EPA passes new fracking rules

Natural gas companies can keep drilling per usual, say the Environmental Protection Agency's new rules for hydraulic fracturing or, as everybody who's not a government employee refers to it, "fracking." The changes the rules aim to affect won't kick in overnight, however. In what some, like Fuel Fix's Jennifer A Dlouhy, consider another case of the government caving in to the wishes of the well-funded energy lobby, the rules won't take effect until 2015.

The new regulations are designed to cut down on the polluting by-products of fracking, which involves drilling through rock and injecting a water-based chemical mixture to force out natural gas. However, after protest from the lobbyists, the EPA will allow the gas industry to hold on to the status quo until 2015, as long as they burn off some of the carcinogenic gases with a process called "flaring."

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.