Being a friend who is fighting with the EPA over some ground he owns, I can tell you that the EPA has plenty of power. Power to just about do anything they decide to do.

My friend purchased 300 acres of ground that was once a part of a gravel pit that had been abandoned decades before the letters EPA were ever put together. To gain access to the majority of his 300 acres there was a low lying gravel road that passed through the edge of the old pit and was not entirely on his ground, but he had a permanent easement to maintain and use it to access his property - for the past 30 years.

Now he needs to haul several loads of gravel in to repair the road and would like to build the road up a foot in order to improve drainage. But because a treehugger neighbor decides that this would cause increased drying of the bottom of the old pit, he calls the EPA and tells them that my friend is endangering a "wetland". No matter how many drainage culverts my friend offered to put in or even if he didn't build up the road at all, he was banned from even fixing the holes in the existing road. The EPA idiots have proclaimed that even the road is now a wetland since water sits in the holes and on the lowest points of the road during heavy rainy seasons.

Don't give them anymore power than they already have.

I don't know why some one is down voting things tonight but this is a good topic, or at least can lead to a few good ones.

This article does suggest that the government can't even accomplish what it's specifically meant to do. We need to find better solutions to protecting property rights than a government that taxes people at the barrel of a gun.

I like your thinking Truth, welcome to the gulch I hope you don't discourage easily.

I hate auto correct... It's fracking not franking!

Previous article on franking from Forbes.com

Ten Things to Know About Fracking
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Fracking is under fire, as we know, from those who insist that it does or can cause huge problems to the surrounding environment.

If this were true then it would be very important. For it’s exactly fracking that is providing America with the gas to keep the lights on for another hundred years, so we’d rather like not to be poisoning ourselves by doing so.

This piece by an old friend, Peter Glover, gives us a list of the ten things we should all know about fracking:

# Hydraulic fracking has been around for 60 years. Developments made by U.S. engineers around 2008-9 have simply made the process much more commercially viable.

# Since fracking was introduced in 1949, over 2 million frack treatments have been pumped without a single documented case of treatments polluting a water aquifer.

# 90 percent of all gas wells drilled in the United States since 1949 have been fracked.

# The depth of most shale gas deposits drilled is between 6,000 and 10,000 feet – water aquifers exist at an average depth of 500 feet.

# Claims of ‘migration’ between the shale gas layers and water aquifers due to fracking or for any other reason, are patently absurd as the gas would have to pass through millions of tons of impermeable rock. If the rock was that porous, neither the water nor the gas would have been there in the first place. (As the hard data in fig. 1 from a study of 15,000 frac treatments in the Barnett Shale Field reveals plainly.)

I especially like that fifth point made there. The very existence of the layers of water and gas shows that cross contamination isn’t really possible.

To add my own, entirely personal, supposition: that some to much of the opposition to fracking is due to opposition to fossil fuels altogether rather than to this specific process of extracting them.

Certainly I think that’s what motivates much of the opposition in Europe for cheap gas supplies would very much undermine the roll out of renewables. Something which a very large number of people seem to be greatly over-invested in. As if it’s a moral crusade rather than just a way to provide us with the energy we need and desire.