“Federal agencies will have to complete the review by the end of May and determine if a more in-depth analysis is necessary,” the paper added. “They will also have to make future permit applications publicly accessible.” If the practice clears federal scrutiny and is deemed adequately safe to the environment, fracking operations could continue. If not, they could be postponed or forestalled indefinitely.

Notching a victory

The result marked a significant win for the Center for Biological Diversity and the Environmental Defense Center, two organizations that alleged frackers had imperiled aquatic life with “over 9 billion gallons of wastewater” each year, according to Grist. Accusing the U.S. Department of the Interior of “rubber-stamping fracking off California’s coast without engaging the public or analyzing fracking’s threats to ocean ecosystems, coastal communities and marine life,” as the Christian Science Monitor observed, the groups filed suit against the federal government.

In a report on the deal, the left-leaning think tank Think Progress noted that fracking had quietly been conducted off the California coast for years. “The initial revelation of ongoing offshore fracking came as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests filed with the Department of the Interior by the Associated Press and Santa Barbara-based community organization the Environmental Defense Center, which just released a new report on the issue,” the organization recalled. “The investigations have found over 200 instances of fracking operations in state and federal waters off California, all unbeknownst to a state agency with jurisdiction over the offshore oil and gas industry.”

Industry pushback

For their part, defendants insisted the case was without merit. “Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, said that the petroleum industry has operated safely in California for decades, working closely with regulators and other officials,” Natural Gas Intelligence reported. Industry defenders have argued that offshore fracking levels in the Pacific haven’t been that high. While the moratorium “will not likely affect production at large because California has not been producing much offshore oil lately,” Reuters noted, “companies have fracked at least 200 wells in Long Beach, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach and in the wildlife-rich Santa Barbara Channel,” according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

The American Petroleum Institute, which joined the suit as a defendant, has refused to agree to the settlement package. Other hurdles to its implementation have arisen. The two separate settlements must still be approved by a federal judge, according to NGI.

Porter Ranch debate

Although the EPA largely exonerated fracking of the dire accusations leveled against it by some environmental activists, the practice has re-entered the public debate in California due to the massive gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of greater Los Angeles. Maya Golden-Krasner, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, recently linked the disaster to fracking in an editorial at the Sacramento Bee; “newly uncovered documents show that hydraulic fracturing was commonly used in the Aliso Canyon gas storage wells,” she wrote, “including a well less than a half-mile from the leak.” Perhaps predictably, Golden-Krasner called for Gov. Jerry Brown to ban the practice of fracking across the state of California.

Regulators have been investigating a possible connection. “More than two months after Southern California Gas Co. detected a leak at its Aliso Canyon field, observers are searching for reasons the well may have failed. Some environmentalists are drawing attention to fracking, while experts caution that such a rupture is unlikely,” the Los Angeles Daily News observed. “The leaking well’s maintenance records don’t indicate that it was fracked, according to a review of the file released by the state Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources.”

Given that 11 million residents rely on these power supplies, that shows the gravity of the problem.

Now the Environmental Defense Funds and other green groups are using the disaster to make the case against fracking in California, arguing that the inability to stem the Porter Ranch leak shows that energy exploration companies and regulators alike are overconfident in their ability to keep energy production safe.

The DeSmogBlog, which is heavily visited by greens around the world and has been quoted and generated stories in many leading world publications, made the case in a recent post:

The SS-25 well itself was not fracked, state records show, but it is not uncommon for companies to frack gas storage sites to help compensate for damage to underground caverns from injecting gas underground. Another well near SS-25, SS-40, was in fact fracked, but that fracking took place at depths of over 9,000 feet, while the SS-25 leak is believed to be far closer to the surface.

 

“About two times a year on average, operators of gas storage facilities use hydraulic fracturing to enhance storage, mostly in one facility serving southern California (Aliso Canyon),” The California Council on Science and Technology noted in a January 2015 report.

