Here is one for the "who didn't see this one coming file??"

War On Shale: EPA Targets Fracking Boom With New Regs

Energy Policy: In spite of dramatically lower methane emissions from fracking, according to the EPA's own data, the agency wants to impose draconian regulations on the oil and gas industry similar to those on coal.

The new rules that the White House announced on Wednesday aim to cut oil emissions of methane, a target of environmental groups, by 45% below 2012 levels, despite the fact that the emissions already show a sharp decline even as shale oil and gas production has skyrocketed.

This war-on-shale action mirrors the administration's war on coal, with EPA rules impossible to meet economically and sometimes requiring technology that doesn't even exist.

Never mind that there's no evidence of the climate change that environmentalists fear. And the EPA doesn't seem to care that the U.S. leads in reducing the fake nightmare of greenhouse gases.

It is an alleged threat of methane to the Earth's climate that has green groups pushing the EPA to limit hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technology that has spawned a job-creating oil and natural-gas boom.

It has also been used as a weapon against the Keystone XL pipeline, which would ship oil from Canada's oil sands and North Dakota's Bakken shale formation to our Gulf Coast refineries.

"Reported methane emissions from (the) petroleum and natural gas systems sector have decreased by 12% since 2011, with the largest reductions coming from hydraulically fractured natural gas wells, which have decreased by 73% during that period," according to the EPA itself.

The EPA would like to take credit for that reduction even as the technology improves on its own.

But are we ready to bankrupt an energy industry for a marginal reduction in emissions whose effect on climate can't be measured, if it exists at all?

We are doing this based not on science but on ideology, because this is what the administration's leftist environmental base wants.

Environmental groups insist that methane is much more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and, if unregulated, would wipe out all the emission reductions achieved through the increased use of natural gas through fracking.

As noted by Energy in Depth, a petroleum-industry research, education and outreach campaign, CO2 emissions are at their lowest in 20 years due to greater use of natural gas from fracking — part of an energy boom creating thousands of jobs and enhancing energy security.

But "ton for ton, methane causes at least 80 times more warming than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period," reads a letter signed by 15 Democratic senators, led by Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse, to Obama, not bothering to explain how global temperatures have essentially flat-lined over the past 20 years.

[Excerpted, rest at link above.]

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(I always figured that they would come after this via regulations, and/or a "terribly horrific accident" of some type.... I guess there is still time for both......)

America will only get back on track when individuals, businesses, corporations begin to ignore the regulations, the regulators, the stooges [read courts] that seek to enforce the regulations, and the government that issues them.