One afternoon in 2000, a famous New York City bachelor sat down for lunch with a natural gas executive. The interchange continued that night with milk cocktails at a fancy hotel bar and he would not drop her off until 2 a.m. They have been dating ever since. The executive was Diana Taylor, now on the board of directors of one of the country’s most powerful banks. The bachelor was Mike Bloomberg, three-time New York City mayor, financial news mogul, funder of the arts and action on gun control and climate change.
One important aspect of their relationship, however, has been forgotten. Just weeks after Bloomberg was controversially reelected for a third term, a deal was struck to enable fracked gas from the Marcellus shale in Appalachia to be piped into the city — despite an industry report stating the gas contained enough radioactivity to cause a statistically significant number of New Yorkers to develop lung cancer. Presiding over a vote that clinched the deal was none other than Taylor, Bloomberg’s romantic partner, in her capacity as board chair of the Hudson River Park Trust, which controlled the sliver of parkland the pipeline had to pass beneath to enter Manhattan.
More than a decade later, natural gas from the highly radioactive Marcellus formation continues to enter into the lungs and bodies of New Yorkers. The threat is not unique to the city. Across the country, the fracking boom that began in Oklahoma and Texas in the 1990s has spread nationwide, enabling oil and gas operators to drill into previously inaccessible formations, including known radioactive ones like the Marcellus.
Natural gas from the highly radioactive Marcellus formation continues to enter into the lungs and bodies of New Yorkers.
With many environmental groups focused on fracking’s contributions to climate change and threats posed to drinking water, radioactivity spewing out gas stoves has been missed. This is despite a wave of media attention in the last two years focused on stove emissions. Despite growing scientific research on the numerous environmental and human health harms linked to fracking, national politicians like Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris are actually backtracking on the issue. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said at the presidential debate in early September. And she touted being the tie-breaking vote in opening up new leases for fracking.
The Harris campaign has not mentioned the health harms of fracking, let alone the dangers of the radioactive gas radon. Not only do such omissions miss the opportunity to debate an intensive industrial process ripe with harm, they allow policy decisions and actions that enable the gas industry’s complex infrastructure to be run right into the homes and lives of Americans far from oil and gas country.
The issue of radon in gas stoves does not start with New York, and it does not end there, either. But understanding how radioactive fracked gas came to New York City is instructive. It’s a story that starts with Mayor Bloomberg, his longtime romantic partner Taylor and a set of long-forgotten policy decisions, which, made under suspect circumstances, now affect the lives of millions.
For the last seven years, I have been researching the ways oil and gas development brings radioactivity to the surface. My book on the subject, “Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It,” documents how radioactive oilfield waste has been spilled, spread, injected, dumped and freely emitted across America — all while the companies responsible are shielded by a system of lax regulations and legal loopholes. No group has been harmed and deceived more than the industry’s own workers. However, of all the pathways of contamination I have uncovered, only radon, a naturally occurring gas, transports radioactivity from deep underground right into the homes of millions of Americans.
The U.S. government has known since at least the early 1970s that natural gas used in unvented appliances like stoves and space heaters can release radon in our kitchens and living rooms. The story of how radon in natural gas became a problem for New York City begins on Dec. 28, 2009, when the Houston-based natural gas transmission company Spectra Energy Corp released plans to extend an existing pipeline network from Staten Island into Manhattan.
The proposed 16-mile, $850-million pipeline would pump gas from wells in the natural gas-rich Marcellus operated by Statoil, Norway’s largely state-owned oil company (now called Equinor) and Chesapeake Energy, an oil and gas company based in Oklahoma City. After traversing 100 feet beneath the Hudson River, it would enter Manhattan on the edge of Greenwich Village, a wealthy neighborhood of investment bankers and Hollywood stars, before linking up with Con Edison’s existing natural gas distribution system.
New York City’s natural gas story really begins in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when pipeline networks used to shuttle oil from the Gulf Coast to the northeast during World War II were retrofitted to deliver natural gas from the Gulf region’s gas fields to northeast cities like Philadelphia and New York City. New Yorkers would remain on Gulf Coast gas until the advent of fracking in the late 1990s and early 2000s enabled drillers to tap the previously inaccessible Marcellus.
The Marcellus Shale begins just 100 miles west of New York City and spans hundreds of miles of rolling farms and woodlands, rural towns and small cities, beneath much of Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia and eastern Ohio. One of the formation’s notable sweet spots of gas is located not far from President Joe Biden’s famous boyhood home of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Beneath the Marcellus is another gas-rich formation, the Utica, and together they represent America’s most productive gas field. In 2019, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that they contain a combined 214 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — enough to power America for 6 1/2 years — or a smaller, less gas-guzzling country, like say Lithuania, for more than 2 million years.