Methane leaks depicted as natural result of fracking

Contrary to the many claims that natural gas is the clean form of fossil fuel, environmentalists cited by DeSmogBlog say the picture is much more complex:

The development roughly 15 years ago of high-volume hydraulic fracturing, combined with horizontal drilling, also spurred a shale gas rush nationwide — and researchers say that overall, the shale gas rush has leaked methane at unusually high rates.

 

Prof. Robert Howarth has been researching methane leaks from the shale gas rush for years, after co-authoring a landmark paper in 2011 that showed that natural gas production could be even worse for the climate than burning coal if enough methane leaked out.

 

Howarth now estimates that the shale gas rush has been remarkably leaky.

 

Research by UC Berkeley energy scholar Rebecca R. Hernandez and energy researchers Madison K. Hoffacker and Chris Field found that …

the amount of energy that could be generated from solar equipment constructed on and around existing infrastructure in California would exceed the state’s demand by up to five times. …

“Integrating solar facilities into the urban and suburban environment causes the least amount of land-cover change and the lowest environmental impact,” Hernandez explained.

Just over 8 percent of all of the terrestrial surfaces in California have been developed by humans — from cities and buildings to park spaces. Residential and commercial rooftops present plenty of opportunity for power generation through small- and utility-scale solar power installations. Other compatible opportunities are available in open urban spaces such as parks.

Likewise, there is opportunity for additional solar construction in undeveloped sites that are not ecologically sensitive or federally protected, such as degraded lands.

“Because of the value of locating solar power-generating operations near roads and existing transmission lines, our tool identifies potentially compatible sites that are not remote, showing that installations do not necessarily have to be located in deserts,” Hernandez said.

But the research paper doesn’t focus strongly on the costs involved. Even as they add renewable supplies, utilities continue to need inexpensive sources of power because of their obligations to shareholders and because of public pressure. Even as the cost of solar arrays comes down and their efficiency increases, natural gas has never been cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars.

According to the California Public Utilities Commission, 35 percent or so of natural gas used in California in recent years has come from other states benefiting from the fracking-driven boom in energy exploration.

In 2050, state can’t “be burning much of anything”

At a January conference in Los Angeles, however, top state officials seemed of two minds about California relying on natural gas:

California has been one of the nation’s bigger users of natural gas, employing it as a bridge fuel for some time as it moved away from coal and oil, said Robert Weisenmiller, chairman of the California Energy Commission. The fuel accounted for 60.5 percent of in-state generation in 2013, the CEC has said.

“It’s certainly been a part of our strategy,” Weisenmiller said. “At the same time, we’re certainly looking at a stage now of saying, ‘What’s next?'”

At the same conference, Mary Nichols, the head of the California Air Resources Board had different views. Nichols …

… rejected the premise of the panel she was on, dubbed “Natural Gas — Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?” ARB is “fuel neutral,” she said, when the agency looks at cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The Golden State aims to shrink those to 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent below 1990’s point by 2050.

Nichols added, however, that the state needs “to look at the full life-cycle picture of emissions when we talk about any fuel,” including production, transport and use.

“When we do that, we certainly find ourselves in agreement with the [state] Energy Commission that right now, it’s pretty hard to see how in 2050 we can be burning much of anything in the state of California to meet our carbon goals,” Nichols said.

That is from reporting by the Energy & Environment Publishing news website.

This is unacceptable to greens in California, who broadly reject the Obama administration’s conclusion that fracking is safe. Instead, they depict it as ruinous to the environment, as causing earthquakes and as using up enormous amounts of water that could be put to much better use.

The latter argument — because of its specific implications for drought-wracked California — is a constant presence on state message boards, letters to the editor and talk radio.

But some crucial research is rarely if ever cited. In a 2010 report, Harvard scientists concluded that energy produced by fracking appeared to use less water than the same amount of energy produced by conventional fossil-fuel extraction. “The increased role of shale gas in the U.S. energy sector could result in reduced water consumption,” wrote authors Erik Mielke, Laura Diaz Anadon and Venkatesh Narayanamurti. According to the energy industry, that’s just what has happened in the five years since.

