"Capping more than three years of study, the O'Malley administration declared Tuesday that hydraulic fracturing for natural gas can be done safely in Western Maryland, but only after regulations are tightened to reduce air and water pollution and protect residents from well contamination, noise and other disruptions associated with an anticipated drilling boom."
"North Dakota took on the oversight of a multibillion-dollar oil industry with a regulatory system built on trust, warnings and second chances."
"It was a brisk February morning, and the governors of Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia and North Carolina were seated around a ring of tables draped with pleated beige fabric in the ornate Nest Room of Washington, D.C.’s Willard InterContinental Hotel. Sitting across the tables was Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, whom the governors had invited so they could make their case for expanding offshore energy production. It was a long-awaited meeting for the governors, and they’d armed themselves with specific 'asks' — that Jewell’s department open access to oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic, for instance, and improve 'regulatory certainty' for energy companies operating rigs off the coasts."
"BURNABY, British Columbia – An 11-year-old girl was among those arrested Sunday as a crowd protested survey work by the Texas-based Kinder Morgan company for a tar sands pipeline expansion through the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby."
"The Obama administration’s decision to put off issuing quotas for the use of renewable fuels this year sets up fights in Congress and the courts over a program that’s been bitterly contested for nearly a decade."
"A Department of Energy investigation into the contentious firing of a Hanford nuclear waste site official met initial resistance from some of the government's biggest contractors."
The White House is threatening to veto three bills changing how EPA uses science in its regulatory decisions. The House has already passed two of them.
On a 229-191 party-line vote, the GOP-controlled House passed a bill reining in EPA's Science Advisory Board (SAB) — authorizing conflicts of interest for its members and gagging them in communications about subjects they are expert on. Science integrity and environmental groups had opposed the bill, which the House passed on November 18, 2014.
It seemed like good news when Baker Hughes, one of the world's largest oilfield services companies, announced in Oct 2014 that it would start disclosing all the chemicals it used in its fracking operation. Now Halliburton, an even larger oilfield services company, is buying Baker Hughes. In a $34.6 billion merger. Or is it a hostile takeover?
"For Barack Obama, it wasn’t easy being green — until, suddenly, it was."
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