AS the Democratic presidential campaign comes to New York, the candidates are competing to dance on the grave of fracking, even though the oil and gas extraction technique of hydraulic fracturing has been banned in the state since 2014. The anti-fracking rhetoric seems to be rooted in the assumption that liberalism is as inherently antithetical to fracking as it is, say, to the Defense of Marriage Act — or monarchy. That assumption, however, does a disservice to liberals’ claims to be on the side of empiricism and climate science.

I can already hear the derisive howls at my being able to make that claim objectively: I am a “fracker,” an executive at an investment firm that funds oil and gas shale development, someone whose own economic interest would be crushed by a national ban on fracking. But my job has also provided me with palpable, irreplaceable encounters with the environmental, economic and global impact of fracking and the shale revolution, in places like Midland, Tex., and Mount Morris, Pa.

Nothing I have seen as a professional has shaken my politics as a person: I remain a classic New York City liberal, whose opinions my friends in Midland see as evidence of either perverse disregard for my own self-interest or pitiable softheadedness.

But I find liberalism and fracking to be completely compatible. This opinion was once relatively common, whether in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s (later disavowed) 2009 assertion that shale gas was President Obama’s “most obvious first step toward saving our planet” to the president’s own State of the Union address in 2012, which praised domestic oil and gas production — whose renaissance has been enabled by fracking — as part of an “all-out, all-of-the-above strategy” on energy.