The Obama administration on Tuesday unveiled its first major effort at slashing government red tape, outlining hundreds of changes in the fine print of government regulations that potentially could save businesses and consumers billions of dollars over the coming decade.

And while the White House touted the measures as unprecedented, they drew negative reviews from the left and right.

Under mounting pressure from industry groups and Republicans to scale back or dilute reams of government rules that greatly add to production and accounting costs and discourage hiring, the White House detailed more than 500 reforms, either already implemented or in the pipeline, that officials claim will save industry and consumers more than $4 billion over the next five years.

The more than 800 pages of major and small-bore rules changes will largely affect the operations of the Departments of Transportation, Treasury, Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In detailing the final plans, Cass Sunstein, the White House regulatory czar, stressed that “this isn’t a one-shot endeavor,” and that other regulatory reforms are in the works that might provide an additional $6 billion of relief of burdensome regulations in the coming years – for a total of $10 billion in savings.

“We haven’t really had in history this kind of sustained, presidentially-driven enhanced process for a look back” on existing rules, Sunstein said during a conference call. “There’s an effort here to create periodic review of existing rules and to change the culture, really, by having openness to public concerns, by getting a sense of how rules are operating on the ground.”  

The reforms are the result of seven months of agency reviews in response to a presidential executive order and are aimed in part at muting bitter complaints from industry groups that President Obama is “anti-business.” The administration also hopes to deflect charges by congressional Republicans and GOP presidential candidates that Obama’s regulatory policies are slowing the economic recovery.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and House and Senate Republican leaders complained that the plan was largely window dressing, and failed to address economically onerous regulations that are only now being implemented under both the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul and Obama’s health care bill as well as new EPA ozone standards.

“The administration’s findings … are a worthy effort at making technical changes to the regulatory process, but the results … will not have a material impact on the real regulatory burdens facing businesses today,” said Bill Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs.

“Cutting $10 billion in regulatory costs over five years is a drop in the bucket,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., vice chair of the Senate Republican Conference. “In July alone, the Administration proposed over $9.5 billion in new regulatory costs.”

Sunstein replied:  “If $10 billion is a drop in the bucket, I’d like to have access to that bucket.”

“We are implementing Dodd Frank; we are implementing health care … in a way that’s attuned to burden minimization and cost-reduction.  If people have ideas for making implementation work as seamlessly and cost-effectively as possible, we’re all ears.”

Sunstein, a former Harvard Law School professor, ignited Republican ire before he was even confirmed as Obama’s head of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  His confirmation was briefly derailed in 2009 when Texas Sen. John Cornyn and some of his Republican colleagues expressed concern that he would use his post to advance an animal rights agenda, pushing for new regulations on agriculture and hunting.

Sunstein had said in a 2007 Harvard speech that he favored banning hunting and eliminating meat from American diets.  He is credited with helping advance the field of “law and behavioral economics,” that seeks to model policy based on research on how people behave. 

The White House is almost certain to tout the adminstration’s regulatory reform proposals  this fall, when Obama resumes negotiations with congressional Republicans over long term deficit reduction and will seek credit for what it has done so far on the regulatory front.  But House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., made it clear in a Washington Post op-ed piece earlier this week that Republicans intend to blister the president for his regulatory policies.

“The Obama administration’s anti-business, hyper-regulatory, pro-tax agenda has fueled economic uncertainty and sent the message from the administration that “we want to make it harder to create jobs,”Cantor wrote.
Some liberal activists also had problems with the administration’s regulatory reforms, suggesting that the president has gone too far in attempting to placate business groups and the GOP.  Rena Steinzor at the Center for Progressive Reform said in a blog post: “The final agency regulatory ‘look-back’ plans . . . fall far short of their obvious goal: to placate greedy and intemperate industry demands that major rules be cancelled. … The White House won’t get political credit for that from their target audience – just disappointment from progressives, disappointed at the whole exercise.”

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In a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner today, President Barack Obama revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency is considering a clean air rule that could cost up to $90 billion to implement.

The proposed regulation, "Reconsideration of the 2008 Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard" would lower the allowable concentration of ozone from 0.075 parts-per-million to between 0.060 and 0.070 ppm. According to the EPA, the new standards are required to increase protection for children and "at-risk" populations against respiratory and cardiovascular diseases related to exposure to ozone in the air.

Obama said the primary cost estimate of implementation is between $19 billion and $90 billion.

The EPA says most ozone comes from three categories of sources — vehicle engines, industrial processes, and electrical power production. The rule would tighten emissions standards on all three categories — which would require technological changes, that critics say would cost jobs.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor called it "possibly the most harmful of all the currently anticipated Obama Administration regulations," in a memo to House Republicans Monday, adding he will seek to repeal the legislation this Winter. Cantor said estimates put the cost of the rule at "$1 trillion or more over a decade and millions of jobs."

The Manufacturers Alliance, a lobbying group for industry, put the cost of meeting the regulation at $1.013 trillion and 7.3 million jobs between 2020 and 2030 — numbers the Obama administration strongly contests.

Regardless, the rule would be among the costliest in recent memory — and has brought a spotlight to other Obama administration regulations.

In a statement, Speaker of the House John Boehner responded to Obama's letter saying "we know from the Administration’s own disclosures that there are 212 other regulatory actions in the works, each with an estimated cost to our economy of more than $100 million." Adding that "at a time like this, with our economy struggling to create jobs, it’s misguided for the federal government to be imposing so many new rules with such enormous costs, even when some of those rules may be well-intentioned.” 

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President Barack Obama announced Friday that he was directing the EPA to withdraw a draft regulation that would tighten air quality standards for Ozone due to concerns about costs.

In a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner Tuesday, Obama revealed that the rule under consideration by the Environmental Protection Agency could cost up to $90 billion to implement.

Obama said that while he supports the regulation, it will be updated again in 2013, adding, "ultimately, I did not support asking state and local governments to begin implementing a new standard that will soon be reconsidered."

The proposed regulation, "Reconsideration of the 2008 Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard" would lower the allowable concentration of ozone from 0.075 parts-per-million to between 0.060 and 0.070 ppm. According to the EPA, the new standards are required to increase protection for children and "at-risk" populations against respiratory and cardiovascular diseases related to exposure to ozone in the air.

Obama said the primary cost estimate of implementation is between $19 billion and $90 billion.

The EPA says most ozone comes from three categories of sources — vehicle engines, industrial processes, and electrical power production. The rule would tighten emissions standards on all three categories — which would require technological changes, that critics say would cost jobs.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor called it "possibly the most harmful of all the currently anticipated Obama Administration regulations," in a memo to House Republicans Monday, adding he would seek to repeal the legislation this Winter. Cantor said estimates put the cost of the rule at "$1 trillion or more over a decade and millions of jobs."

The Manufacturers Alliance, a lobbying group for industry, put the cost of meeting the regulation at $1.013 trillion and 7.3 million jobs between 2020 and 2030 — numbers the Obama administration strongly contests.

Regardless, the rule would be among the costliest in recent memory — and has brought a spotlight to other Obama administration regulations.

In a statement, Speaker of the House John Boehner responded to Obama's letter saying "we know from the Administration’s own disclosures that there are 212 other regulatory actions in the works, each with an estimated cost to our economy of more than $100 million." Adding that "at a time like this, with our economy struggling to create jobs, it’s misguided for the federal government to be imposing so many new rules with such enormous costs, even when some of those rules may be well-intentioned.” 

Read Obama's full statement below:

Over the last two and half years, my administration, under the leadership of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, has taken some of the strongest actions since the enactment of the Clean Air Act four decades ago to protect our environment and the health of our families from air pollution. From reducing mercury and other toxic air pollution from outdated power plants to doubling the fuel efficiency of our cars and trucks, the historic steps we’ve taken will save tens of thousands of lives each year, remove over a billion tons of pollution from our air, and produce hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits for the American people. 

At the same time, I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover.  With that in mind, and after careful consideration, I have requested that Administrator Jackson withdraw the draft Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards at this time. Work is already underway to update a 2006 review of the science that will result in the reconsideration of the ozone standard in 2013.  Ultimately, I did not support asking state and local governments to begin implementing a new standard that will soon be reconsidered. 

I want to be clear: my commitment and the commitment of my administration to protecting public health and the environment is unwavering. I will continue to stand with the hardworking men and women at the EPA as they strive every day to hold polluters accountable and protect our families from harmful pollution.  And my administration will continue to vigorously oppose efforts to weaken EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act or dismantle the progress we have made.

