"not as bad as Kazakhstan"

Here in the northeastern part of the U.S. folks are fighting against the rampant and sparsely regulated natural gas industry for real and potential ills related to fracking shale deposits for natural gas. And now it turns out that the same market forces that brought shale gas into production also brought shale oil into production. And what is a nasty by product of shale oil? Why natural gas, of course!

And there's so much natural gas production going on (thank you shale gas guys) that the sparsely regulated oil shale guys can't bring the gas to market so they're burning it off.

Set aside for a moment the whole carbon dioxide global warming thing as they burn all this waste gas. Wouldn't it make more sense to just do less shale production and less burning of waste gas? Probably not. But is sure does feel stupid.