Robert Finne was talking with a friend about the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission earlier this year when they both started wondering, "Who are these people?" So they wrote to the commission and asked. Finne, a critic of gas drilling in the Fayetteville Shale, was surprised to learn that most of the commissioners owned oil and gas drilling companies.

TOWANDA, Pa. -- A thin smile crept across Tony Tripp's face when reporters started asking him about the rules for gas drilling in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. "A lot of things aren't required in West Virginia," Tripp, foreman of the 92-foot drill rig rumbling a few feet away, told journalists on an industry-sponsored tour of drill sites here.

The chairwoman of the Texas Railroad Commission, Elizabeth Ames Jones, gets more campaign contributions from oil and gas than from any other industry. The Railroad Commission doesn't oversee railroads. By accident of history, the elected three-member panel regulates Texas's oil and gas industry.

State oil and gas agencies across the country are straining to prevent a flood of new drilling from harming human health and the environment. But that's not really their job. Or at least not all of it. Their job is also to promote drilling. And sometimes the law makes that their top priority.

RIFLE, Colo. -- Judy Jordan got her orders before she started her job. "You must be absolutely neutral," she remembers the assistant county manager of Garfield County, Colo., telling her during her job interview. "I took that as pretty strong guidance." The job was "oil and gas liaison" for the county on Colorado's Western Slope, negotiating disputes between drillers and people living in a petroleum boomtown.

Oil and gas drillers who pollute groundwater, spill toxic chemicals or break other rules have little to fear from the inspectors and agencies regulating the surge in American petroleum production. A Greenwire review of enforcement data from the largest drilling states shows that only a small percentage of violations result in fines, and the fines that are levied often amount to little more than a rounding error for billion-dollar companies.