The Environmental Protection Agency issued the first-ever national air pollution regulations for fracking on Wednesday. First proposed in July 2011, the final rules have been welcomed by environmental groups as a much-needed initial move in reducing pollution and protecting public health from the toxic chemicals involved in the oil and natural gas drilling process. But many cautioned it was just a first step.

"It sets a floor for what the industry needs to do," said attorney Erik Schlenker-Goodrich of the Western Environmental Law Center. "The reality is we can do far better."

Earlier this year, the oil company Plains Exploration and Production (PXP) blasted water and chemicals more than one and half miles into the earth to force oil embedded in a sandstone formation to gush to the surface.

The process—known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking"—has been debated in many U.S. communities where oil and gas deposits have been identified in recent years. But PXP wasn't fracking in the much-touted Marcellus Shale on the East Coast, where much of the controversy over fracking has centered. It was fracking two test wells in urban Los Angeles, where 300,000 people live within a three-mile radius.

The drilling was done less than a year after community and environmental groups reached a settlement with PXP, after complaining for years about pollution from the site.

Hydraulic fracturing, which is used to recover deeply buried sources of gas and oil, is emerging as a contentious issue in California. Nearly two-thirds of the nation's shale oil deposits are found in California, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but most of it is hard to recover without fracking.

A recent report in Los Angeles Times revealed that the state is ill-prepared for a surge in this type of drilling, with regulators as well as residents struggling simply to define fracking, much less pinpoint where it is occurring.

France's Total is laying plans including a helicopter water drop, fire-fighting vessels and spraying nitrogen to extinguish a flare on its Elgin North Sea gas platform that is leaking explosive clouds of gas, the energy department said.

The flare, lit as part of evacuation proceedings to relieve pressure in the abandoned rig, cannot be turned off remotely and remains at risk of igniting the explosive plumes pumping out of the platform, the department said.

But it added aerial surveillance suggests the flame has reduced in size, offering hope for a safe resolution to the crisis.

The authorities have praised the embattled French oil firm's handling of the leak, one of the North Sea's biggest in decades, calling it "effective" and conditions on the rig "stable" as hydrocarbons continue to spew into the atmosphere.

Total has dismissed the risk of a blast at the platform and has two fire-fighting ships ready to act outside a two mile-exclusion zone set up to protect marine traffic. Experts warn Elgin could become "an explosion waiting to happen."

California's long-running campaign to reduce air pollution has indirectly helped create a new problem: its oil refineries produce more greenhouse gas emissions than refineries anywhere else in the country.

On average, California refineries emit 19 to 33 percent more greenhouse gases per barrel of crude oil when stacked up against comparable gas-producing regions in the United States, according to a recent study commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The report analyzed national and California-specific refinery data and combined it with data gathered by author Greg Karras, who has been studying and writing about refinery operations since 1989.

California began mandating cleaner burning fuel than the rest of the nation in the mid-1990s, in an effort to combat some of the worst smog levels in the country and meet federal clean air rules. That spurred oil refiners to expand their facilities and install technology to remove more pollutants like sulfur, so car tailpipes would spew out less of it.

In the last decade, however, oil refineries have begun processing heavier and dirtier types of crude oil, including Canadian tar sands oil, which requires more cleaning to meet California's standard. And that extra cleaning means that plants use more energy and emit more CO2.

An associate of the Heartland Institute, the think tank devoted to discrediting climate change, taught a course at a top Canadian university that contained more than 140 false, biased and misleading claims about climate science, an expert audit has found.

The course at Ottawa's Carleton University, which is being accused of bias, was taught for four terms from 2009-2011 by Tom Harris, a featured expert at the Heartland Institute.

Heartland's core mission is to discredit climate change, and it is currently moving into the education realm. It plans to spend $100,000 on a project countering established teaching of climate change to American school children, an unauthorized release of documents showed.

But the audit report, released on Tuesday, suggests such efforts are already underway on college campuses.

The career and reputation of the scientist behind the Heartland Institute exposé was in jeopardy on Wednesday night, after his employers said they were reviewing his use of deception to obtain confidential documents.

The review, by the board of directors of the Pacific Institute, was the most serious potential repercussion to date of the admission by Peter Gleick that he had lied to obtain fundraising documents and a donor list from Heartland, the rightwing think tank devoted to discrediting climate change.

A statement on the website of the Pacific Institute, which Gleick founded and now heads, said the board was "deeply concerned" about the ruse carried out against Heartland.

"Neither the board nor the staff of the Pacific Institute knew of, played any role in, or condones these events," the board said.

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama on Wednesday blamed his Republican opponents for imposing an "arbitrary" deadline on his review of TransCanada Corp's plan to build the Keystone XL Canada-to-Texas crude oil pipeline, which led to its rejection.

"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," Obama said in a statement. "I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision."

Early last year, deep in the forests of northern British Columbia, workers for Apache Corp. performed what the company proclaimed was the biggest hydraulic fracturing operation ever.

The project used 259 million gallons of water and 50,000 tons of sand to frack 16 gas wells side by side. It was "nearly four times larger than any project of its nature in North America," Apache boasted.

The record didn't stand for long. By the end of the year, Apache and its partner, Encana, topped it by half at a neighboring site.

As furious debate over fracking continues in the United States, it is instructive to look at how a similar gas boom is unfolding for our neighbor to the north.

To a large extent, the same themes have emerged as Canada struggles to balance the economic benefits drilling has brought with the reports of water contamination and air pollution that have accompanied them.

The Canadian boom has differed in one regard: The western provinces' exuberant embrace of large-scale fracking offers a vision of what could happen elsewhere if governments clear away at least some of the regulatory hurdles to growth.

Even as some officials have questioned the wisdom of doing so, Alberta and British Columbia have dueled to draw investment by offering financial incentives and loosening rules. The result has been some of the most intensive drilling anywhere.

President Barack Obama supports a compromise payroll tax deal reached in Congress on Friday but Republican insistence on including a demand to speed a decision on a controversial Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline means it almost certainly will not be built, a senior administration official said.

The Obama administration believes that while an agreement to extend payroll tax breaks for just two months is not ideal, it would be inconceivable that Republicans would consent to that and later refuse to renew the cuts for rest of the year.

The senior official said the deal, which still must be approved by the full Senate and House of Representatives, meets Obama's main concern that middle-class taxes not rise with the expiration of payroll tax breaks at the end of December.

But it falls short of Obama's original push for a full-year extension and also runs counter to an earlier White House demand that there be no link to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

ALBERTA, Canada—Enbridge Inc's proposed $5.3 billion pipeline to British Columbia poses a raft of environmental risks, according to a new report that signals the project will become the next battleground over the future of Canada's oil sands.

The study by a trio of environmental groups, released on Tuesday, comes fast on the heels of a decision to push back approval of TransCanada Corp's Alberta-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline by more than a year.

The delay has led Canada's oil industry and Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government to intensify their emphasis on exporting oil sands-derived crude to Asia.

The Enbridge project, known as the Northern Gateway pipeline, is the first attempt at doing that in scale.

But the new report—issued by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Pembina Institute and Living Oceans Society—says the project would threaten native communities, salmon fishery and wildlife habitat on land and in waters off the West Coast.

The report uses last year's Enbridge pipeline rupture and oil spill in Michigan, and even the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, as examples of why governments and regulators should block the proposal to bisect the rugged Western Canadian province with steel pipe.