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell offered the sharpest critique yet of President Barack Obama's jobs plan — two days before it is to be formally announced.

Speaking on the Senate floor to open the fall legislative session after a five-week vacation, McConnell said he is growing confident that Obama's plan will be bad for the country.

"While I have no doubt the President will propose many things on Thursday that, when looked at individually, sound pretty good, or that he’ll call them all bipartisan," he said. "I’m equally certain that, taken as whole, they’ll represent more of the same failed approach that’s only made things worse over the past few years, and resulted in even fewer jobs than when he started."

McConnell added that Washington needs to stop "thinking it's the center of the Universe," and recenter its policies around job creators. 

He also pushed back on Obama's assertion that opposition to his plan is an expression of partisanship.

"With all due respect, Mr. President, there’s a much simpler reason for opposing your economic proposals that has nothing to do with politics: they don’t work." he said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used his speech to criticize Republican opposition to jobs bills, saying "Republicans have distracted Congress from its most important responsibility – getting our economy back on track – time and again."

Earlier Tuesday, Speaker of the House John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor expressed optimism that Republicans and Obama could find some common ground — but restated their opposition to some of the bolder options Obama is considering.

Read the full speech here:

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Former Vice President Al Gore criticized President Barack Obama's decision to withdraw a $90 billion clean air regulation last week in a post on his blog.

Gore said that "instead of relying on science, President Obama appears to have bowed to pressure from polluters who did not want to bear the cost of implementing new restrictions on their harmful pollution."

Read his message, titled "Confronting Disappointment" below:

"On Friday afternoon, as brave and committed activists continued their non-violent civil disobedience outside the White House in protest of the tar sands pipeline that would lead to a massive increase in global warming pollution, President Obama ordered the EPA to abandon its pursuit of new curbs on emissions that worsens disease-causing smog in US cities. Earlier this year, the EPA’s administrator, Lisa Jackson, wrote that the levels of pollution now permitted -- put in place by the Bush-Cheney administration-- are “not legally defensible.” Those very same rules have now been embraced by the Obama White House."

"Instead of relying on science, President Obama appears to have bowed to pressure from polluters who did not want to bear the cost of implementing new restrictions on their harmful pollution—even though economists have shown that the US economy would benefit from the job creating investments associated with implementing the new technology. The result of the White House’s action will be increased medical bills for seniors with lung disease, more children developing asthma, and the continued degradation of our air quality."

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The coal industry that sustained Central Appalachia since the 19th-century is declining faster than anyone expected.

In a little more than three years, the amount of coal mined there will be less than half the total in 2008, according to the Department of Energy. They've simply exhausted most of the easy to reach resources.

Reporting from Garrett, Ky., the AP warns of economic devastation as the industry shrinks. Coal mining occupies up to 40 percent of the workforce in some towns.

We tracked down a 2010 report from West Virginia's Downstream Strategies about the decline of the industry.

Coal production has been declining since 1983

Coal production has also shifted increasingly toward surface coal production

Total mining employment has fallen by half since 1983

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Ben LaBolt, the press secretary for President Barack Obama's reelection campaign is out with a memo today highlighting polls showing Republicans as out of touch with Americans on issues from immigration to financial regulation.

"The campaign to win the Republican nomination has become a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Tea Party," LaBolt writes. "They would return to policies that have been tried before and done nothing to improve economic security for the middle class, rewarding special interests who can afford to pay for lobbyists instead of looking out for working families."

“Instead of laying out a plan to promote America’s competitiveness, the Republican candidates have focused on what they want to dismantle,” LaBolt added.

Read the full memo below:

TO: Interested Parties

FR: Ben LaBolt, Press Secretary

Republican Candidates Support Policies that the American People Oppose

From economics to immigration, Governor Perry, Governor Romney and the Republican field have embraced policies that the American people oppose. The campaign to win the Republican nomination has become a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Tea Party. They would return to policies that have been tried before and done nothing to improve economic security for the middle class, rewarding special interests who can afford to pay for lobbyists instead of looking out for working families.

While the President is fighting to create jobs and put money in the pockets of middle class Americans, the Republican candidates have proposed extending tax breaks for large corporations and tax cuts for the wealthiest while allowing special interests to write their own rules.

The Republican candidates universally want to repeal the protections that the President put in place to prevent another financial crisis and instead allow banks to write their own rules, but an overwhelming majority of Americans – Republicans, Democrats, and Independents — favor strong oversight of Wall Street and an independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [Lake Research 7/11].

Governor Perry called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and continues to question its constitutionality and Governor Romney supports turning Social Security funds over to Wall Street. Yet even a majority of Republicans oppose a fundamental overhaul of Social Security [Gallup 9/15/11].

According to recent surveys, a strong majority of Americans favor asking the wealthiest to pay their fair share in order to create jobs and get our fiscal house in order. Seventy three percent support ensuring that people who make over a million dollars a year pay the same percentage of taxes on their total income as those who make less, and in a recent Gallup poll asking the wealthiest Americans to pay more was the single most popular proposal to reduce the deficit [PPP 9/22/11; Gallup 8/7/11]. Seventy three percent of Americans support repealing tax breaks for oil and gas companies [CNN Poll 7/21/11]. Yet none of the Republican candidates would ask the wealthiest to pay an additional dime and their economic plans maintain tax breaks for large corporations.

The Republican candidates have embraced Republican budget plans – from the Ryan budget to the so-called Cut Cap and Balance plan – that would end Medicare as we know it, erode Social Security, and eliminate investments in education and research and development. Fifty seven percent of Americans oppose replacing Medicare with a system in which government vouchers would be used to help pay for health insurance [Bloomberg Poll 9/12/11]. And recent surveys have all reflected support for the investments the President has proposed we make to create jobs and spur the economy – from putting first responders and teachers back to work to rebuilding our roads and bridges – rather than a retreat from them.

Instead of laying out a plan to promote America’s competitiveness, the Republican candidates have focused on what they want to dismantle. While the EPA has become the Republican candidates’ favorite punching bag, 71% of Americans believe we should continue to fund the EPA to enforce greenhouse gas emission standards and other environmental regulations [CNN Poll 4/10/11]. A majority of Democrats, a majority of Republicans, and a majority of Independents believe that the Department of Education should remain [CNN Poll 9/11/11]. But Governor Perry called “cutting back on the Department of Education” a “good idea,” and Representative Bachmann said we should “turn off [its] lights and lock the door.” 

While Americans oppose repeal by a margin of 52-37, the Republican candidates would repeal the Affordable Care Act, allowing insurance companies once again to refuse to cover preexisting conditions [Kaiser 9/12/11].

Americans don’t want to return to policies that haven’t worked in the past, and they don’t want to start doing away with sensible environmental safeguards and investments in education. They want a forward looking plan to take on our economic challenges, to create jobs and to ensure that America wins the future in a competitive global economy. The Republican field has become increasingly out of step on immigration. While 64% of Americans believe the U.S. should allow undocumented immigrants to become citizens under certain conditions, the leading Republican candidates oppose a path to citizenship for immigrants [Gallup 6/12/11]. And a majority of Americans have consistently supported the DREAM Act which the Republican candidates universally oppose at the federal level.

Fighting for a fairer economy that rewards hard work and responsibility has been at the center of this administration’s mission. Upon taking office, the President took immediate steps to address our historic economic challenges. He stood up to the banks and passed sweeping credit cards reforms ensuring that they couldn’t gouge consumers through deceptive lending practices, he ignored the pundits and extended a loan to the auto companies that saved 1.4 million American jobs, and instead of carving out tax breaks for large corporations, he cut taxes for small businesses 17 times in order to fuel the true engine of job creation.

America’s future will be defined by the success of our middle class, but the Republican candidates are positioning themselves as champions for large corporations and special interests whose plans would leave working families in the lurch.

This is one of a series of periodic memos about the state of the campaign.
###

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The Environmental Protection Agency has to delay or soften new coal regulations or it would jeopardizing U.S. power supply, Morgan Stanley says in a note this morning:

These rules were tougher than expected and affect Texas which had believed until a few months ago that it would be excluded from this regulation. Our utility team says that on first inspection up to 22% of the ERCOT and PJM coal fleet would be affected from January 1st 2012. With coal representing about 44% of US power generation and typical reserve capacity around 20%, this implies about half of the critical spare capacity that protects the reliability of the grid is under threat.

The EPA also faces lawsuits from eight states and pushback from Texas, which was recently added to the proposed rule.

Yesterday WSJ's Deborah Solomon said the administration was already talking about revising the new rule. Coal stocks posted big gains yesterday on this report.

