EcoWatch: Proposed standards that the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) announced last week for hydraulic fracturing on federal and Indian lands are hugely important, especially in the arid West where water is gold. Unfortunately, water protection gets short shrift in the rules that, once finalized, will apply to 750 million acres of public lands.
To provide a bit of context, oil and gas wells on public lands account for about 13 percent of the nations natural gas production and five percent of its oil...