They have been at the vanguard of an effort to keep fracking out of New York — the practice has been banned since 2010.

But the urgency of the issue in New York is belied by a larger the truth about the environmental dangers of fracking: we pretty much know what they are, and know how to deal with them.

Quick recap: fracking involves pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and chemicals into rocks to fracture them and release their oil and gas.

Though the practice is not new, there's been an explosion of horizontal drilling all over the country as the full extent of shale resources trapped in places like south Texas and western Pennsylvania began to be known.