Some big drillers no longer use freshwater

One reason is that technological advances have made it easier for drillers to recycle water than ever. This is from a 2013 Reuters story:

MERTZON, Texas, Nov 21 (Reuters) – At a dusty Texas oilfield, Apache Corp has eliminated its reliance on what arguably could be the biggest long-term constraint for fracking wells in the arid western United States: scarce freshwater.

For only one well, millions of gallons of water are used for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the process that has helped reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil over the past five years by cracking rock deep underground to release oil and gas.

In Irion County, where Apache is drilling dozens of Wolfcamp shale wells in the Permian Basin, the company is meeting its water needs for hydraulic fracturing by using brackish water from the Santa Rosa aquifer and recycling water from wells and fracking using chemicals.

The company’s approach could have broader significance for areas prone to drought. Apache, which has the most rigs running in the Permian, the oil-rich region that spans 59 Texas counties, says the model can cut costs and truck traffic rattling small towns stretched by the country’s drilling boom.

“We’re not using freshwater out here,” Lucian Wray, production manager for Apache’s South Permian region, said of the company’s Barnhart operating area, which is run out of a former hunting lodge. “We are recycling 100 percent of our produced water. We don’t dispose of any of it.”

“Produced water” is a byproduct of oil and natural gas drilling. “Flowback” water is the fluid pushed out of a well during fracking. Apache is recycling both types, which are typically trucked away and put into underground disposal wells.

Some drillers frack without water entirely

And some drillers have stopped using water entirely. This is from a 2013 Houston Chronicle story:

The use of one precious fluid — water — to recover another — oil — chafes in dry country. Rivers and groundwater are receding in Texas for lack of rain and over-pumping just when the demand for water in new oil and gas fields is growing.

Now one exploration and production company in San Antonio is fracturing its wells mostly without water, using gas liquids instead, in a practice that’s beginning to spread. …

BlackBrush Oil & Gas LP is using a butane-rich mix for fracking after being confounded by many of the same obstacles other energy companies face in buying, moving and disposing of large amounts of water.

“Ranchers don’t want to give up their water,” said Jasen Walshak, production manager at BlackBrush.

The term gas liquids refers here to three fluids – propane, butane and pentane – that occur together with natural gas. They’re extracted from natural gas and sold, mostly as fuels.

Switching to gas liquids also seems to reduce controversy for BlackBrush.

“People don’t see water transfer lines all over the place,” Walshak said, referring to the yards and miles of pipe that move water from rural wells to oilfield tanks and rig trucks.

Environmentalists concerned about fossil fuels and global warming are certain to see a downside to these new approaches to fracturing even if they lead to far less water use.

But at the least, these developments show that energy exploration firms are listening to their critics. They realize that it’s in their interest to counteract the gripes about water use that are a staple of much fracking criticism.

But we haven’t seen some crucial context about Brown’s latest energy policy and about how the state has done in meeting the primary original goal of AB 32, the landmark 2006 state law that dictates the use of a cap-and-trade system in which emission credits are bought and sold to try to limit the gases that are believed to contribute to global warming.

The first is that business groups listened to the governor’s speech last week and came away believing that as with fracking, he is signalling he’s not necessarily in sync with the National Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club. This is from a new story in the trade publication “Inside Cal EPA,” which is not available free online:

As the debate has begun, many industry groups are seeking to ensure that any new “second generation” climate and energy programs emphasize “affordable” energy, “achievable” goals, accountability for regulators and other similar approaches.

In his inaugural address, Brown appeared to acknowledge the industry concerns. “How we achieve these goals and at what pace will take great thought and imagination mixed with pragmatic caution. It will require enormous innovation, research and investment. And we will need active collaboration at every stage with our scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, businesses and officials at all levels,” he said.

