TRUMP STICKS HIS NOSE WHERE IT’S NOT NEEDED

…This is what “Fracking” looked like before Obama regulations.

 

Trump does away with a sensible set of rules.

 

Well, as with most things that President Trump does, it’s again time for Americans to become alarmed.

 

If you have seen the YouTube film “Gasland”, where it shows what can happen with methane migration after hydraulic fracturing called “Fracking”, it shows a normal kitchen water faucet being set afire. 

 

Well, the Trump administration has now announced that it was tearing up the Obama rules on fracking on federal lands. This change will satisfy oil drillers who have long opposed federal regulations on this controversial oil and gas extraction process. But this decision should alarm every other American

 

Even though drillers operating on public lands for some time have fracked extensively.  They do this by pumping a cocktail of water and chemicals into wells at high pressure to fracture rock formations and free trapped oil and gas.   Up to 2015, the US Interior Department had not updated its fracking rules for decades. But President Barack Obama’s Interior Department spent several years developing new regulations, and the Obama Interior Department released the new rules in 2015. The lengthy development process resulted in standards that struck a thoughtful balance between the economic opportunity and environmental safety.

 

As an example, the Obama administration’s rules required drillers to carefully test the cement they use for sealing off their wells.  This helps prevent leakage into the subterranean soil. They would also have to stipulate careful treatment of the wastewater flowing back out of the ground after injection, insisting that it be stored in aboveground storage tanks rather than in open pits. This was because most of the major fracking accidents occurred in the handling of fracking wastewater.  The need for these rules was glaring at the time. The Obama regulations also would have obliged drillers to disclose publicly the chemicals they added to the water that they pumped underground.

 

As expected, the new standards failed to satisfy many of the environmentalists on the left, who wanted regulations that cracked down hard or effectively banned fracking. Instead, the Obama administration insisted that the rules would suffice and would pose little challenge to the industry.  That was because compliance costs would be extremely cheap at just over $11,000 per well.

 

The Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) underscored the importance of a well-balanced fracking policy in a major report on fracking’s safety profiles that the agency released at the end of 2016. The EPA found only scattered evidence of any harm to drinking water, which was remarkable given the large number of wells drilled in the past decade. The agency nevertheless identified several ways in which fracking jobs could go wrong if improperly managed, along with real-world examples of potential major harm.

 

The Obama concept was that the industry could increase national and local acceptance of fracking if there were also strong federal regulations in place.  But the industry argues that states are already doing an adequate job of regulating fracking, so the federal government need not slow the drilling approval process with yet more red tape.

 

But based on past issues, even if most states have model fracking regulations, that does not eliminate the need for a federal backstop guaranteeing a minimum level of regulation across the country.

 

The Obama rules would have deferred to any local regulations when states had regulations as strong or stronger than the federal ones, so why remove a safe-guard for the public good?

 

If Trump administration officials were worried about regulatory redundancy, they should have ensured that the federal authorities were deferring to states when they could. Instead, they did away with a sensible set of rules that would have avioded accidents and encouraged public confidence in the industry.

Once again, the Trump administration is getting involved where they are not needed, and when it goes bad, guess who’s going to pay the price? 

 

Hello, American public.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2018