Environmental activists have accused President Barack Obama of turning his back on the chance to crack down on the procedure of fracking for oil and natural gas.
They claim that the Interior Department missed out on a golden opportunity to rein in the hydraulic fracturing process when it released the first major fracking regulations for federal lands last week,
according to The Hill.
With Congress exempting fracking from many environmental laws on private and state lands in 2005, the conservationists say that the new regulations were a
bonus to the oil and natural gas industry by allowing drillers to continue their environment-destroying practice.
"We do think it's a missed opportunity and continue to wonder why the Interior Department isn't putting conservation as its top objective," said Bill Snape, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. "It continues to give away favors to the oil and gas industry on our lands."
Snape claimed that fracking can contaminate groundwater, air, soil and rivers, and endangers the health of humans and animals. And he blasted the department for continuing "to shirk its mandate to protect lands and waters of the United States for all Americans."
According to The Hill, fracking standards only apply to drilling on leased federal land and land owned by American Indian tribes. Those lands account for under a quarter of U.S. oil production and 17 percent of gas.
Kate DeAngelis, the lead climate and energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth, also condemned the Interior Department's new rules: "If they had put out strong regulations, it would have had a huge impact. So I think it was a lost opportunity."
Federal regulators have said they had believed that states would take the government rules as a framework for their own fracking regulations for state and private lands, The Hill noted.
But DeAngelis said, "Even in that, they failed, because it's not setting a very strong example to begin with."
She added: "We would have hoped for stronger regulations and stronger support for rules that would close those loopholes that were put in place in 2005, and making sure oil and gas companies are held accountable for the devastation that they are causing in our water and our air."
DeAngelis was commenting on the law passed by Congress 10 years ago that exempted fracking from part of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The exemption became known as the "Halliburton loophole," referring to the company once led by former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The Hill noted that the oil and gas industry was also unhappy with the new federal rules and has claimed that the Obama administration was kowtowing to environmentalists.
In fact, only hours after the department introduced the new measures, the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) and Western Energy Alliance
filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to have them invalidated.
"These new mandates on hydraulic fracturing by the federal government ... are the complete opposite of common sense," IPAA President Barry Russell said.
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