‘Industry groups welcomed Brown’s note of caution’

“Inside Cal EPA” reported that the governor’s green-energy speech was seen as reassuring in what may seem as some unlikely corners.

Industry groups welcomed Brown’s note of caution, with California Manufacturers & Technology Association President Dorothy Rothrock underscoring Brown’s remarks by saying “our efforts to inspire technologies to reduce climate change emissions must do so without harming the vibrancy of our economy, so we must ensure that we control costs for manufacturers and not further increase the already highest electricity rates of any industrial state.”

 That’s not how the governor’s speech was described in newspaper accounts.

Meanwhile, the coverage of the speech outlining a policy billed as a follow-up to AB 32 didn’t provide much historical context for the original measure. It imposes the cap-and-trade system as part of a requirement that the state get one-third of its electricity from cleaner-but-costlier sources by 2020. Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former state Senate President Darrell Steinberg, among many others, now consistently depict the law as having a primary intention of helping California develop green jobs and green industries.

But the first four “findings and declarations” in the text of the law don’t mention economic development as a goal at all. Sections 38501(a) and (b) outline the threat that global warming poses to California’s environment and core components of its economy.

AB 32 text: It will have ‘far-reaching effects’ on world

And the next two sections make explicit AB 32’s primary goal.

(c) California has long been a national and international leader on energy conservation and environmental stewardship efforts, including the areas of air quality protections, energy efficiency requirements, renewable energy standards, natural resource conservation, and greenhouse gas emission standards for passenger vehicles. The program established by this division will continue this tradition of environmental leadership by placing California at the forefront of national and international efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

(d) National and international actions are necessary to fully address the issue of global warming. However, action taken by California to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases will have far-reaching effects by encouraging other states, the federal government, and other countries to act.

The law did go on to say that AB 32 would help California’s tech economy by positioning the state to benefit from “national and international efforts to control greenhouse gases.”

But that hasn’t happened since 2006. Instead, as former Obama economics adviser Larry Summers wrote recently in The Washington Post, the rest of the world mostly gave up on a cap-and-trade approach as clunky and inefficient in reducing greenhouse gases. A simple carbon tax is viewed as a much smarter approach than the one California adopted with the stated intent of changing the world.

Occidental has long been upbeat about fracking’s potential on lands it already owns or controls in California. This is from a piece I wrote in 2012:

Oxy estimates the shale reserves on California land it already controls to have over 20 billion barrels of potential oil –- a claim that the company says is made in accordance with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rule that only “economically producible” reserves can be cited in SEC filings.

So where have professional investors and energy speculators come down? So far, as the stock chart at right shows, they’re skeptics.

But it appears to be due to market conditions — the plunging cost of oil — not because California Resources is considered poorly managed or to be facing political opposition.

In The Street’s Real Money Pro column of Nov. 14, analyst David Katz predicted CRC’s early plunge — and said it would then be an attractive investment:

At the end of November, Occidental Petroleum (OXY) will distribute the majority (at least 80.1%) of its stake in California Resources (CRC) to OXY shareholders. It’s not uncommon for a new spinoff’s share price to decline in the weeks after distribution as the company’s ownership base changes. And unless the price of oil rallies in the next month, CRC shares are likely to be under even more than the usual selling pressure. However, we think California Resources is an interesting energy production growth story and if you have a 12-18 month time horizon, you may be richly rewarded for picking up the shares from distressed sellers.

The worst two examples of this conscious decision to leave out perhaps the strongest argument that pro-fracking forces can offer were in the Sacramento Bee and the L.A. Times.

In 2013, the Bee’s Pulizer-winning environmental reporter, Tom Knudson, wrote a voluminous, harshly critical look at fracking and California. He never mentioned that the Obama administration believes it to be just like another heavy industry that can be made safe enough with proper regulation.