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Water used to be free.

In fact, it still is -- at least in nations blessed with plentiful clean tap water like the U.S. -- but that doesn't stop the world from spending over $100 billion on bottled water a year.

This strange industry is exploding overseas as well.

Who got the idea to sell us something we can get for free? And how did it get so popular that now more than half of Americans drink it?

The first documented case of selling bottled water was in Boston in the 1760s

Jackson's Spa took mineral water and sold it for therapeutic uses. Other later examples include the bottling of water in Saratoga Springs and Albany.

Global consumption of bottled water goes up 10 percent each year.

The slowest growth is in Europe, where commercial bottled water -- like Perrier -- has been around for centuries. Faster growth can be seen in places like Asia and South America, but North America still leads the pack in total consumption.

America is now drinking more bottled water than milk or beer.

The U.S. drank 9 billion gallons of bottled water in 2008, at an average of 30 gallons per person.

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The EPA's bombshell report about groundwater contamination from fracking acknowledges a few reasons why the site at Pavillion, WY is irregular. Expect the natural gas industry to make a big deal of these points:

• The unique sandstone structure in the area means there is no natural barrier from the chemicals migrating to the wells.
  
• Nearby storage for drilling waste means that the contamination may be from stored chemicals rather than the actual drilling
  
• The drilling depth of this site was very shallow, 1200 feet.

The EPA report found a long list of synthetic chemicals associated with hydraulic fracturing fluid in its test samples at Pavillion, WY.

If the findings stand, there will probably be higher standards on the cement casings at fracking sites and tighter regulations on the storage and disposal of drilling wastes in the future. But it shouldn't impede the growth of the natural gas industry.

The locals of Pavillion complained about the taste and odor of the local water in 2008, and believe that the 169 drilling sites in the local area are the problem.

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ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) — Residents of a northeastern Pennsylvania village where a natural gas driller has been accused of tainting water wells with methane and possibly hazardous chemicals say the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is promising to deliver fresh water.

Homeowners in Dimock Township have been without a reliable supply of clean water since Houston-based driller Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. stopped making daily deliveries more than a month ago.

Three Dimock residents say the EPA told them Friday it's hiring a private contractor to deliver water to their homes about 20 miles south of the New York state line. The EPA says no decision has been made.

Cabot has been blamed for polluting an aquifer but denies responsibility for the contamination. It won permission from Pennsylvania environmental regulators to stop delivering water to Dimock on Nov. 30.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Several conservative members of the Supreme Court criticized the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday for heavy-handed enforcement of rules affecting homeowners after the government told an Idaho couple they can't challenge an order declaring their future home site a "protected wetlands."

Justice Antonin Scalia assailed the "high-handedness" of the environmental agency when dealing with private property, and Justice Samuel Alito described some of the EPA's actions as "outrageous," arguing that most people would say "this kind of thing can't happen in the United States."

The EPA said that Mike and Chantell Sackett illegally filled in most of their 0.63-acre lot with dirt and rocks in preparation for building a home. The agency said the property is a wetlands that cannot be disturbed without a permit. The Sacketts had none.

The couple, who attended the Supreme Court arguments, said they had no reason to suspect there were wetlands on their property. They paid $23,000 for their property in 2005 and decided two years later to build a three-bedroom home. Workers spent three days filling in just under a half-acre of land.

Three EPA officials showed up, said they believed the land was wetlands, asked for a permit and told the workers to stop. Six months later, the EPA sent the order that triggered the court case. The Sacketts wanted to challenge that order, but lower courts have said that they cannot.

The EPA issues nearly 3,000 administrative compliance orders a year that call on alleged violators of environmental laws to stop what they're doing and repair the harm they've caused. Major business groups, homebuilders, road builders and agricultural interests all have joined the Sacketts in urging the court to make it easier to contest EPA compliance orders issued under several environmental laws.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wondered how far the Supreme Court should go in a ruling, noting that government agencies often threaten citations when people don't comply with the law. "Health inspectors go into restaurants all the time and say: 'Unless you fix this, I'm going to give you a citation.' Fire inspectors, the same thing," he said.

The Sacketts' lawyer, Damien M. Schiff, argued that they weren't trying to take away EPA's power. Environmental groups say a purpose of the orders is to make it easier to negotiate a resolution without a protracted legal fight.

"Let EPA administer the act and issue compliance orders," Schiff said. "But let's also give homeowners a fair shake, too. Let them have their day in court to contest what the agency has done."

Alito leveled some of the strongest criticism against the EPA, noting that the Sacketts had to wait until the EPA sued them to even challenge the idea that there were wetlands on their property.

"You think maybe there is a little drainage problem in part of your lot, so you start to build the house and then you get an order from the EPA which says: 'You have filled in wetlands, so you can't build your house; remove the fill, put in all kinds of plants; and now you have to let us on your premises whenever we want to,'" Alito said. "You have to turn over to us all sorts of documents, and for every day that you don't do all this you are accumulating a potential fine of $75,000. And by the way, there is no way you can go to court to challenge our determination that this is a wetlands until such time as we choose to sue you."

Chief Justice John Roberts said that because of the potential fines, few people are going to challenge the EPA's determinations.

"Because of the administrative compliance order, you're really never going to be put to the test, because most land owners aren't going to say, 'I'm going to risk the $37,000 a day," Roberts said. "All EPA has to do is make whatever finding it wants, and realize that in 99 percent of the cases, it's never going to be put to the test."

The EPA's normal procedure is to contact the homeowner before issuing a compliance order, Justice Department lawyer Malcolm Stewart said. A wetlands biologist has also confirmed to The Associated Press that he advised the Sacketts in May 2007 that their property was a wetlands and that there were wetlands on three sides of their land. The Sacketts say that in 2010, other wetlands consultants examined their land and concluded that the first one was wrong.

If the Sacketts "had wanted a judicial resolution of the coverage question without subjecting themselves to potential penalties, they could have filed a permit application before discharging, they could have gotten review there. All we're saying is they can't discharge fill, wait to see whether EPA notices, and then insist upon immediate judicial review if EPA notices and objects," Stewart said.

The justices will rule by summer.

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There's a heated debate brewing on Capitol Hill over just how costly a new EPA rule to cut dirty toxins like mercury and lead from energy plant emissions would be for consumers at home.  

Before you take sides, let's start with a bit of background: 

In December, President Obama signed the EPA's "Utility MACT" rule, which will levy new emissions standards on about 1,000 or so coal- and oil-powered plants.  In short, they'll have to give the facilities a good scrub-down and be sure they're not releasing as many harmful chemicals into the air. 

Opponents claim the law would not only destroy jobs, but also force companies to jack up utility rates for nearly all U.S. households in order to pay for it. 

In August, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) estimated light bills could surge anywhere from 12 to 24 percent. However, the EPA puts that figure at just 3.1% in 2015 and predicts it will fall to 2% by 2020, once the benefits start kicking in. 

Naturally, energy companies have been quick to blast the rule. 

“When government regulations increase the cost of energy, it is America’s working class who shoulder the burden,” said Steve Miller, president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. “For millions of Americans living on low and fixed incomes, surging energy prices mean less money for other necessities such as food, housing and health care.”

The coalition just released a study that shows nearly half of Americans are paying double what it cost to keep the lights on just a decade ago – a whopping 20 percent of their family budget. 

The study – “Energy Cost Impacts on American Families” – combines data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Dept. of Energy to analyze how much more we're paying for things like transportation, home heating, A/C, and electricity in general.

"The 60 million households that earn less than $50,000 per year, or half of all U.S. families, will devote an estimated 21 percent of their after-tax incomes to energy, compared to 12 percent spent in 2001," the report says. "The energy bills of families earning less than $10,000 have risen to 78 percent of their after-tax income."

It's hard to argue with numbers like those, but proponents of MACT say it will benefit consumers and the environment in the long-run. 

The Center for American Progress was on the bullhorn today to fire back at the ACCCE's claims:

"The final rules to reduce the mercury, lead, arsenic, and other toxic pollutants from coal-fired power plants will have huge public-health benefits," writes Daniel J. Weiss. "Slashing mercury and other contaminants will save 11,000 lives annually and prevent more than 100,000 asthma and heart attacks year. These health improvements will provide economic benefits of up to $90 billion every year."

See the CAP's chart for a state-by-state look at the benefits.

And to conservatives and energy companies' claim that the rule will slash jobs for working class Americans, the CAP notes that power companies will have no choice but to create new jobs if they want to retrofit their plants to comply with the rules by springtime.

