There’s some discussion up in Albany of permitting the use of hydraulic fracturing to remove natural gas from the Marcellus shale formation upstate. In the industry this is colloquially called “fracking” because afterward you’re pretty much fucked.
The problem with fracking, as with other environmental issues, is one of negative externalities. That is, the company extracting the resource does not bear the full costs of its operations, and certainly not the full costs of its failures. This creates a moral hazard, both at the extraction company, which cares nothing for the people who can no longer drink their water, and in the government, which aligns itself with the corporation rather than the citizens, as in Pennsylvania.
Beyond that, I fail to understand why an industry that burns off natural gas from oil wells as waste would be granted the privilege to extract natural gas in a manner that most likely has adverse effects.