For much of the 20th century, most of this gas was inaccessible, sandwiched within compact formations. Beginning in the 1990s, however, modern fracking techniques unlocked previously untappable formations. Using a combination of explosives and millions of gallons of water and chemicals injected at high pressure, drillers fracture and lubricate the formation, allowing oil and gas to flow out.
The EPA found that radon in natural gas may be causing dozens of excess lung cancer deaths each year.
Aside from being particularly large, the Marcellus and Utica are geologic formations known as “black shales” for their color. Black shales are defined by a high uranium content. So high, in fact, that in 1960, the Atomic Energy Commission suggested the uranium could potentially be mined, with oil “a possibly important byproduct.” When the Marcellus boom began in 2005, drillers knew this, too; they were able to locate the most fuel-rich areas by running a special type of Geiger counter down the drill hole to measure radioactivity. As it turns out, the best spots to look for gas are where Geiger readings are highest.
The radioactive element of primary concern in natural gas is radon. Unlike uranium, which is a solid and tends to not move through the environment much in its most common form, radon is a gas and the Earth’s crust is emitting it regularly. That’s why radon gets trapped in many home basements, creating a little-known but deadly public health crisis. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that radon causes 21,000 lung cancer deaths annually, more people than die each year in home fires (2,800), drownings (3,900) or drunk-driving accidents (17,400). Only smoking causes more lung cancer deaths.
In a 1973 report, the EPA found that radon in natural gas may be causing dozens of excess lung cancer deaths each year, confirming that dangerous amounts of radioactivity is entering people’s homes and lungs through the nation’s natural gas pipeline system. If the Spectra pipeline were built, millions of New Yorkers could be getting gas from the Marcellus pumped directly into their kitchens.
The radon level inside the average American home is about 1.3 picocuries per liter, and the EPA remediation limit is 4 picocuries. If 100 people spent 70 years in a home with radon levels of 4 picocuries per liter, about three would die of lung cancer, according to the EPA. At 20 picocuries per liter, a level found in certain parts of Maine, Colorado and Iowa, among other places, as many as 21 of 100 residents would die from lung cancer after 70 years. Cranking the radon knob up to 200 picocuries could kill more than half of the residents.
While the EPA has worked hard to publicize the risks of radon silently seeping into your home and killing you, they have not done the same for natural gas. In fact, the EPA has not repeated its 1973 study to understand how the issue may have changed in the past 50 years and what it all might mean for the public. Radioactivity in natural gas, according to that study, may also affect the gonads and damage a fetus, “exposed through placental transfer of radioactivity in maternal blood.”
Although the EPA has remained mum on the topic of radioactivity in fracked gas, in 2012, the Canada-based engineering consulting firm Risk Sciences International confirmed that radon levels in the Spectra pipeline were high enough to pose a lethal risk to New Yorkers. For those living their lives in an 800-square-foot apartment with eight-foot ceilings, reasonable ventilation and a gas range with the stovetop used for two hours a day, the oven used for one, and four stovetop pilot lights that remain on, radon could cause lung cancer in two of every 100,000 people. In a scenario involving increased gas use and smaller apartments, as many as 747 lung cancers from radon could be expected in New York City.
It may seem like low odds, but the risk is high enough that in even the general scenario, Marcellus gas would be labeled a cancer-causing product under current California laws. At the very least, experts have argued, the EPA should seriously investigate what New Yorkers are being exposed to.
Unlike many other contaminants, radon does not burn but passes through flame unchanged. Its buildup is especially dangerous in small and poorly ventilated apartments. Other situations of concern include restaurants where half a dozen burners might be going at once, and buildings with inadequate heat where residents use stoves to keep warm.
Like most elements, radon has many forms or isotopes, but the primary one of concern is radon-222. With a half-life of about four days, radon-222 decays into various forms of radioactive lead, bismuth and polonium — the daughters of radon. These daughters are responsible for all the deaths, says David Carpenter, a former dean of the School of Public Health at the State University of New York who has followed the New York City natural gas radon issue with concern.
In a scenario involving increased gas use and smaller apartments, as many as 747 lung cancers from radon could be expected in New York City.
They bond to dust in a house and are deposited on dishes, tables, cookware and food while elevating the level of radioactivity in the home, says Carpenter. “You touch a contaminated surface, you bring your fingers to your mouth, or eat the food off the plate, and you are going to be bringing these radioactive elements into your body, and they will continue to decay and emit radiation. If you breathe them in, they can deposit in your lung tissue and lead to cancer, and if you ingest them they may settle somewhere in your digestive tract and pose problems there.”
Pets and children are at heightened risk because they spend more time on the floor and have much more hand-to-mouth activity than adults, Carpenter says.
The Spectra pipeline switch from Gulf Coast gas to Marcellus gas meant using a more radioactive formation, and the shorter pipeline travel time to New York City meant more of the radon in the gas stream would make it through the pipeline and into a home. The only question was how much.