"We have to hire plumbers, electricians, painters, folks who do that kind of work when you retrofit a plant. Jobs are created in the process—no question about that," Mike Morris, chief executive of American Electric Power said.

Just how many jobs is uncertain, but Weiss cites a University of Massachusetts study that estimates the rule could generate more than 300,000 new jobs over five years. 

This much is true for now: The rising cost of energy continues to pummel American households, especially those of low-income and minority consumers. 

While lawmakers hash it out in D.C., do what you can to cut your energy costs at home with these 6 simple tips from YM Contributor Brandon Ballenger:

-Don’t pre-rinse dishes
-Maintain your appliances (ex: check lint traps, change A/C filters). 
-Use pots and pans with flat bottoms that fit the burners.
-Minimize opening/closing of oven and fridge doors. 
-Use power strips.
-Get energy-efficient bulbs. 

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DIMOCK, Pa. (AP) — Tugging on rubber gloves, a laboratory worker kneels before a gushing spigot behind Kim Grosso's house and positions an empty bottle under the clear, cold stream. The process is repeated dozens of times as bottles are filled, marked and packed into coolers.

After extensive testing, Grosso and dozens of her neighbors will know this week what may be lurking in their well water as federal regulators investigate claims of contamination in the midst of one of the nation's most productive natural gas fields.

More than three years into the gas-drilling boom that's produced thousands of new wells, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Pennsylvania are tussling over regulation of the Marcellus Shale, the vast underground rock formation that holds trillions of cubic feet of gas.

The state says EPA is meddling. EPA says it is doing its job.

Grosso, who lives near a pair of gas wells drilled in 2008, told federal officials her water became discolored a few months ago, with an intermittent foul odor and taste. Her dog and cats refused to drink it. While there's no indication the problems are related to drilling, she hopes the testing will provide answers.

"If there is something wrong with the water, who is responsible?" she asked. "Who's going to fix it, and what does it do to the value of the property?"

Federal regulators are ramping up their oversight of the Marcellus with dual investigations in the northeastern and southwestern corners of Pennsylvania. EPA is also sampling water around Pennsylvania for its national study of the potential environmental and public health impacts of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the technique that blasts a cocktail of sand, water and chemicals deep underground to stimulate oil and gas production in shale formations like the Marcellus. Fracking allows drillers to reach previously inaccessible gas reserves, but it produces huge volumes of polluted wastewater and environmentalists say it can taint groundwater. Energy companies deny it.

The heightened federal scrutiny rankles the industry and politicians in the state capital, where the administration of pro-drilling Gov. Tom Corbett insists that Pennsylvania regulators are best suited to oversee the gas industry. The complaints echo those in Texas and in Wyoming, where EPA's preliminary finding that fracking chemicals contaminated water supplies is forcefully disputed by state officials and energy executives.

Caught in the middle of the state-federal regulatory dispute are residents who don't know if their water is safe to drink.

EPA is charged by law with protecting and ensuring the safety of the nation's drinking water, but it has largely allowed the states to take the lead on rules and enforcement as energy companies drilled and fracked tens of thousands of new wells in recent years.

In Pennsylvania, that began to change last spring after The Associated Press and other news organizations reported that huge volumes of partially treated wastewater were being discharged into rivers and streams that supply drinking water. EPA asked the state to boost its monitoring of fracking wastewater from gas wells, and the state declared a voluntary moratorium for drillers that led to significant reductions of Marcellus waste. Yet a loophole in the policy allows operators of many older oil and gas wells to continue discharging significant amounts of wastewater into treatment plants, and thus, into rivers.

The state's top environmental regulator, Michael Krancer, says Pennsylvania doesn't need federal intervention to help it protect the environment. He told Congress last fall that Pennsylvania has taken the lead on regulations for the burgeoning gas industry.

"There's no question that EPA is overstepping," Katherine Gresh, Krancer's spokeswoman, told the AP. "DEP regulates these facilities and always has, and EPA has never before shown this degree of involvement."

The American Petroleum Institute urged the Obama administration last week to rein in the 10 agencies it says are either reviewing, studying or proposing regulation of fracking.

"The fact is that there is a strong state regulatory system in place, and adding potentially redundant and duplicative federal regulation would be unnecessary, costly, and could stifle investment," API Vice President Kyle Isakower said in a statement.

EPA says public health is its key focus and insists it is guided by sound science and the law.

"We have been clear that if we see an immediate threat to public health, we will not hesitate to take steps under the law to protect Americans whose health may be at risk," said Terri White, an EPA spokeswoman in Philadelphia.

The EPA investigations are being conducted amid reports of possibly drilling-related contamination in several Pennsylvania communities.

In recent years, methane migrating from drill sites into private water supplies has forced scores of residents to stop using their wells and rely on deliveries of fresh water. Some residents complain the state agency has failed to hold drillers to account.

In heavily drilled Washington County, near the West Virginia border, EPA staff are inspecting well pads and natural gas compressor stations for compliance with water- and air-quality laws. In Dimock, a village about 20 miles south of the New York state line, EPA stepped in after a gas driller won the state's permission to halt fresh water deliveries to about a dozen residents whose wells were tainted with methane and, the residents say, heavy metals, organic compounds and drilling chemicals.

Dimock holds the distinction of being Pennsylvania's top gas-producing town, yielding enough gas in six months to supply 400,000 U.S. homes for a year. Some residents contend their water wells were irreversibly contaminated after Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. drilled faulty gas wells that leaked methane into the aquifer 7/87/8— and spilled thousands of gallons of fracking fluids that residents suspect leached into the groundwater.

Cabot first acknowledged, then denied responsibility for the methane it now contends is naturally occurring. It also asserts that years of sampling data show the water is safe to drink.

The EPA looked at the same test results and arrived at a different conclusion.

The well water samples "led us to conclude that there were health concerns that required action," White said. EPA said its tests showed alarming levels of manganese and cancer-causing arsenic and that Cabot's own tests found minute concentrations of organic compounds and synthetic chemicals, suggesting the influence of gas drilling.

Cabot says its drilling operations had nothing to do with any chemicals that have turned up in the water. It points to a Duke University study last year that found no evidence of contamination from fracking.

Yet the company racks up state violations at a far higher rate than its competitors in the Marcellus — 248 violations at its wells in Dimock alone since late 2007 — most recently last month, when the company was flagged for improper storage, transport or disposal of residual waste. State regulators levied more than $1.1 million in fines and penalties against the company between 2008 and 2010. And it is still banned from drilling any new wells in a 9-square-mile area of Dimock.

While EPA agreed last month to deliver water to four homes along Carter Road, the agency said the tests did not justify supplying water to several other residents who had been getting their water from Cabot and who have filed suit against the company.

The plaintiffs still don't trust their wells, instead relying on water from the nearby Montrose municipal supply.

Twice a day, six days a week, Carter Road resident Ray Kemble drives about eight miles to a hydrant in Montrose, fills a 550-gallon tank strapped to the back of a donated truck, and delivers water to as many as five homes — including his own. Anti-drilling groups are footing the bill, estimated at $500 per week.

Kemble said his well water turned brown and became unusable in 2008, shortly after the gas well across the street was drilled and fracked.

At his home, he filled a large plastic container dubbed a water buffalo from the tank on the truck.

"Never had a problem before until Cabot came in," Kemble said.

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DIMOCK, Pa. (AP) — Tugging on rubber gloves, a laboratory worker kneels before a gushing spigot behind Kim Grosso's house and positions an empty bottle under the clear, cold stream. The process is repeated dozens of times as bottles are filled, marked and packed into coolers.

After extensive testing, Grosso and dozens of her neighbors will know this week what may be lurking in their well water as federal regulators investigate claims of contamination in the midst of one of the nation's most productive natural gas fields.

More than three years into the gas-drilling boom that's produced thousands of new wells, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Pennsylvania are tussling over regulation of the Marcellus Shale, the vast underground rock formation that holds trillions of cubic feet of gas.

The state says EPA is meddling. EPA says it is doing its job.

Grosso, who lives near a pair of gas wells drilled in 2008, told federal officials her water became discolored a few months ago, with an intermittent foul odor and taste. Her dog and cats refused to drink it. While there's no indication the problems are related to drilling, she hopes the testing will provide answers.

"If there is something wrong with the water, who is responsible?" she asked. "Who's going to fix it, and what does it do to the value of the property?"

