Pol Blasts EPA Director’s Comments
City Council Member James F. Gennaro, chairman of the New York City Council Committee on Environmental Protection, challenged the comments made by federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson on Feb. 22 that indicated her agency does not intend to take the lead in regulating the controversial natural gas drilling process known as high-volume hydraulic fracturing.
Also called “fracking” or “hydrofracking,” this process involves pumping large volumes of pressurized chemicals deep underground to fracture rocks containing natural gas.
The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. reported last Wednesday, Feb. 22, that Jackson said fracking regulation does not necessarily need to be federal, pointing to the volume of public comments in the wake of New York State’s proposed fracking regulations as an indicator of state awareness.
Gennaro said fracking is the only energy drilling process for which there are no federal standards or regulations- and the only process about which there exists significant unanswered scientific questions about its potential adverse environmental impacts with regard to drinking water supplies, air emissions and earthquakes/ seismic activity that it is becoming apparent that it can induce.
“This is a completely unacceptable abdication of federal leadership. From a national environmental regulatory perspective, this is like taking us back to the Articles of Confederation,”
Gennaro said. “When President Obama made fracking a pillar of his job creation, economic revitalization and energy independence strategies for the country in his State of the Union address, it was clear that the federal government needed to step up and create comprehensive, sciencebased, environmentally protective national regulations fracking-as it has for each and every other method of energy exploration and production.”
“New York State-or any state, for that matter-is grossly illequipped to perform the basic science that would lead to even a basic understanding of the poorly understood -and, to some degree, completely unknown-phenomena associated with high volume hydraulic fracturing and the possible consequences of those phenomena,” Gennaro added. “Without this understanding, the development of adequate regulations and enforcement by states is impossible. The prodigious resources of the federal government are desperately needed here.”
