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Do Regulations Protect Public Health and the Environment?

The Department of Energy’s recommendations on regulating fracking for shale gas emphasizes a desire to regain public trust when it comes to natural gas drilling. Subcommittee members want industry to lift the veil of secrecy on fracking chemicals. The report says the country needs to strengthen public health and environmental regulations. And the D.O.E’s Shale Gas Subcommittee recommends state and local governments establish new regulations on water treatment, testing and withdrawals. All this to restore faith in a process that has raised the ire of environmentalists and landowners unable to drink their tap water. But the report to Secretary Chu questions the effectiveness of even the existing regulations.
From the report:

While many states and several federal agencies regulate aspects of these operations, the efficacy of the regulations is far from clear. Raw statistics about enforcement actions and compliance are not sufficient to draw conclusions about regulatory effectiveness. Informed conclusions about the state of shale gas operations require analysis of the vast amount of data that is publicly available, but there are surprisingly few published studies of this publicly available data.

In other words, nobody really knows whether regulations, and subsequent enforcement efforts, actually end up protecting the environment and public health.

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