From the PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS:
…The industry insists that “fracking” is perfectly safe and, at this point, that’s where the debate ends. Even with a big surge in drilling – for example, Pennsylvania saw 120 new wells a month in 2010, compared to 17 a month before that – Congress only last year gave permission for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to actually study fracking’s impact on the water we drink. (Pennsylvania will be a center of the inquiry.)
Meanwhile, the natural-gas industry is pretty much free to inject whatever chemicals it wants into the earth, without having to tell anyone, including government regulators, what they are, because fracking isn’t covered by the environmental laws that we have relied upon for nearly 40 years, including the Clean Water Act.
One exemption is nicknamed the “Halliburton Loophole” (the fracking process was developed by Halliburton in the 1940s) and it’s one of the many dubious legacies bequeathed to the American people by former Vice President Dick Cheney…
Click here to read the full article.