Bloomberg arrived in office in 2002 and became a cheerleader for bringing fracked gas into New York City. Over 11 years in office, he executed “an aggressive climate change action plan that would transform New York and the mayor into world leaders on global warming,” write Katherine Bagley and Maria Gallucci in “Bloomberg’s Hidden Legacy: Climate Change and the Future of New York City.” Key to his policy was replacing heating oil with fracked gas, which Bloomberg argued was cleaner than coal and oil.
“Natural gas, when safely and responsibly extracted, has been a godsend for the environment and public health,” Bloomberg says in his own book, “Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet.” “As long as we need natural gas, it makes sense to frack.”
At first, few in the city voiced any concern about the pipeline. The Environmental Defense Fund promoted natural gas as a cleaner alternative to burning oil in boilers. The New York League of Conservation Voters also backed the pipeline project. Only five people submitted comments at a public meeting held in Manhattan in 2010. A year later, the New York Times reported, “The new pipeline” has drawn “barely a shrug from environmental groups.”
“You’re about to mainline an ecological disaster for the rest of the state.”
Then, in 2011, an advocacy group born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement called Sane Energy took up the fight to stop the Spectra pipeline. In October, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission held a meeting in Greenwich Village on the issue, more than 300 protestors filled the room.
“You’re about to mainline an ecological disaster for the rest of the state,” said the actor Mark Ruffalo, to a standing ovation. “I’m begging you people to stand up.”
And stand up New Yorkers did — at least some of them. Through the end of 2011 and into 2012, activists dressed up in hazmat suits and hosted dance parties in the lobbies of banks financing the project — Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo. They painted their bodies a blotchy toxic green and walked, mostly naked, through the streets of Greenwich Village to the construction site where they locked themselves to construction equipment. An activist named Lopi LaRoe, wearing a black and white dress, walked from the wave-splashed rocks along the Gansevoort Peninsula, where the pipeline would connect under the Hudson River to New Jersey, and to much cheering and chanting unfurled a hand-printed sign that stated, “Danger Radioactive Pipeline.” She was dragged away, stretcher-style, by a group of police officers and into a squad car.
Despite their efforts, the machinery of approval moved forward, and on March 28, 2012, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation approved the project. A few months later, on May 21, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued its approval.
“We did everything in our power,” says Kim Fraczek, a jewelry designer and artist and director of Sane Energy. “We used our art, we used the legal system, we used civil disobedience.”
Although few other activists were yet following the issue, other cities were set to receive natural gas from the Marcellus formation — Boston; Washington, D.C.; Cleveland; Chicago — and New Yorkers were closer than ever to becoming the guinea pigs. There was just one last chance to stop Spectra from entering the city.
To enter Manhattan, the Spectra pipeline had to cross a strip of parkland maintained by the Hudson River Park Trust. An easement would be needed, and the group that could issue it was governed by a 13-member board of directors. On June 18, 2012, they gathered in downtown Manhattan for a vote.
At the time, board members included Pamela Frederick, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism; a Manhattan borough president appointee named Lawrence Goldberg; and Paul Ullman, managing partner at a firm that provided hard money loans to investors purchasing distressed real estate. The board’s chair was Diana Taylor, a Wall Street executive, former official at KeySpan Energy, once the fifth-largest natural gas distribution company in the United States, and Bloomberg’s romantic partner. Bloomberg and Taylor met in 2000, just after Taylor had been named vice president at KeySpan and placed in charge of the natural gas company’s Government and Regulatory Affairs division.
To pass, the pipeline easement would need the support of eight of the 13 board members. Five of them had been handpicked by Bloomberg and would surely be on his side. The views of the other board members were less obvious. When the trust had asked for the public’s opinion of the project, it received 862 written comments, with more than 850 opposed. The Hudson River Park Advisory Council, which advises the board on issues of environment and labor, opposed the pipeline. As did the local Manhattan community board representing the neighborhood where the pipeline would be entering, and Jerrold Nadler, the region’s U.S. congressman, who said he was “alarmed that natural gas” produced by fracking “will be consumed in New York City.”
To pass, the pipeline easement would need the support of eight of the 13 board members.
As the meeting began, Spectra, the mayor’s office and Con Edison all made presentations about the pipeline — all positive. The board’s most critical member was Ullman. He asked the Spectra reps if they had conducted a risk assessment with respect to the park. They hadn’t. He pressed Spectra on its plans if the pipeline exploded in lower Manhattan. They said the pipeline would have enhanced safety but mentioned no formal disaster plan.
Here the city was in the eleventh hour, with the Spectra pipeline on its doorstep and its fate to be decided by a handful of members on a single board. The sole reporter at the meeting was Albert Amateau, of the downtown Manhattan weekly, the Villager, circulation 6,000. Another record of the meeting was produced by Daniele Gerard, president of a community organization called Three Parks Independent Democrats, who attended the meeting as a public observer and sent her notes to Sane Energy.