Also in 2013, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell held a news conference announcing rules for fracking on federal land. The New York Times noted that Jewell’s remarks included pointed criticism of those who depicted fracking as unsafe. The Los Angeles Times covered the same press conference. Rather incredibly, it ignored Jewell’s remarks and instead quoted an oil industry figure as saying fracking was safe.

Cabinet member hits fracking ‘misinformation’

Now Jewell may have made it close to impossible for the California media to continue ignoring the Obama administration’s view by weighing in with KQED on what she sees as the poor logic behind local fracking bans.

President Obama’s chief custodian of federal lands says local and regional bans on fracking are taking regulation of oil and gas recovery in the wrong direction.

“I would say that is the wrong way to go,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told KQED in an exclusive interview. “I think it’s going to be very difficult for industry to figure out what the rules are if different counties have different rules.”

In November, two California counties added themselves to a growing list of local bans on hydraulic fracturing. Voters approved measures in San Benito and Mendocino Counties by wide margins.

“There are a lot of fears out there in the general public and that manifests itself with local laws or regional laws,” Jewell said.

The recent move by New York to extend a statewide ban does not sit especially well with Jewell, who, as a former petroleum engineer, has hands-on experience with fracking.

“There is a lot of misinformation about fracking,” Jewell said. “I think that localized efforts or statewide efforts in many cases don’t understand the science behind it and I think there needs to be more science.”

Will the Bee, the Times and other California newspapers ignore this latest affirmation of the Obama administration’s view that fracking is not the devil?

I don’t see how they can — even though it will remind people how long they’ve covered up the views of Jewell, Obama and the administration in general.

New York’s decision to ban fracking for health reasons could reverberate beyond the state, bolstering other efforts to limit the controversial method of drilling for oil and natural gas.

While two dozen U.S. municipalities and at least two countries, Bulgaria and France, have also adopted bans, states have been slower to act. Fracking opponents say New York, which surprised them Wednesday with the boldest move of any state so far, will change that.

“It definitely has a national political impact … It really has a domino effect,” says Deb Nardone, director of the Sierra Club’s Keeping Dirty Fuels in the Ground initiative.

She and other activists say the measure could intensify pressure to roll back nascent fracking plans in California, Illinois, Maryland, and North Carolina, and to help secure a permanent ban in the Delaware River Basin, which supplies drinking water for nearly a thousand community water systems in the mid-Atlantic region. It could also buoy efforts in various state legislatures, many of which return for a new session in January.

Anti-fracking measure succeeds in Central Valley

There is little question that California greens will mount an intense new effort to ban fracking. They were intensely disappointed in Gov. Jerry Brown’s seeming agnosticism on whether fracking was bad for the environment when a compromise state law was passed in 2013. Rules stemming from that law will go into effect in July 2015.

Greens’ success last month in getting rural San Benito County to ban fracking, however, could lead to a statewide ballot initiative — not to a new fight with Brown, Republican lawmakers and oil lobbyists over legislation in Sacramento. The victory of the ban in the poor, mostly Hispanic, heavily Democratic county was unsurprising, especially because of the local arguments that suggested fracking would take even more water away from the Central Valley.

A silver bullet to boost Dem turnout?

But one element of the ban’s victory was extremely heartening for Democratic strategists in a constant struggle to find new ways to excite the base and increase turnout. This is from The Los Angeles Times:

Fracking opponents here were vastly outspent by oil companies that fought a measure to ban well stimulation techniques such as fracking, acidizing and steam injection, along with conventional drilling in some areas. With just $130,000, the homegrown campaign managed to draw 57% of San Benito County voters to the polls in a low-excitement midterm election. They held off oil companies that spent nearly $2 million opposing the initiative.

If fear of fracking is such a powerful tool to generate Democratic turnout in a small agricultural county, imagine its potential power to get out college students and marginal voters in a big urban area. Democratic officials are likely to support placement of an anti-fracking measure of some sort on the November 2016 ballot even if they think it goes too far or even if they, like the Obama administration, believes fracking is just another heavy industry.

