Natural Gas Industry hamstrings Doctors in Pennsylvania

[badtoworse]

44. In Post 20, I was referring to local governments being preempted by state law.

I actually think the EPA should wear the most blame on this. It should have been involved in this much earlier - taking on a leadership role in 2009 as opposed to still being in a reactive mode in 2012.

I don't think that Pennsylvania has a particularly good record either. In doing research on this, I was very surprised to learn that Pennsylvania has no standards for the construction of private water wells. They too are late in regulating fracking.

As far as local governments go, they simply have no resources and are not in a position to do much of anything (IMO).

As I've said elsewhere on this thread, we need standards to insure that wells are properly constructed and we need strictly enforced regulations to insure that fracking fluids are properly handled, stored and disposed of. With such regulation, I believe fracking can be done safely; without it, there will certainly be problems.

ETA: Our investment mandate will be low carbon sources of energy - gas fired generation and renewables such as wind, solar and biomass. We are also looking at mid-stream gas and electric transmission as potential investments. As I've said, I do believe fracking can be safely and one of the things I am looking at is the regulatory environment and whether the appropriate safeguards are in place. At this point, I do not believe that is the case.