New York City

Nearly a quarter of the stimulus aid assigned to rural areas— most of it in loan guarantees for home buyers— has actually gone to large metropolitan areas, reports USA Today. The money has been channeled to outlying regions of metropolitan areas with more than a million inhabitants.
The problem, according to the report, lies in the [...]

New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection last week issued a report that casts serious doubts on the common natural gas drilling process of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which injects water, sand and chemicals deep underground to free up more gas.
A looming drilling boom in the Marcellus Shale of New York and Pennsylvania has regulators [...]

Hydraulic fracturing – the subject of so much controversy on Colorado’s Western Slope lately – will be allowed to resume in Susquehanna County, Pa., after state environmental officials said they were satisfied with prevention plans submitted by a Texas company that reported three chemical spills related to the process last month.
Held up by proponents of [...]

Perhaps when mayors of small mountain towns on Colorado’s Western Slope express concerns about the environmental impacts of natural gas drilling it doesn’t cause too many ripples nationally, but when it becomes a campaign issue in the Big Apple, people tend to notice.
Last year, the mayors of Colorado towns like New Castle and Rifle complained [...]