lowest figure since analysts began keeping track in 1949. The ongoing shift from coal to natural gas is the main reason that American greenhouse-gas emissions have declined by 450 million tons in five years—a 5.3 percent drop from 2011 to 2012 alone. By contrast, greenhouse-gas emissions have risen in Europe, which lacks a ready source of gas and has been replacing oil and aging nuclear power with coal. “Displacement of coal-fired power by gas-fired power . . . is the most cost-effective way of reducing CO2 emissions in the power sector,” the MIT study concludes.

New York City in particular could benefit greatly from the Shale Revolution. A network of pipelines already delivers gas to nearly every home stove in the five boroughs. The heating boilers in the basements of most residential and commercial buildings, which now run mostly on dirty Number 4 and Number 6 heating oil, could be converted to cheaper, cleaner natural gas over time. My own Upper West Side apartment building has just replaced an obsolete boiler that burned Number 6 oil with one that burns cleaner Number 2 but can shift to gas power with the flick of a switch—once enough gas is available. Utilities are already working to upgrade the underground pipelines to make the changeover possible. Con Edison is installing a gas line an avenue away from my building, and a new city initiative called NYC Clean Heat is helping us persuade the utility to bring the supply to our building. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has embraced shale development, envisioning a city in which buses and trucks run on natural gas and electric vehicles are charged through gas-fired power plants. “Remember that 13,000 Americans will die from the effects of coal-fired power plant pollution every year,” Bloomberg said this April. “I don’t know of anybody yet that’s been killed by fracking.”

Shale gas’s benefits won’t be realized, though, if environmentalists have their way. Convinced of the evils of fossil fuels and the promise of renewable energy, they have successfully portrayed fracking as a destructive and dangerous practice, rather than a safe, tested means of extracting a clean, local, and naturally abundant resource. They often cite a 2011 article in Climatic Change, written by Robert Howarth, Renee Santoro, and Anthony Ingraffea, that contends that “3.6 percent to 7.9 percent of the methane from shale-gas production escapes to the atmosphere in venting and leaks over the lifetime of a well.” Therefore, the piece continues, “the [greenhouse-gas] footprint for shale gas is greater than that for conventional gas or oil when viewed on any time horizon.” This much-publicized article, however, has been debunked by many other researchers, including Cornell University’s Lawrence Cathles, who argues that Howarth and his colleagues “significantly overestimate the fugitive emissions associated with unconventional gas extraction.”

An equally unpersuasive environmentalist claim is that fracking contaminates groundwater. As Columbia Law School’s Thomas Merrill and David Schizer conclude in a study of shale regulations, “there is little evidence so far that subterranean fracturing activity can directly contaminate groundwater, and this risk may never materialize. The layer of shale that is fractured is usually thousands of feet below the water table, with a buffer of dense rock or clay in between.” Of the 35,000 gas wells fractured in the United States in 2006, they write, “the paucity of confirmed incidents of water contamination from the underground migration of fracturing fluid provides powerful evidence that the risk is small.”

At one point, a handful of Pennsylvania residents complained to the media that fracking had contaminated their drinking water, but the Environmental Protection Agency surveyed their groundwater and found it safe. The recently released anti-fracking documentary Gasland (not to be confused with the recently released anti-fracking movie Promised Land, starring Matt Damon) shows a Colorado man holding a match near his faucet water and watching the flame flare up dramatically—because of gas released by fracking, the documentary says. But Colorado’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission discovered that the cause was naturally occurring methane in the resident’s water. (Merrill and Schizer recommend that gas companies, before drilling, survey water for existing levels of methane to mitigate false claims and shakedowns.) The Center for Rural Pennsylvania, an agency of the state legislature, has found “no statistically significant increases in methane levels after drilling.”

