Lawmakers oppose fracking disclosure rules after big donations from industry

Members of Congress are weighing in on the chemical disclosure rules that the Dept. of Interior is considering for natural gas fracking on public lands. Not too surprisingly it turns out that those representatives who oppose disclosure rules took in a lot more money from the oil and gas industries.

ProPublica reports:

On January 5, a bipartisan group of 32 members of Congress, who belong to the Natural Gas Caucus, sent Salazar a letter imploring him to resist a hasty decision because more regulations would “increase energy costs for consumers, suppress job creation in a promising energy sector, and hinder our nation’s ability to become more energy independent.”

A week later, 46 House Democrats followed up by signing a letter to Salazar urging him to at least adopt the disclosure requirement because, as Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., said, “communities across America have seen their water contaminated by the chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process.”

Using data from the campaign finance tracking group Open Secrets, ProPublica was able to determine that members of the Natural Gas Caucus collectively received $1,742,572 from that industry while the lawmakers who wrote in favor of disclosure rules received only $91,212.

According to the Dept. of the Interior, over the last two decades natural gas production has increased by 60 percent on the 245 million surface acres and 700 million acres of underground mineral estate managed by the federal government.