Constitutional does not mean necessary. And yes, deregulating oil production at the federal level is essentially impossible to achieve politically.
My point is that deregulation does not necessarily mean you are in favor of unfettered rape of nature. Quite the contrary. I fully believe we should be stewards of the environment. Federalizing regulations, IMO, is not the best way to go about things. States might be the better avenue for regulations, since they may understand their local environment better.
North Dakota has a State regulatory agency which does a great job of ensuring compliance with regulations written by knowledgeable people who commonly worked in the industry, but who are North Dakotans. That combination ensures that those regulations will be intelligently written to address specific potential problems, and will safeguard landowners, the environment, and yet foster industry by not unnecessarily encumbering it with nonsensical regulations which add burden with no benefit.
In contrast, I have seen where Federal rules required a proposed route for a section of location access road (which followed the exact route a
reclaimed location access road had followed to a different and previously drilled location) be fully surveyed for cultural remains, rare plants, raptor nests, etc., even though the route had been seeded with the BLM approved seed mixture, and had been reclaimed from a route which had been surveyed for all of that when the original road was put in. The surveys were redundant, as the BLM approved seed mixture used in reclamation contained no rare plant seeds, and no new centuries old archaeological sites had been put in over the past year.
That alone, in order to obtain the permits to build the access road, cost tens of thousands of dollars which were not necessary.
