Do Regulations Protect Public Health and the Environment?

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

August 12, 2011 | 10:30 AM

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.