“The Solyndra affair has harmed more people than hydrofracking has in 60 years.”

Fleming absolutely hammers All Hat on this.

Hammers him.

Salazar can’t even answer basic questions about how fracking works. All he can say is how important “wellbore integrity” is, as though somehow that means he knows what he’s talking about. As though you’ll have a well that actually produces without a proper seal to deliver the well pressure that brings oil or gas to the surface.

The guy in charge of the Department of Interior is clueless. CLUELESS. And he wants to regulate something the states already regulate quite well.

If Fleming had more time, maybe he could have taken Salazar through the fact that Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources already requires natural gas producers to disclose the chemicals they use in their drilling fluid, or the fact that DNR already has fairly strict requirements on what should be done with that drilling fluid once it comes back up to the surface after a well hits gas – as a quick and dirty answer, it gets collected and reused, not because it’s such an environmental hazard but because the stuff costs money and it’s cheaper to reuse it than to go buy more.

Salazar wouldn’t know about any of that, either. And that’s not a surprise.

But the point of the exercise would be that we already do all the regulation necessary to satisfy whatever concerns Salazar says he has about fracking, and because of that we don’t need his federal goons running around ruining a highly productive sector of our state’s economy. We have the regulation in place that works for us, and some clown plucked from a senior fellowship at the Natural Resources Defense Council or the Sierra Club who has never spent five minutes in the presence of a gas well running things out of Washington won’t fix what’s not broken.

Does Salazar have an answer for that? Of course not. He’ll just sit there with that somnambulent I-just-had-a-Big-Gulp-of-Purple-Drank look on his face and then say something inane – and then go right on inserting the federal government up the rear end of the productive economy as soon as the hearing is over.