What happens when the fox builds the hen house? The drilling industry helped get some of the most influential lawmakers elected with lavish donations to their campaigns. It paid millions to lobbyists to influence legislation, and it has hired many of the experienced regulators away from public service.
Now the industry will pay to train the people who set policy and enforce it.
ExxonMobil and GE will be investing $1 million each to establish new training programs at three universities, including Penn State, “to ensure that regulators and policymakers have access to the latest technological and operational expertise to assist in their oversight of shale development,” according to a Penn State press release issued Thursday.
The other schools are the University of Texas at Austin and the Colorado School of Mines.
With money from the drilling industry, Penn State’s Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research will offer a new “Shale Gas Regulators Training Program” to provide “best-practices training” to people who oversee the drilling industry.
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