North Carolina passed a series of laws in the 1970s that prevented its agencies and local governments from creating environmental regulations that were more stringent than federal regulations. These laws were called “Hardison amendments” in reference to then-Senator Harold Hardison, D-Lenoir, who chaired several important legislative committees, notably the Appropriations Committee. Environmentalists lobbied long and hard and finally succeeded in removing the Hardison amendments in the mid-1980s. For the next thirty years, North Carolina was often a national leader among states in innovative environmental regulatory approaches. But in 2011, with the return of a Republican majority to both legislative chambers for the first time since 1870, the legislature reinstated the Hardison amendments, in slightly altered form (originally the new language was added as GS § 143B-279.16; it was later re-codified into the Administrative Procedures Act as GS § 150B-19.3). Understanding the rise, fall, and restoration of North Carolina’s Hardison Amendments helps explain the political dynamics of environmental regulation at the state level in the United States.

Since 2012, North Carolina has been on a fast and furious quest to create an entirely new regulatory regime for oil and gas production. The intertwined issues of whether and how to create such a regime to encourage fracking in North Carolina became and remain central enviro/political questions for the state. In 2012, a legislature newly controlled by the Republican Party (for the first time since Reconstruction) directed that regulations be put in place to encourage oil and gas exploration, and quickly. The central institutional actor charged with doing this has been a new State commission, the Mining and Energy Commission. The MEC is made up, as is typical in this and other states, of volunteer political appointees.  Could a new group of volunteers really pull off the creation of an entirely new regulatory scheme in little over a year? Environmental rulemaking in North Carolina in the past fifty years has not been about speed or efficiency, and the issues involved in fracking and its regulation are highly technical and politically controversial. So many of us who watch and advise about state environmental law felt this process might just produce a train wreck.