Well, the votes are in, and America’s first black President, Barack Hussein Obama, has handily won a second term.
The U.S. energy companies, having heavily backed Obama’s opponent, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, are now nervously contemplating their future on many levels, as they massively supported his opponent. Romney promised to get the federal government, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency (ironically, established by a Republican President, Richard Milhous Nixon, in 1970) to back off their practices, as well as opening up to their interests both federal lands and offshore areas to energy companies in a search for U.S. energy autonomy.
As the newest but most impressively productive of America’s newer energy assets, the hydraulic fracturing companies, which have unleashed the potential of the U.S. shale gas reserves, are clearly nervous that a second Obama administration will impose additional federal regulations on their activities. Had Romney won, fracking would have remained largely regulated by state legislatures, without countrywide mandates on the controversial practice.
There was no equity in America’s major energy conglomerates in funding the rivals’ campaign. As Bloomberg News, a dispassionate economic website focused solely on the bottom line reported, “Oil, gas, coal and electricity interests donated in this election as if their fate depended on it. Together, energy companies spent more than $115 million on the election, more than on any campaign since at least 1990, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ aggregation of federal data. Eighty percent of candidate donations went to Republicans.”
Now, what, especially for natural gas fracking companies, which in less than a decade, have managed to insinuate themselves into America’s energy matrix? Environmental groups are ramping up their lobbying efforts with centrist Democrats like Obama to tighten regulations on fracking even as efforts on pressuring Congress to battle climate change fall by the wayside.
Read more: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Fracking-to-be-Gutted-in-Obamas-2nd-Term.html
The U.S. energy companies, having heavily backed Obama’s opponent, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, are now nervously contemplating their future on many levels, as they massively supported his opponent. Romney promised to get the federal government, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency (ironically, established by a Republican President, Richard Milhous Nixon, in 1970) to back off their practices, as well as opening up to their interests both federal lands and offshore areas to energy companies in a search for U.S. energy autonomy.
As the newest but most impressively productive of America’s newer energy assets, the hydraulic fracturing companies, which have unleashed the potential of the U.S. shale gas reserves, are clearly nervous that a second Obama administration will impose additional federal regulations on their activities. Had Romney won, fracking would have remained largely regulated by state legislatures, without countrywide mandates on the controversial practice.
There was no equity in America’s major energy conglomerates in funding the rivals’ campaign. As Bloomberg News, a dispassionate economic website focused solely on the bottom line reported, “Oil, gas, coal and electricity interests donated in this election as if their fate depended on it. Together, energy companies spent more than $115 million on the election, more than on any campaign since at least 1990, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ aggregation of federal data. Eighty percent of candidate donations went to Republicans.”
Now, what, especially for natural gas fracking companies, which in less than a decade, have managed to insinuate themselves into America’s energy matrix? Environmental groups are ramping up their lobbying efforts with centrist Democrats like Obama to tighten regulations on fracking even as efforts on pressuring Congress to battle climate change fall by the wayside.
Read more: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Fracking-to-be-Gutted-in-Obamas-2nd-Term.html
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