This strategy isn’t just likely in California but in states across the nation.

But the state Senate has had only Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, as president from 2008 until a few weeks ago. Steinberg left to media accolades this fall. Note this long Q&A in which the Bee reporter’s framing is consistently favorable to the former teacher.

Yet his successor, Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, is off to the roughest start of any Californian assuming a high-profile office since Lane Kiffin took over as coach of the Oakland Raiders.

De Leon has gotten skeptical to scathing media responses for a relatively long list of things in a relatively short time.

More perceived screw-ups since Walters tore him up

On Dec. 4, Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters blasted him for a “series of blunders.”

Walters ripped de Leon for verbal gaffes that proved hugely damaging to a Central Valley Assembly Democratic hopeful; for a self-important, pompous “inaugural” ceremony in Los Angeles; and for gutting many of the Senate’s most experienced policy analysts because of murky budget problems. Insiders said if the Senate really were hurting, the logical thing to do was lay off the political apparatchiks on all Senate staffs, not the people with the institutional memory.

The knocks have kept coming since Dec. 4.

De Leon’s announcement last week that he would pressure CalPERS and CalSTRS to disinvest from coal-affiliated companies — but not those in oil or natural gas — struck a chord in the wrong way with just about everyone.

I talked to one insider who said there was disbelief among lawmakers that 1) this symbolic, hollow gesture was highlighted as an early priority of de Leon’s and 2) that de Leon wouldn’t realize this would seem insubstantial and not worthy of his time. Another Sacramento watcher told me he couldn’t believe de Leon would focus on this trivia instead of grabbing a chance to be enviros’ hero by talking up a fracking ban. New York state’s passage of such a ban last week shows how much it’s where greens want to go.

Oversight office abruptly scrapped

Then de Leon was pulverized last week by editorials in both the Bay Area Newspaper Group and its sister Los Angeles News Group over other actions as well. This is from the Vallejo Times-Herald’s version:

“De León has eliminated a team of Senate aides dedicated to evaluating state government institutions and programs. He declined to renew the Senate’s Office of Oversight and Outcomes, established in 2008 by then-Senate President Darrell Steinberg with a goal “to ensure taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely and productively.

“The four-person staff’s combined salaries of about $379,000 seemed a small price for the good it did.

“Among the reports the office produced just last year were ones on the misuse of student meal funds by school districts, including $158 million in misappropriations and unallowable charges by Los Angeles Unified; about how the state’s system for overseeing substance-abuse counselors failed to flag sex offenders; and assigning blame for problems with the $373 million state payroll system. Among earlier reports was one looking at 10 tax breaks that, over a decade, cost state coffers $6.3 billion more than anticipated.”

Accused of wide range of political sins

What’s interesting is that these criticisms of de Leon don’t just focus on money-grubbing or another particular sin that politicians sometime specialize in. Implicitly, they make quite a sweeping case.

In possibly costing an Assembly candidate a chance at victory, de Leon is accused of poor political acumen.

In staging a showy unofficial “inaugural,” de Leon is accused of grandiosity.

In his Senate shakeups, de Leon is accused in one of a power grab and, in the other, of showing ignorance of the importance of a new but respected Sacramento institution.

In thinking that going after coal while ignoring fracking would make him look good, de Leon is accused of — to be blunt — stupidity.

The Sacramento version of the Stockholm syndrome

That is a pretty sweeping bill of particulars. What’s going on here?

The most obvious problem is that de Leon is politically tone-deaf in a way that’s striking for someone who’s made such a rapid ascent.

But the less obvious problem is that a lot of times it’s not fun to cover politics. It feels sleazy, disheartening, transactional, petty and repetitive. Steinberg made it feel more principled and sincerely, earnestly progressive.

