In Barney Jopson’s “US states seek to block city fracking bans,” an article that appeared in yesterday’s Financial Times, Barry Rabe explains that “the US is still in the early stages of discovering and managing the upsides and downsides of shale energy—from jobs bonanzas to seismic activity.”
“What you’re beginning to see,” says Rabe, “are localities pushing about as far as they can to control what happens in their boundaries, but then rubbing up against the fact that many state constitutions give state governments control of land use decisions for energy.”
Yesterday, the governor of Texas signed the Denton Bill, which will override the rights of cities and municipalities to ban drilling and fracking. The article describes the Texas conflict, as well as other state-local conflicts over fracking that have taken place in Colorado, New York, and Oklahoma.