Federal regulators are ramping up their oversight of the Marcellus with dual investigations in the northeastern and southwestern corners of Pennsylvania. EPA is also sampling water around Pennsylvania for its national study of the potential environmental and public health impacts of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the technique that blasts a cocktail of sand, water and chemicals deep underground to stimulate oil and gas production in shale formations like the Marcellus. Fracking allows drillers to reach previously inaccessible gas reserves, but it produces huge volumes of polluted wastewater and environmentalists say it can taint groundwater. Energy companies deny it.

The heightened federal scrutiny rankles the industry and politicians in the state capital, where the administration of pro-drilling Gov. Tom Corbett insists that Pennsylvania regulators are best suited to oversee the gas industry. The complaints echo those in Texas and in Wyoming, where EPA's preliminary finding that fracking chemicals contaminated water supplies is forcefully disputed by state officials and energy executives.

Caught in the middle of the state-federal regulatory dispute are residents who don't know if their water is safe to drink.

EPA is charged by law with protecting and ensuring the safety of the nation's drinking water, but it has largely allowed the states to take the lead on rules and enforcement as energy companies drilled and fracked tens of thousands of new wells in recent years.

In Pennsylvania, that began to change last spring after The Associated Press and other news organizations reported that huge volumes of partially treated wastewater were being discharged into rivers and streams that supply drinking water. EPA asked the state to boost its monitoring of fracking wastewater from gas wells, and the state declared a voluntary moratorium for drillers that led to significant reductions of Marcellus waste. Yet a loophole in the policy allows operators of many older oil and gas wells to continue discharging significant amounts of wastewater into treatment plants, and thus, into rivers.

The state's top environmental regulator, Michael Krancer, says Pennsylvania doesn't need federal intervention to help it protect the environment. He told Congress last fall that Pennsylvania has taken the lead on regulations for the burgeoning gas industry.

"There's no question that EPA is overstepping," Katherine Gresh, Krancer's spokeswoman, told the AP. "DEP regulates these facilities and always has, and EPA has never before shown this degree of involvement."

The American Petroleum Institute urged the Obama administration last week to rein in the 10 agencies it says are either reviewing, studying or proposing regulation of fracking.

"The fact is that there is a strong state regulatory system in place, and adding potentially redundant and duplicative federal regulation would be unnecessary, costly, and could stifle investment," API Vice President Kyle Isakower said in a statement.

EPA says public health is its key focus and insists it is guided by sound science and the law.

"We have been clear that if we see an immediate threat to public health, we will not hesitate to take steps under the law to protect Americans whose health may be at risk," said Terri White, an EPA spokeswoman in Philadelphia.

The EPA investigations are being conducted amid reports of possibly drilling-related contamination in several Pennsylvania communities.

In recent years, methane migrating from drill sites into private water supplies has forced scores of residents to stop using their wells and rely on deliveries of fresh water. Some residents complain the state agency has failed to hold drillers to account.

In heavily drilled Washington County, near the West Virginia border, EPA staff are inspecting well pads and natural gas compressor stations for compliance with water- and air-quality laws. In Dimock, a village about 20 miles south of the New York state line, EPA stepped in after a gas driller won the state's permission to halt fresh water deliveries to about a dozen residents whose wells were tainted with methane and, the residents say, heavy metals, organic compounds and drilling chemicals.

Dimock holds the distinction of being Pennsylvania's top gas-producing town, yielding enough gas in six months to supply 400,000 U.S. homes for a year. Some residents contend their water wells were irreversibly contaminated after Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. drilled faulty gas wells that leaked methane into the aquifer 7/87/8— and spilled thousands of gallons of fracking fluids that residents suspect leached into the groundwater.

Cabot first acknowledged, then denied responsibility for the methane it now contends is naturally occurring. It also asserts that years of sampling data show the water is safe to drink.

The EPA looked at the same test results and arrived at a different conclusion.

The well water samples "led us to conclude that there were health concerns that required action," White said. EPA said its tests showed alarming levels of manganese and cancer-causing arsenic and that Cabot's own tests found minute concentrations of organic compounds and synthetic chemicals, suggesting the influence of gas drilling.

Cabot says its drilling operations had nothing to do with any chemicals that have turned up in the water. It points to a Duke University study last year that found no evidence of contamination from fracking.

Yet the company racks up state violations at a far higher rate than its competitors in the Marcellus — 248 violations at its wells in Dimock alone since late 2007 — most recently last month, when the company was flagged for improper storage, transport or disposal of residual waste. State regulators levied more than $1.1 million in fines and penalties against the company between 2008 and 2010. And it is still banned from drilling any new wells in a 9-square-mile area of Dimock.

While EPA agreed last month to deliver water to four homes along Carter Road, the agency said the tests did not justify supplying water to several other residents who had been getting their water from Cabot and who have filed suit against the company.

The plaintiffs still don't trust their wells, instead relying on water from the nearby Montrose municipal supply.

Twice a day, six days a week, Carter Road resident Ray Kemble drives about eight miles to a hydrant in Montrose, fills a 550-gallon tank strapped to the back of a donated truck, and delivers water to as many as five homes — including his own. Anti-drilling groups are footing the bill, estimated at $500 per week.

Kemble said his well water turned brown and became unusable in 2008, shortly after the gas well across the street was drilled and fracked.

At his home, he filled a large plastic container dubbed a water buffalo from the tank on the truck.

"Never had a problem before until Cabot came in," Kemble said.

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The U.S. Government Accountability Office is trying to put an end to one wasteful federal habit: The 10,000 computers the Environmental Protection Agency estimates the government discards each week.

The U.S. government is the world’s largest purchaser of information technology, yet doesn’t always dispose of its technology in responsible ways.

According to a GAO study, five agencies hand-picked due to the amount of electronics purchased — the departments of Defense, Energy, Education, Housing and Urban Development and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — have the capacity to dispose of their technology in different ways.

Agencies can donate their electronics to schools; recycle them; exchange them with other federal, state or local governments and agencies; or sell them through specific public auctions.

According to the GAO study, in 2003 the EPA helped pilot a strictly voluntary program called the Federal Electronics Challenge (FEC) to encourage agencies to purchase environmentally-friendly electronic products, reduce the perceived impacts of these products during their use, and to manage the used electronics in an environmentally-friendly way.

GAO’s study found much more could be done to help reach the original goals of the FEC, and that currently only one-third of the federal workforce recycles its electronics.

This post originally appeared at The Daily Caller.

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By Dan Vergano

USA TODAY

Federal regulators issued first-ever air pollution rules for "fracking" wells on Wednesday, requiring that drillers burn or capture the gas and its smog-producing compounds released when the wells are first tapped.

Environmental Protection Agency official Gina McCarthy announced the long-anticipated rules, the first to cover some of the 13,000 wells drilled yearly nationwide that use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to collect natural gas and oil from deep shale layers.

Going into effect in 60 days, the rules cover the period when a well is first drilled when natural gas is still venting but before it begins actual production. In a compromise with the industry, regulators said the drillers can flare, or burn off, the gas for now, a process that can last for weeks. But starting in 2015 they would lose that option. Instead, they'll be required to collect it -- so-called green completion of new fracking wells.

"We wanted to encourage 'green completions' as soon as the technology can become widely available," McCarthy said, explaining the 2015 "phase-in" of the rules. The announcement came in response to a lawsuit involving the Clean Air Act. EPA estimates the rules will cut 95(PERCENT) of the smog-related chemicals released by fracking wells, ones linked to asthma, respiratory ailments and cancer.

"On the whole, we're pleased to see EPA has made improvements in the rules that we requested," said Howard Feldman of the American Petroleum Institute, such as the two-year wait to end flaring. "We want to collect the natural gas; after all, that is the product."

On the environmental side, Sierra Club chief Michael Brune called the rules "an important first step" to address fracking well pollution.

Half of all new fracking wells already collect gases from the initial drilling of the well,

McCarthy said, but only Colorado and Wyoming explicitly require such green completions.

Along with a warm winter, the fracking boom has helped lead to a sharp drop in natural gas prices in the past six months, from about $4 per thousand cubic feet to around $2.

"The rules seem like a step in the right direction," said environmental engineer Allen Robinson of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "Other pollutants need to be looked at, particularly ones associated with ozone."

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Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.

No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.

There are growing signs they were mistaken.

Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation's drinking water.

In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation's most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami's drinking water.

There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.

Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater reserves—from which most Americans get their drinking water—remain safe and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.

But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work.

"In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted," said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA's underground injection program in Washington. "A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die."

The boom in oil and natural gas drilling is deepening the uncertainties, geologists acknowledge. Drilling produces copious amounts of waste, burdening regulators and demanding hundreds of additional disposal wells. Those wells—more holes punched in the ground—are changing the earth's geology, adding man-made fractures that allow water and waste to flow more freely.

