The regulation of the shale gas industry in China is to say the very least fractured. There are many concurrent federal organizations that regulate various parts of the industry as a whole. Understandably organizations have different competencies and are better suited to make policies in differing areas of shale gas exploration, extraction, and consumption. However if there is too great of split between the regulation of a given industry, there are problems that arise from such a scenario. The members of the industry may find the oversight too onerous, and the regulations too difficult to abide by. As the author notes there are at least six of these agencies regulating parts of shale gas. Yet even with six or more agencies on watch of the shale gas industry, there is not one that is focused on the environmental impacts of the industry and their practices. Damages done by the industry have to be regulated by often convoluted means. Ensuring that protecting the welfare of the environment and citizen’s becomes more difficult when the process by which grievances are resolved are difficult to navigate. Even when environmental protections get enshrined in Chinese law, there are often greater difficulties of ensuring that the protections are enforced. This balance between energy markets and environmental protection are not indigenously only to the Chinese example, and are problems in nearly every nation. However, it is particularly difficult to look past China as an example because their progress has been relatively quick in some regards, and quite slow in others. Taking the EU and US environmental protection practices would show that China has quite a distance to go to be comparable.
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