Nevertheless, celebrities have embraced the anti-fracking cause with gusto. In 2012, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, the widow and son of slain Beatles front man John Lennon, formed the advocacy group Artists Against Fracking, which soon had more than 200 prominent signatories, including Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway, David Geffen, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Lady Gaga. Artists Against Fracking has erected billboards, organized a letter-writing campaign to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and chartered a luxury tour bus to drive to Dimock, where Ono and Lennon, along with actress Susan Sarandon, brought drinking water to residents. “I can’t believe that here in the United States people don’t even have water to drink,” says Ono in a video about the trip posted on YouTube. “It’s more horrible than I could imagine,” Lennon adds.

Seven months after Artists Against Fracking formed, a March Quinnipiac University poll found that, for the first time, New Yorkers opposed fracking, 45 to 39 percent—an unsurprising outcome, given the unremitting campaign against shale gas. One of the opponents is apparently Governor Cuomo, once a supporter of shale-gas development, who has cited environmental risks in delaying approval of drilling in the state’s economically depressed Southern Tier. As the New York Post’s Fredric Dicker reported in April, “After telling associates for nearly two years he believed natural-gas drilling could be conducted safely, Cuomo developed cold feet late last year in the wake of an increasingly aggressive ‘anti’ movement led by environmental activists, including his former brother-in-law and uncle to his three daughters, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” Further, proposed legislation in Albany would require all shale gas to undergo tests for radon before it could enter city limits, probably raising the ultimate price of gas and encouraging people to stick with coal and heating oil.

It’s worth noting that Artists Against Fracking was born after gas-development companies, looking to serve New York City’s cleaner energy demands, announced plans to run an underground distribution line near the Lennon family’s second home in Delaware County. The not-in-my-backyard possessiveness of wealthy Catskills second-homeowners is effectively preventing poorer, less politically connected, communities from profiting from the energy wealth beneath their feet.

Soon after Lennon and Ono traveled to Dimock, I made my own trip and found a very different scene. Most of the protest signs are pro-gas. One pro-fracking organization, Dimock Proud, was founded by two landowners to serve, they say, as the “voice of the silent majority” in their town. Residents here took part in a new documentary, FrackNation, an effort by journalists Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney to document the distortions of the anti-fracking lobby.

For an area with extensive gas development, Dimock seems almost bereft of heavy industry to the naked eye; its wells are tucked into the region’s endless folding hills. After many twists and turns, I finally come to a Cabot derrick, one of five that the company runs in the area. Here I ask Steve McDonald, Cabot’s colorful drilling consultant—a dead ringer for Hank Williams, Jr.—if the owner of the house next door to the site had to move out. “No, sir,” McDonald tells me. “The gentleman right up there, Mr. Gray, he come down when we first rigged up down here and he visited with me a little bit, and he says, ‘Steve, if you don’t mind, try not to point the lights towards my house, because that’s my bedroom side.’ Well, we done everything we could do to keep them from pointing lights at his house. So he comes down three or four days later and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, devil, we done pointed light at his house up there.’ And he comes, and he brings three dozen of those Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and I’m all about them things. And I asked him, just to see, ‘Is everything okay up there?’ And he said, ‘I hardly know y’all here.’ ”

The Marcellus story is a positive one. The gas industry has newly paved the roads around Dimock. Farmers now have income to pay down debts and fix up their properties. Jobs are growing. McDonald tells me about a conversation that he had with a local contractor hired by Cabot to do odd jobs around the drilling site. “ ‘I’m living the dream,’ the contractor says. And I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He said, ‘Man, I couldn’t be any happier. I’ve got a good job. I do what I need to do, and before I got this job here, I was personally almost eating out of garbage cans, trying to feed my family.’ Best thing that’s ever happened to him and his family is the oil company.” As that story suggests, Pennsylvania has been wise enough to let the Shale Revolution improve its residents’ lives. New York should follow suit.

Choking a Golden Goose

NEW YORK POST

August 6, 2013

Choking a Golden Goose:

The mindless war on fracking

by James Panero

The Marcellus Shale is a layer of gas-rich rock that extends from New York’s Finger Lakes district and Southern Tier through Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, covering nearly 100,000 square miles. The layer gets its name from a surface outcropping near Marcellus, NY — which makes it ironic that New York is the only state not basking in the riches of this cornucopia.