According to Gerard’s notes, the public was not allowed to speak, and no one presented any reasons to oppose the pipeline. Nor did anyone object to the close relationship between Taylor and the mayor. When Goldberg mentioned that community leaders and area environmental groups opposed the pipeline because it would encourage fracking, Taylor shut down the conversation, saying that the fracking issue was not within the trust’s purview, reported the Villager. The meeting’s minutes, which I obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, confirm this.
At last, the vote was held and the tally was clear — yes votes were only seven. There were not the sufficient eight votes to approve the pipeline. Ullman, Goldberg and Frederick had all voted no.
Then Taylor spoke up.
“May I just say something?” she asked the group. “This is a very important issue for the city. It’s too bad it’s coming across the park here. It’s got to come across somewhere.” She discussed that oil came into the city in trucks, and “we have got oil trucks that explode.”
A roll call vote was requested, forcing each board member to publicly declare yes or no.
Frederick switched sides. Taylor then “thanked” her, according to Gerard’s notes, and the easement for the Spectra pipeline was approved. Despite most New Yorkers not having any idea what had just occurred, radioactive fracked gas was set to enter New York City. And it would keep entering. Two months later, the mayor’s office released a report estimating that by 2030, “over 80 percent of the physical gas going to New York City will be shale gas from nearby areas.”
In the years since the Spectra pipeline was connected into New York City’s natural gas distribution system on Nov. 2, 2013, two additional pipelines carrying fracked gas from the radioactive Marcellus formation have entered the city, says Fraczek. One is the Rockaway Lateral off the Rockaway peninsula; the other is a project involving the 134th West Harlem Meter and Regulating Station. But local activists have also halted projects.
In 2020, says Fraczek, activists fought an aggressive three-year campaign against the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline, which was slated to connect to the Rockaway peninsula. The state of New York ultimately denied operators a water quality permit.
Sane Energy also worked with New York state legislators to pass a bill that would measure the amount of radon in new natural gas pipelines entering the city and ensure levels were “kept at a safe minimum,” but this bill was defeated in 2014. “The city is unaware of potential radioactivity levels within its gas infrastructure,” says Fraczek.
Con Edison or National Grid, or the New York State Public Service Commission, which regulates natural gas utilities in the state, have not answered my questions on radioactivity in the city’s gas. Meanwhile, the metropolis marches forward into the future, purporting to do big things on climate, hosting climate events sponsored by gas companies and consulting firms and still uncertain of how much radioactivity may be spewing from through home stoves.
Today, the Spectra pipeline links into New York City’s gas distribution system in Greenwich Village. It crosses under the Hudson River Park Trust’s strip of parkland, which includes a riverside walkway, where joggers jog and children learn to ride bicycles. At 10th Avenue and Gansevoort Street, it formally enters New York City in a vault in the basement of the Whitney Museum.
The adjacent blocks, presumably some of the first ones the pipeline’s gas would enter, have cobbled brick streets and cafes frequented by the Hollywood stars who live nearby. I enter one building — brick exterior, small booth with a doorman — go down a hallway, around a corner, enter a tiny, groaning, slow-moving elevator with a red door, then walk into the basement, where the building super is waiting for me, a walkie-talkie on their left hip, a jangle of keys on their right.
“Would you like to see the boiler room?” they ask, then lead the way, opening a heavy black door into a sweltering room that more resembles a cavern, with a beastly piece of machinery humming in the middle.
“This is called a Scotch marine boiler,” says the super. It was developed nearly 200 years ago to power ships. A black pipe with a yellow sticker labeled “GAS” leads from the city street into the undercarriage of the building and enters the boiler room through the ceiling, then goes in through the side of the massive metal boiler tank, where the gas is ignited in a burner. These boilers, along with home stoves in hundreds of thousands of New York kitchens, are the final destination for the natural gas that is piped from the Marcellus.
In the evening, just after rush hour, if you were to momentarily dissolve the city’s walls, you’d see millions of little blue flames burning across the metropolis, stacked one atop the other. Each one is liable to be carrying radon, which will do what radon does: Blast off radiation and decay to radioactive polonium, lead, bismuth, and on down the list of deadly daughters.
Questions for Diana Taylor sent to a spokesperson with Citi Group, the multinational investment bank where she serves on the Board of Directors, have not received replies.
Questions to the communications team for Mike Bloomberg regarding the Spectra pipeline, the possible business interests behind his relationship with Taylor, and whether her positioning on a board set to decide the easement for a natural gas pipeline when his administration had so energetically promoted natural gas represented a conflict of interest have not received replies. An automatic message from Bloomberg’s communications team said that someone would be evaluating my query, and: “If you would like Mike Bloomberg to attend an event, contact [email protected].”
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