"There is no certainty at all in any of this, and whoever tells you the opposite is not telling you the truth," said Stefan Finsterle, a leading hydrogeologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who specializes in understanding the properties of rock layers and modeling how fluid flows through them. "You have changed the system with pressure and temperature and fracturing, so you don't know how it will behave."

A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections found that structural failures inside injection wells are routine. From late 2007 to late 2010, one well integrity violation was issued for every six deep injection wells examined—more than 17,000 violations nationally. More than 7,000 wells showed signs that their walls were leaking. Records also show wells are frequently operated in violation of safety regulations and under conditions that greatly increase the risk of fluid leakage and the threat of water contamination.

Structurally, a disposal well is the same as an oil or gas well. Tubes of concrete and steel extend anywhere from a few hundred feet to two miles into the earth. At the bottom, the well opens into a natural rock formation. There is no container. Waste simply seeps out, filling tiny spaces left between the grains in the rock like the gaps between stacked marbles.

Many scientists and regulators say the alternatives to the injection process—burning waste, treating wastewater, recycling, or disposing of waste on the surface—are far more expensive or bring additional environmental risks.

Subterranean waste disposal, they point out, is a cornerstone of the nation's economy, relied on by the pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. It's also critical to a future less dependent on foreign oil: Hydraulic fracturing, "clean coal" technologies, nuclear fuel production and carbon storage (the keystone of the strategy to address climate change) all count on pushing waste into rock formations below the earth's surface.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has primary regulatory authority over the nation's injection wells, would not discuss specific well failures identified by ProPublica or make staffers available for interviews. The agency also declined to answer many questions in writing, though it sent responses to several. Its director for the Drinking Water Protection Division, Ann Codrington, sent a statement to ProPublica defending the injection program's effectiveness.

"Underground injection has been and continues to be a viable technique for subsurface storage and disposal of fluids when properly done," the statement said. "EPA recognizes that more can be done to enhance drinking water safeguards and, along with states and tribes, will work to improve the efficiency of the underground injection control program."

Still, some experts see the well failures and leaks discovered so far as signs of broader problems, raising concerns about how much pollution may be leaking out undetected. By the time the damage is discovered, they say, it could be irreversible.

"Are we heading down a path we might regret in the future?" said Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell University engineering professor who has been an outspoken critic of claims that wells don't leak. "Yes."

In September 2003, Ed Cowley got a call to check out a pool of briny water in a bucolic farm field outside Chico, Texas. Nearby, he said, a stand of trees had begun to wither, their leaves turning crispy brown and falling to the ground.

Chico, a town of about 1,000 people 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth, lies in the heart of Texas' Barnett Shale. Gas wells dot the landscape like mailboxes in suburbia. A short distance away from the murky pond, an oil services company had begun pumping millions of gallons of drilling waste into an injection well.

Regulators refer to such waste as salt water or brine, but it often includes less benign contaminants, including fracking chemicals, benzene and other substances known to cause cancer.

The well had been authorized by the Railroad Commission of Texas, which once regulated railways but now oversees 260,000 oil and gas wells and 52,000 injection wells. (Another agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, regulates injection wells for waste from other industries.)

Before issuing the permit, commission officials studied mathematical models showing that waste could be safely injected into a sandstone layer about one-third of a mile beneath the farm. They specified how much waste could go into the well, under how much pressure, and calculated how far it would dissipate underground. As federal law requires, they also reviewed a quarter-mile radius around the site to make sure waste would not seep back toward the surface through abandoned wells or other holes in the area.

Yet the precautions failed. "Salt water" brine migrated from the injection site and shot back to the surface through three old well holes nearby.

"Have you ever seen an artesian well?" recalled Cowley, Chico's director of public works. "It was just water flowing up out of the ground."

Despite residents' fears that the injected waste could be making its way toward their drinking water, commission officials did not sample soil or water near the leak.

If the injection well waste "had threatened harm to the ground water in the area, an in-depth RRC investigation would have been initiated," Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for Texas' Railroad Commission, wrote in an email.

The agency disputes Cowley's description of a pool of brine or of dead trees, saying that the waste barely spilled beyond the overflowing wells, though officials could not identify any documents or staffers who contradicted Cowley's recollections. Accounts similar to Cowley's appeared in an article about the leak in the Wise County Messenger, a local newspaper. The agency has destroyed its records about the incident, saying it is required to keep them for only two years.

After the breach, the commission ordered two of the old wells to be plugged with cement and restricted the rate at which waste could be injected into the well. It did not issue any violations against the disposal company, which had followed Texas' rules, regulators said. The commission allowed the well operator to continue injecting thousands of barrels of brine into the well each day. A few months later, brine began spurting out of three more old wells nearby.

"It's kind of like Whac-a-Mole, where one thing pops up and by the time you go to hit it, another thing comes up," Cowley said. "It was frustrating. ... If your water goes, what does that do to the value of your land?"

Deep well injection takes place in 32 states, from Pennsylvania to Michigan to California. Most wells are around the Great Lakes and in areas where oil and gas is produced: along the Appalachian crest and the Gulf Coast, in California and in Texas, which has more wells for hazardous industrial waste and oil and gas waste than any other state.

Federal rules divide wells into six classes based on the material they hold and the industry that produced it. Class 1 wells handle the most hazardous materials, including fertilizers, acids and deadly compounds such as asbestos, PCBs and cyanide. The energy industry has its own category, Class 2, which includes disposal wells and wells in which fluids are injected to force out trapped oil and gas. The most common wells, called Class 5, are a sort of catch-all for everything left over from the other categories, including storm-water runoff from gas stations.

The EPA requires that Class 1 and 2 injection wells be drilled the deepest to assure that the most toxic waste is pushed far below drinking water aquifers. Both types of wells are supposed to be walled with multiple layers of steel tubing and cement and regularly monitored for cracks.

Officials' confidence in this manner of disposal stems not only from safety precautions, but from an understanding of how rock formations trap fluid.

Underground waste, officials say, is contained by layer after layer of impermeable rock. If one layer leaks, the next blocks the waste from spreading before it reaches groundwater. The laws of physics and fluid dynamics should ensure that the waste can't spread far and is diluted as it goes.

The layering "is a very strong phenomenon and it's on our side," said Susan Hovorka, a senior research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin's Bureau of Economic Geology.

According to risk analyses cited in EPA documents, a significant well leak that leads to water contamination is highly unlikely—on the order of one in a million.

Once waste is underground, though, there are few ways to track how far it goes, how quickly or where it winds up. There is plenty of theory, but little data to prove the system works.

"I do think the risks are low, but it has never been adequately demonstrated," said John Apps, a leading geoscientist who advises the Department of Energy for Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. "Every statement is based on a collection of experts that offer you their opinions. Then you do a scientific analysis of their opinions and get some probability out of it. This is a wonderful way to go when you don't have any evidence one way or another... But it really doesn't mean anything scientifically."

The hard data that does exist comes from well inspections conducted by federal and state regulators, who can issue citations to operators for injecting illegally, for not maintaining wells, or for operating wells at unsafe pressures. This information is the EPA's primary means of tracking the system's health on a national scale.

Yet, in response to questions from ProPublica, the EPA acknowledged it has done very little with the data it collects. The agency could not provide ProPublica with a tally of how frequently wells fail or of how often disposal regulations are violated. It has not counted the number of cases of waste migration or contamination in more than 20 years. The agency often accepts reports from state injection regulators that are partly blank, contain conflicting figures or are missing key details, ProPublica found.

In 2007, the EPA launched a national data system to centralize reports on injection wells. As of September 2011—the last time the EPA issued a public update—less than half of the state and local regulatory agencies overseeing injection were contributing to the database. It contained complete information from only a handful of states, accounting for a small fraction of the deep wells in the country.

The EPA did not respond to questions seeking more detail about how it handles its data, or about how the agency judges whether its oversight is working.

In a 2008 interview with ProPublica, one EPA scientist acknowledged shortcomings in the way the agency oversees the injection program.

"It's assumed that the monitoring rules and requirements are in place and are protective—that's assumed," said Gregory Oberley, an EPA groundwater specialist who studies injection and water issues in the Rocky Mountain region. "You're not going to know what's going on until someone's well is contaminated and they are complaining about it."

ProPublica's analysis of case histories and EPA data from October 2007 to October 2010 showed that when an injection well fails, it is most often because of holes or cracks in the well structure itself.

