Yesterday, I heard that the Supreme Court struck down Obama's immigration plans. Now this - from the New York Times:
Obama Fracking Rule Is Struck Down by Court
A federal judge on Tuesday night struck down an Obama administration regulation on the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas on public lands, a blow to President Obama’s muscular stand on the extraction of fossil fuels on government lands.
A bit more:
Judge Scott W. Skavdahl of Federal District Court in Wyoming ruled that the Interior Department lacked the authority from Congress to issue the regulation, and also noted that fracking was already subject to other regulations under state and federal law.
The decision comes amid a heated political debate over fracking, which involves the injection of water, gravel and chemicals underground to extract oil and gas. The technology has produced an oil and gas boom in the United States, but environmentalists say fracking can contaminate groundwater and lead to the leaking of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
The blocked rule would not have affected most fracking operations in the United States, since it would have applied only to fracking on federal lands. The vast majority of fracking in the United States — almost 90 percent — is done on state and private land and is governed by state and local regulations. The rule was unlikely to have stopped most new fracking on public lands, although oil and gas companies complained that it could have slowed operations by creating burdensome paperwork.
This is a very good ruling. Most of the people who do not like fracking are unaware of the history or the scale. Fracking is not a new technology - it has been done sucessfully since 1862. The reason it was not widespread at that time is that there were other wells that produced without the added expense. Now that the low hanging fruit has been harvested, we are revisiting this technology. As for scale, most groundwater happens in the first two hundred feet. Most oil and gas wells are more than 5,000 feet deep - the idea that you are going to routinley contaminate drinking water is absurd. Yes, there are cases where methane does contaminate drinking water and these instances have been trumpeted to the media as examples of fracking contamination but they are just natural seeps and have nothing to do with the extraction happening nearby.
We need to stop Barry's plan:
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