In D.C. they call it a “fly-in.” You recruit a handful of like-minded allies and give them a trip to Washington – and all they have to do is say the right things to some very important people. But somehow, when the oil and gas industry’s strong-arm lobbying crew, the American Petroleum Institute (API), parades 18 workers through the Capitol, it seems not only desperate but disgusting to...
When a high-ranking George W. Bush-era EPA official starts blowing the whistle on the triumph of politics over the environment – confirming that a business-friendly “fracking exemption” went way too far – you begin to sense that the wheels are coming off the wagon for the energy-extraction industry. We’re seeing cracks in the armor as a groundswell of support for real regulation rolls...
When Benjamin Grumbles was assistant administrator for water at the Environmental Protection Agency in the George W. Bush administration, he oversaw the release of a 2004 EPA report that determined that hydraulic fracturing was safe for drinking water.
You can tell that Ian Urbina’s New York Times series on natural-gas drilling is hitting an industry nerve when the third-party “damage control” machine roars to life. It looks to me like an expensive “crisis management” program this time around, so we can expect to hear more along the lines of a recent Forbes blog post by Michael Economides, identified as a professor of...
After years of being an issue “too large to address,” both mainstream media and government regulators are finally acknowledging that radioactive wastewater is a huge problem for energy production – not only for oil drilling, of course, but for natural gas fields as well. The “radiation problem” has been a fact of life for the oil and gas industry for decades. But the day of reckoning...
Last year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster focused international attention on offshore well blowouts. But they happen more often onshore, with dangerous effect: release of flammable and toxic gases, spills of oil and drilling fluid, and plumes of groundwater pollution.
Guess who turns up as a double-talking, industry-coddling government bureaucrat in the latest installment of the New York Times “natural gas pollution” series? That’s right, our friend Carol M. Browner, the White House energy advisor of “the vast majority of oil is gone” fame, who has avoided getting fired by cleverly announcing her resignation – and then simply not leaving. In New...
The BP spill certainly illustrates just how little forethought went into a handling a deep-water drilling disaster, with a pathetic level of planning and not even so much as a test for the 2 million gallons of toxic dispersant BP and the Coast Guard pumped into the water. Now we are discovering that reckless attitude is not exclusive to deep-water drilling but extends through other energy...
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The New York Times natural gas series by Ian Urbina continues to illustrate the lack of government oversight in the “energy extraction” industry, but I take some issue with the implication that there are no laws against the dangerous and irresponsible practices oil and gas companies employ. There’s a difference between lack of regulation and lack of enforcement. In the second...