Operators are required to do so-called "mechanical integrity" tests at regular intervals, yearly for Class 1 wells and at least once every five years for Class 2 wells. In 2010, the tests led to more than 7,500 violations nationally, with more than 2,300 wells failing. In Texas, one violation was issued for every three Class 2 wells examined in 2010.

Such breakdowns can have serious consequences. Damage to the cement or steel casing can allow fluids to seep into the earth, where they could migrate into water supplies.

Regulators say redundant layers of protection usually prevent waste from getting that far, but EPA data shows that in the three years analyzed by ProPublica, more than 7,500 well test failures involved what federal water protection regulations describe as "fluid migration" and "significant leaks."

In September 2009, workers for Unit Petroleum Company discovered oil and gas waste in a roadside ditch in southern Louisiana. After tracing the fluid to a crack in the casing of a nearby injection well, operators tested the rest of the well. Only then did they find another hole—600 feet down, and just a few hundred feet away from an aquifer that is a source of drinking water for that part of the state.

Most well failures are patched within six months of being discovered, EPA data shows, but with as much as five years passing between integrity tests, it can take a while for leaks to be discovered. And not every well can be repaired. Kansas shut down at least 47 injection wells in 2010, filling them with cement and burying them, because their mechanical integrity could not be restored. Louisiana shut down 82. Wyoming shut down 144.

Another way wells can leak is if waste is injected with such force that it accidentally shatters the rock meant to contain it. A report published by scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Texas said that high pressure is "the driving force" that can help connect deep geologic layers with shallower ones, allowing fluid to seep through the earth.

Most injection well permits strictly limit the maximum pressure allowed, but well operators—rushing to dispose of more waste in less time—sometimes break the rules, state regulatory inspections show. According to data provided by states to the EPA, deep well operators have been caught exceeding injection pressure limits more than 1,100 times since 2008. 

Excessive pressure factored into a 1989 well failure that yielded new clues about the risks of injection.

While drilling a disposal well in southern Ohio, workers for the Aristech Chemical Corp. (since bought by Sunoco, and sold again, in 2011, to Haverhill Chemicals) were overwhelmed by the smell of phenol, a deadly chemical the company had injected into two Class 1 wells nearby. Somehow, perhaps over decades, the pollution had risen 1,400 feet through solid rock and was progressing toward surface aquifers.

Ohio environmental officials—aided by the EPA—investigated for some 15 years. They concluded that the wells were mechanically sound, but Aristech had injected waste into them faster and under higher pressure than the geologic formation could bear.

Though scientists maintain that the Aristech leak was a rarity, they acknowledge that such problems are more likely in places where industrial activity has changed the underground environment.

There are upwards of 2 million abandoned and plugged oil and gas wells in the U.S., more than 100,000 of which may not appear in regulators' records. Sometimes they are just broken off tubes of steel, buried or sticking out of the ground. Many are supposed to be sealed shut with cement, but studies show that cement breaks down over time, allowing seepage up the well structure.

Also, if injected waste reaches the bottom of old wells, it can quickly be driven back toward aquifers, as it was in Chico.

"The United States looks like a pin cushion," said Bruce Kobelski, a geologist who has been with the agency's underground injection program since 1986. Kobelski spoke to ProPublica in May, 2011, before the EPA declined additional interview requests for this story. "Unfortunately there are cases where someone missed a well or a well wasn't indicated. It could have been a well from the turn of the [20th] century."

Clefts left after the earth is cracked open to frack for oil and gas also can connect abandoned wells and waste injection zones. How far these man-made fissures go is still the subject of research and debate, but in some cases they have reached as much as a half-mile, even intersecting fractures from neighboring wells.

When injection wells intersect with fracked wells and abandoned wells, the combined effect is that many of the natural protections assumed to be provided by deep underground geology no longer exist.

"It's a natural system and if you go in and start punching holes through it and changing pressure systems around, it's no longer natural," said Nathan Wiser, an underground injection expert working for the EPA in its Rocky Mountain region, in a 2010 interview. "It's difficult to know how it would behave in those circumstances."

EPA data provides a window into some injection well problems, but not all. There is no way to know how many wells have undetected leaks or to measure the amount of waste escaping from them.

In at least some cases, records obtained by ProPublica show, well failures may have contaminated sources of drinking water. Between 2008 and 2011, state regulators reported 150 instances of what the EPA calls "cases of alleged contamination," in which waste from injection wells purportedly reached aquifers. In 25 instances, the waste came from Class 2 wells. The EPA did not respond to requests for the results of investigations into those incidents or to clarify the standard for reporting a case.

The data probably understates the true extent of such incidents, however.

Leaking wells can simply go undetected. One Texas study looking for the cause of high salinity in soil found that at least 29 brine injection wells in its study area were likely sending a plume of salt water up into the ground unnoticed. Even when a problem is reported, as in Chico, regulators don't always do the expensive and time-consuming work necessary to investigate its cause.

"The absence of episodes of pollution can mean that there are none, or that no one is looking," said Salazar, the EPA's former injection expert. "I would tend to believe it is the latter."

The practice of injecting waste underground arose as a solution to an environmental crisis.

In the first half of the 20th century, toxic waste collected in cesspools, or was dumped in rivers or poured onto fields. As the consequences of unbridled pollution became unacceptable, the country turned to an out-of-sight alternative. Drawing on techniques developed by the oil and gas industry, companies started pumping waste back into wells drilled for resources. Toxic waste became all but invisible. Air and water began to get cleaner.

Then a host of unanticipated problems began to arise.

In April, 1967 pesticide waste injected by a chemical plant at Denver's Rocky Mountain Arsenal destabilized a seismic fault, causing a magnitude 5.0 earthquake—strong enough to shatter windows and close schools —and jolting scientists with newfound risks of injection, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A year later, a corroded hazardous waste well for pulping liquor at the Hammermill Paper Co., in Erie, Pa., ruptured. Five miles away, according to an EPA report, "a noxious black liquid seeped from an abandoned gas well" in Presque Isle State Park.

In 1975 in Beaumont, Texas, dioxin and a highly acidic herbicide injected underground by the Velsicol Chemical Corp. burned a hole through its well casing, sending as much as five million gallons of the waste into a nearby drinking water aquifer.

Then in August 1984 in Oak Ridge, Tenn., radioactive waste was turned up by water monitoring near a deep injection well at a government nuclear facility.

Regulators raced to catch up. In 1974, the Safe Drinking Water Act was passed, establishing a framework for regulating injection. Then, in 1980, the EPA set up the tiered classes of wells and began to establish basic construction standards and inspection schedules. The EPA licensed some state agencies to monitor wells within their borders and handled oversight jointly with others, but all had to meet the baseline requirements of the federal Underground Injection Control program.

Even with stricter regulations in place, 17 states—including Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wisconsin—banned Class 1 hazardous deep well injection.

"We just felt like based on the knowledge that we had at that time that it was not something that was really in the best interest of the environment or the state," said James Warr, who headed Alabama's Department of Environmental Management at the time.

Injection accidents kept cropping up.

A 1987 General Accountability Office review put the total number of cases in which waste had migrated from Class 1 hazardous waste wells into underground aquifers at 10—including the Texas and Pennsylvania sites. Two of those aquifers were considered potential drinking water sources.

In 1989, the GAO reported 23 more cases in seven states where oil and gas injection wells had failed and polluted aquifers. New regulations had done little to prevent the problems, the report said, largely because most of the wells involved had been grandfathered in and had not had to comply with key aspects of the rules.

Noting four more suspected cases, the report also suggested there could be more well failures, and more widespread pollution, beyond the cases identified. "The full extent to which injected brines have contaminated underground sources of drinking water is unknown," it stated.

The GAO concluded that most of the contaminated aquifers could not be reclaimed because fixing the damage was "too costly" or "technically infeasible."

Faced with such findings, the federal government drafted more rules aimed at strengthening the injection program. The government outlawed certain types of wells above or near drinking water aquifers, mandating that most industrial waste be injected deeper.

The agency also began to hold companies that disposed of hazardous industrial waste to far stiffer standards. To get permits to dispose of hazardous waster after 1988, companies had to prove—using complex models and geological studies—that the stuff they injected wouldn't migrate anywhere near water supplies for 10,000 years. They were already required to test for fault zones and to conduct reviews to ensure there were no conduits for leakage, such as abandoned wells, within a quarter-mile radius. Later, that became a two-mile minimum radius for some wells.

The added regulations would have prevented the vast majority of the accidents that occurred before the late 1980s, EPA officials contend.

