The Obama administration on Friday issued a proposed rule governing hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas on public lands that will for the first time require disclosure of the chemicals used in the process.
But in a significant concession to the oil industry, companies will have to reveal the composition of fluids only after they have completed drilling — a sharp change from the government’s original proposal, which would have required disclosure of the chemicals 30 days before a well could be started.
Environmental News Archive


With a 103-36 vote in the House of Representatives, Vermont on Friday became the first state to ban hydraulic fracturing to extract oil or natural gas. The bill passed the Senate earlier this week.
A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.
The Energy Department and a contractor building a waste treatment plant at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site procured and installed tanks that did not always meet requirements of a quality assurance program or the contract, a federal audit concluded Monday.
The American Legislative Exchange Council, a “stealth business lobbyist” that helps corporations write state and federal legislation supporting their interests, has taken major heat for its backing of controversial laws.
I wish everything I am reporting on were not true, or at least were less true than it appears. It does seem that Japan is in the process of contaminating the entire Pacific Ocean via continued uncontrolled releases of radioactivity at Fukushima.
A motorcycle that washed up on a Canadian beach could have been floating at sea since the Japanese tsunami in March last year. Debris has been drifting across the Pacific since the disaster struck over a year ago, and much is now beginning to land on North American shores.





























