EPA site replaces 'fracking' with 'unconventional oil and gas' - Entrepreneur Generations

The Environmental Protection Agency has largely replaced the terms "hydraulic fracturing" and "fracking" on its website, according to a report released last week by the Environmental and Data Governance Initiative. The replacement: "unconventional oil and gas".

There are two ways to interpret the EPA’s replacement of the phrase “hydraulic fracturing” with “unconventional oil and gas.” The benign take is that the pages are now inclusive of a variety of ways we continue to extract fossil fuels from the ground. Fracking is just one step in one process to get at hard-to-access oil and gas. Unconventional oil and gas include all sorts of things like tar sands, for example, though the new EPA pages don’t get into those or even defining what the term means," Brian Kahn reports for left-leaning environmentalist publication Earther. "There’s another, less charitable read on the change, though. Anti-fracking sentiment has been on the rise for years, and majorities of Americans of all political stripes favor tighter regulation, according to Gallup polling done earlier this year. The Trump administration does not agree."

EPA made a lot of other changes in the overhaul: they removed the section that said the agency promoted transparency and conducted outreach to stakeholders, added a section highlighting partnerships with oil and natural gas sectors and industry associations, and changed content to emphasize potential impacts of fracking rather than known impacts such as seismic activity, air pollution or climate change.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2Fya8OF EPA site replaces 'fracking' with 'unconventional oil and gas' - Entrepreneur Generations

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