The science writer John Horgan (who’s also a friend and Hudson Valley neighbor) has written a piece for Scientific American laying out the tradeoffs that face New York State, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, if campaigners succeed in shutting the Indian Point nuclear plant and preventing gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Even if energy conservation were pursued more aggressively in the state (a perennial opportunity), scratching off New York natural gas and nuclear power would clearly lead to more reliance on coal-generated electricity (or gas extracted in other states unlikely to have the safeguards that are inevitable in environment-minded New York).

Here’s a snippet from the nuclear portion of Horgan’s piece, followed by some thoughts from me on energy arguments centered on tradeoffs:

If we shut down Indian Point and other nuclear power plants, we will become even more dependent — at least for the foreseeable future – on fossil fuels, which, in addition to spewing out toxic pollutants, also contribute to global warming. Germany illustrates the problem. After Fukushima, Germany announced that it would close its nuclear power plants by 2022. But to meet its energy needs, Germany has had to build new fossil-fuel plants, including one of the biggest coal facilities in the world. As The Washington Post reported, “Germany’s dilemma shows how difficult it is to balance competing environmental priorities, even with vast resources and popular support for the efforts.”

Horgan goes on to discuss the fracking fight, building on a recent post and podcast by fellow Scientific American blogger David Biello. Both frame the issue as a tradeoff, however uncomfortable, for environmentalists. If you foreclose one option, you end up driving demand for another.

I’ve done the same in the past, noting that no energy choice exists in isolation. (As I wrote more than once, for example, if you love wind power, you had better at least like transmission lines.)

But after my most recent trip deep in anti-fracking country, to speak at Cornell on science, climate and energy (see the YouTube video below), it became clearer than ever to me that the fight over an issue like fracking can never be resolved that way.

Those with deep-rooted fears of direct harm to water, health or property values will never be persuaded with arguments built around the overarching logic for gas as a cleaner option in humanity’s long climb up Loren Eiseley’s “heat ladder” from dung and firewood toward a sustainable energy future.

The gradient in societies will always include a substantial fraction for whom the Precautionary Principle will always be capitalized.

With nuclear power, that gradient was on stark display after the Fukushima nuclear crisis, with two passionate environmentalists, Bill McKibben and George Monbiot, drawing entirely different lessons from the post-earthquake events.

An ideal starting place for exploring the science pointing to the enduring nature of such divides is Paul Slovic’s “The Feeling of Risk.” Also invaluable is Spencer Weart’s scholarship on “nuclear fear.”

For those who haven’t seen it, here’s my appearance at Cornell (the question period at the end is perhaps the most important section):

Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations has a paper in press in the Journal of Geophysical Research challenging a widely covered “bombshell” study in that journal estimating very high rates of emissions of methane from Colorado gas and oil wells.