"The requirements weren't as rigorous, the testing wasn't as rigorous and in some cases the shallow aquifers were contaminated," Kobelski said. "The program is not the same as it was when we first started."

Today's injection program, however, faces a new set of problems.

As federal regulators toughened rules for injecting hazardous waste, oil and gas companies argued that the new standards could drive them out of business. State oil and gas regulators pushed back against the regulations, too, saying that enforcing the rules for Class 2 wells—which handle the vast majority of injected waste by volume—would be expensive and difficult.

Ultimately, the energy industry won a critical change in the federal government's legal definition of waste: Since 1988, all material resulting from the oil and gas drilling process is considered non-hazardous, regardless of its content or toxicity.

"It took a lot of talking to sell the EPA on that and there are still a lot of people that don't like it," said Bill Bryson, a geologist and former head of the Kansas Corporation Commission's Conservation Division, who lobbied for and helped draft the federal rules. "But it seemed the best way to protect the environment and to stop everybody from just having to test everything all the time."

The new approach removed many of the constraints on the oil and gas industry. They were no longer required to conduct seismic tests (a stricture that remained in place for Class 1 wells). Operators were allowed to test their wells less frequently for mechanical integrity and the area they had to check for abandoned wells was kept to a minimum—one reason drilling waste kept bubbling to the surface near Chico.

Soon after the first Chico incident, Texas expanded the area regulators were required to check for abandoned waste wells (a rule that applied only to certain parts of the state). Doubling the radius they reviewed in Chico to a half mile, they found 13 other injection or oil and gas wells. When they studied the land within a mile—the radius required for review of many Class 1 wells—officials discovered another 35 wells, many dating to the 1950s.

The Railroad Commission concluded that the Chico injection well had overflowed: The target rock zone could no longer handle the volume being pushed into it. Trying to cram in more waste at the same speed could cause further leaks, regulators feared. The commission set new limits on how fast the waste could be injected, but did not forbid further disposal. The well remains in use to this day.

In late 2008, samples of Chico's municipal drinking water were found to contain radium, a radioactive derivative of uranium and a common attribute of drilling waste. The water well was a few miles away from the leaking injection well site, but environmental officials said the contaminants discovered in the water well were unrelated, mostly because they didn't include the level of sodium typical of brine.

Since then, Ed Cowley, the public works director, said commission officials have continued to assure him that brine won't reach Chico's drinking water. But since the agency keeps allowing more injection and doesn't track the cumulative volume of waste going into wells in the area, he's skeptical that they can keep their promise.

"I was kind of like, 'You all need to get together and look at the total amount you are trying to fit through the eye of the needle,'" he said.

When sewage flowed from 20 Class 1 wells near Miami into the Upper Floridan aquifer, it challenged some of scientists' fundamental assumptions about the injection system.

The wells—which had helped fuel the growth of South Florida by eliminating the need for expensive water treatment plants—had passed rigorous EPA and state evaluation throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Inspections showed they were structurally sound. As Class 1 wells, they were subject to some of the most frequent tests and closest scrutiny.

Yet they failed.

The wells' designers would have calculated what is typically called the "zone of influence"—the space that waste injected into the wells was expected to fill. This was based on estimates of how much fluid would be injected and under what pressure.

In drawings, the zone of influence typically looks like a Hershey's kiss, an evenly dispersed plume spreading in a predictable circular fashion away from the bottom of the well. Above the zone, most drawings depict uniform formations of rock not unlike a layer cake.

Based on modeling and analysis by some of the most sophisticated engineering consultants in the country, Florida officials, with the EPA's assent, concluded that waste injected into the Miami-area wells would be forever trapped far below the South Florida peninsula.

"All of the modeling indicated that the injectate would be confined in the injection zone," an EPA spokesperson wrote to ProPublica in a statement.

But as Miami poured nearly half a billion gallons of partly treated sewage into the ground each day from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, hydrogeologists learned that the earth—and the flow of fluids through it—wasn't as uniform as the models depicted. Florida's injection wells, for example, had been drilled into rock that was far more porous and fractured than scientists previously understood.

"Geology is never what you think it is," said Ronald Reese, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey in Florida who has studied the well failures there. "There are always surprises."

Other gaps have emerged between theories of how underground injection should work and how it actually does. Rock layers aren't always neatly stacked as they appear in engineers' sketches. They often fold and twist over on themselves. Waste injected into such formations is more likely to spread in lopsided, unpredictable ways than in a uniform cone. It is also likely to channel through spaces in the rock as pressure forces it along the weakest lines.  

Petroleum engineers in Texas have found that when they pump fluid into one end of an oil reservoir to push oil out the other, the injected fluid sometimes flows around the reservoir, completely missing the targeted zone.

"People are still surprised at the route that the injectate is taking or the bypassing that can happen," said Jean-Philippe Nicot, a research scientist at the University of Texas' Bureau of Economic Geology.

Conventional wisdom says fluids injected underground should spread at a rate of several inches or less each year, and go only as far as they are pushed by the pressure inside the well. In some instances, however, fluids have traveled faster and farther than researchers thought possible.

In a 2000 case that wasn't caused by injection but brought important lessons about how fluids could move underground, hydrogeologists concluded that bacteria-polluted water migrated horizontally underground for several thousand feet in just 26 hours, contaminating a drinking water well in Walkerton, Ontario, and sickening thousands of residents. The fluids traveled 80 times as fast as the standard software model predicted was possible.

According to the model, vertical movement of underground fluids shouldn't be possible at all, or should happen over what scientists call "geologic time": thousands of years or longer. Yet a 2011 study in Wisconsin found that human viruses had managed to infiltrate deep aquifers, probably moving downward through layers believed to be a permanent seal.

According to a study published in April in the journal Ground Water, it's not a matter of if fluid will move through rock layers, but when.

Tom Myers, a hydrologist, drew on research showing that natural faults and fractures are more prevalent than commonly understood to create a model that predicts how chemicals might move in the Marcellus Shale, a dense layer of rock that has been called impermeable. The Marcellus Shale, which stretches from New York to Tennessee, is the focus of intense debate because of concerns that chemicals injected in drilling for natural gas will pollute water.

Myers' new model said that chemicals could leak through natural cracks into aquifers tapped for drinking water in about 100 years, far more quickly than had been thought. In areas where there is hydraulic fracturing or drilling, Myers' model shows, man-made faults and natural ones could intersect and chemicals could migrate to the surface in as little as "a few years, or less."

"It's out of sight, out of mind now. But 50 years from now?" Myers said, referring to injected waste and the rock layers trusted to entrap it. "Simply put, they are not impermeable."

Myers' work is among the few studies done over the past few decades to compare theories of hydrogeology to what actually happens. But even his research is based on models.

"A lot of the concepts and a lot of the regulations that govern this whole practice of subsurface injection is kind of dated at this point," said one senior EPA hydrologist who was not authorized to speak to ProPublica, and declined to be quoted by name.

"It's a problem," he said. "There needs to be a hard look at this in a new way."

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Arthur Tress is one of the hundreds of freelance photographers hired by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s to document mounting environmental problems in America.  

The following set of images shows the deterioration of the New York Harbor area in 1973.

Scenes from Staten Island and Brooklyn depict refuse-laden streams, beaches covered with garbage and abandoned cars. 

A sign warns of polluted water at a Staten Island beach. The recently completed Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is seen in the background.

A sewer pipe is prepared for installation on new housing in Grant City, Staten Island — part of the building boom touched off by the completion of the bridge.

This sign encourages Manhattan and Brooklyn residents to cross the bridge to find good living in Staten Island.

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The Natural Resources Defense Council released its annual report on water quality at U.S. beaches.

In addition to urging the Environmental Protection Agency to raise its water-quality standards, the organization listed sources of pollution that contributed to beach closures over the last decade.  

Here's a breakdown of the data:

• 49 percent (11,588 closing/advisory days) were attributed to unknown sources of pollution.
• 47 percent (10,954 closing/advisory days) were attributed to polluted runoff and stormwater. In 2010, 36 percent of closing advisory/days were attributed to polluted runoff and stormwater.
• 12 percent (2,690 closing/advisory days) were attributed to miscellaneous pollution sources, such as boat discharges. Of those, 1,366 days were attributed to wildlife sources.
• 6 percent (1,541 closing/advisory days) were attributed to sewage spills and overflows. This category includes combined sewer overflows, sanitary sewer overflows, breaks or blockages in sewer lines, and faulty septic systems

(Totals exceed total closing/advisory days and 100 percent because more than one contamination source was reported for some events.)

SEE ALSO: The 10 Best Beaches In America > 

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