Pa.'s Congressional Delegation Pushes to Keep the Feds Out of Fracking

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

October 19, 2011 | 11:00 AM

Scott Detrow / StateImpactPA

A Bradford County drilling rig

A dozen of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Representatives have sent a letter to the White House, urging President Obama to keep the bulk of natural gas drilling regulation at the state, not federal, level.
Members of both parties signed onto the document.
Lancaster Online has more:

The lawmakers, in a letter to senior White House economic adviser Gene Sperling, say the “economic benefits of shale gas to ordinary citizens” are being overlooked as environmental regulators study the impact of hydraulic fracturing, the procedure used to extract natural gas from the earth.
“The existence of shale gas in the United States, coupled with the technological achievements that have made its production possible, present a tremendous economic opportunity for our nation,” the letter states.
“It is our view that the states are in the best position to regulate the activity, given that the types of fracturing operations, local priorities, and environmental concerns vary widely among the regions in which hydraulic fracturing is used,” the letter, dated Oct. 13, says.