Texas oilman George P. Mitchell spent millions and nearly two decades solving the puzzle of how to extract the natural gas trapped in shale. He got it working about 15 years ago — launching what some call the Shale Revolution.

What did the job, he found, was a combination of two technologies: hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Hydraulic fracturing — a k a fracking — is the fracturing of rock with pressurized fluid. The technology has been around since the late 1940s. Horizontal drilling is even older, but matured in the 1970s.

On the northern Pennsylvanian Marcellus, the wells link up with the underground infrastructure of gas pipelines that crisscrosses the eastern United States, so on-site gas storage is unnecessary.

And, once the drilling and fracking are finished, the firm removes all the equipment from the site and restores the topsoil. All that’s visible is a tiny wellhead and storage tanks to collect the small amount of fracturing fluid that returns to the surface, which the company will re-use in future jobs.

The Shale Revolution has brought enormous economic benefits. The consulting firm IHS Global Insight reported last year that shale oil and gas combined generated $87 billion in domestic capital investments in 2012 — on track to rise to $172.5 billion a year by the end of the decade.

Much of that investment is in struggling rural economies. Shale developers not only lease drilling sites from their owners; they also pay the owners of the plots whose gas is being tapped. Distributors pay people to run underground pipelines through their properties. Drillers share the returns of each well with the landowner.

The savings on energy ripple through the economy. The US Energy Information Administration reports that the shale-gas boom has pushed down the price of natural gas in America to a third its 2008 level. The lower costs of shale gas, PricewaterhouseCoopers reports, will yield 1 million domestic manufacturing jobs by 2025.

It also means lower heat and electricity bills for consumers, even as it helps the environment by replacing coal in power plants.

New York City in particular could benefit greatly. Pipelines already deliver gas to nearly every home stove in the five boroughs. The heating boilers in the basements of most residential and commercial buildings, which now run mostly on dirty No. 4 and No. 6 heating oil, could be converted to cheaper, cleaner natural gas over time.

My own Upper West Side apartment building has just replaced an obsolete boiler that burned No. 6 oil with one that burns cleaner No. 2 but can shift to gas power with the flick of a switch — once enough gas is available.

Utilities are working to upgrade the underground pipelines to make the changeover possible. Con Edison is installing a gas line an avenue away from my building, and a new city initiative called NYC Clean Heat is helping us persuade the utility to bring the supply to our building.

Mayor Bloomberg has embraced shale development, envisioning a city where buses and trucks run on natural gas and electric vehicles are charged via gas-fired power plants. “Remember that 13,000 Americans will die from the effects of coal-fired power plant pollution every year,” Bloomberg said in April. “I don’t know of anybody yet that’s been killed by fracking.”

Yet shale gas’s benefits won’t be realized if environmentalists have their way. They’ve painted fracking as destructive and dangerous — rather than what it is: a safe, tested means of extracting a clean, local, naturally abundant resource.

The fact that independent studies have found precious little evidence to support the greens’ claims (such as the charge that fracking contaminates groundwater) hasn’t detered them.

Indeed, celebrities have embraced the anti-fracking cause with gusto. In 2012, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon formed the advocacy group Artists Against Fracking, which soon had more than 200 prominent signatories, including Alec Baldwin, Gwyneth Paltrow and Lady Gaga.

The money poured into such disinformation campaigns has paid off: Seven months after Artists Against Fracking formed, a Quinnipiac poll found that, for the first time, New Yorkers opposed fracking, 45 percent to 39 percent. And Gov. Cuomo, apparently unwilling to confront the monied anti-fracking interests, has endlessly delayed approval of drilling in the economically depressed Southern Tier.

Yet the facts show that the Marcellus story is a positive one. The gas industry has newly paved the roads around Dimock, Pa.; farmers there now have income to pay down debts and fix up their properties. Jobs are growing.

Pennsylvania has been wise enough to let the Shale Revolution improve its residents’ lives. New York should follow suit.

This article was adapted from the Summer issue of City Journal.