From the mainstream media:
Driving along the narrow roads of southwest Pennsylvania through the hamlet of West Middletown, you can't miss the legacy the declining coal industry has left behind. Barbed, leafless tree branches reach across the road as the wild landscape slowly reclaims the town's once majestic homes.
But head just a few miles down the road from the crumbling town and a different picture of the area emerges. Pristine new white fences cordon off lush farms; million-dollar state-of-the-art barns have replaced rickety, decaying wooden ones.
Perhaps most important is the increasing number of forest-green well pads that now dot manmade gravel mounds in the Pennsylvanian foothills, an emblem of the booming natural-gas industry that has sprouted from the dying embers of the coal industry in just a few short years.
As much as the discovery of massive stores of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation has already started transforming the state's economy and landscape, it also has the potential to fundamentally change the nation's role in the energy security conversation.The BLM says fracking has been going on for more than sixty years in California and has a proven record of safety. (BLM = Bureau of Land Management)