That mattered to a bigger chunk of the Sacramento media-political establishment than people far from the state Capitol might imagine. This establishment didn’t miss Steinberg’s, er, colorful predecessor Don Perata at all.

The steepening drop in gasoline prices in recent weeks — spurred by soaring domestic energy production and Saudi discounts for crude oil at a time of faltering global demand — is set to provide the United States economy with a multibillion-dollar boost through the holiday season and beyond.

The windfall, experts say, comes at a critical moment, with the American economy on the upswing but facing headwinds from other quarters, including weaker exports because of slow growth overseas. Gas prices recently dropped below $3 a gallon for the first time since 2010, while crude oil prices have fallen by more than $25 a barrel since midsummer, settling on Thursday just above $74.

“If oil prices stay between $75 and $95 a barrel, we would see the kind of stimulus package that the Federal Reserve or Congress could never do,” said Douglas R. Oberhelman, the chief executive of Caterpillar, the multinational maker of heavy construction equipment.

The NYT article doesn’t talk about any raging debate over fracking’s safety. The newspaper has repeatedly acknowledged that the Obama administration considers fracking to be safe if properly regulated and has never given serious ink to the apocalyptic claims of fracking haters.

Which brings us to the Los Angeles Times. On Friday, the newspaper continued its absolutely bizarre tradition of raising safety concerns about fracking without noting that the greenest administration of all time thinks it’s safe. It comes in a story about L.A. City Council members agitating for a citywide fracking ban and finding resistance from city staffers who are skeptical that would be legal:

Councilmen Mike Bonin and Paul Koretz, who championed the ban, said in a letter Wednesday that they were “extremely disappointed” that the planning department had not drafted the rules as it was asked to do nearly nine months ago.

“Your report outlines interesting recommendations and important considerations,” Bonin and Koretz wrote to the deputy director of planning, Alan Bell.

“The council, however, asked for a draft ordinance establishing a fracking moratorium for its consideration, not a report without an ordinance attached,” the councilmen wrote. …

The Los Angeles City Council voted in February to start drafting rules that would prohibit hydraulic fracturing — commonly known as fracking — and other kinds of “well stimulation” techniques until adequate environmental safeguards are adopted by state and federal governments.

Does the LAT note that the federal government strongly believes it has “adequate environmental safeguards” in place? Nah. It has a pathetic tradition to continue. This is from CalWatchdog in May 2013:

Say what you will about The New York Times, but at least it’s not in denial about fracking the way The Los Angeles Times is.

Friday’s LAT coverage of new U.S. Interior Department rules for fracking on 756 million acres of public and Indian lands depicted the rules as being strongly objectionable to both enviros and the energy exploration industry.

The NYT coverage made the industry whining seem more pro forma and offered this essential point that the LAT couldn’t bring itself to point out:

“The 171-page proposal is the first significant regulation issued under the new interior secretary, Sally Jewell. Ms. Jewell worked in the oil industry in the late 1970s and proudly said that she fracked a few wells in Oklahoma.

“Ms. Jewell said in a conference call for reporters that the administration would continue to lease large tracts of public and Indian lands for oil and gas development and that it was critical that rules keep pace with technology.

“Anticipating criticism from environmental advocates, she said: ‘I know there are those who say fracking is dangerous and should be curtailed, full stop. That ignores the reality that it has been done for decades and has the potential for developing significant domestic resources and strengthening our economy and will be done for decades to come.’”

NYT quotes Obama Cabinet member; LAT quotes flack

The L.A. Times’ account put in the “fracking is safe and has been around forever” context by quoting an oil industry trade association spokesperson. The NYT quoted THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR!

Quite a gigantic difference. But than the LAT’s Neela Banerjee and Wes Venteicher and their editors can’t have Times’ readers knowing the Obama administration likes fracking, can they? It doesn’t fit the West L.A.-Marin County-NRDC narrative.

Pretty incredible how blatant the LAT bias is here. Can’t discomfit readers with a jarring truth.