My direct answer is yes, emphatically.
Let me support that by saying a few things about a moratorium that exists in my home state of New York. At the same time that Pennsylvania, a sister state, and Ohio, a sister state, and West Virginia, a near sister state, began full-scale development of their shale gas resources four or five years ago, New York State had the wisdom to stop and say, wait a minute, this is substantially different technology than has been used in the past, it's relatively new technology, and we do not have in place adequate environmental regulations, we do not have in place adequate numbers of regulators, and we do not have in place an adequate number of inspectors; therefore we need to study the problem some more, and not just in an academic sense, but we need to learn from the mistakes that are being made today in our sister states, and we would really like to wait until the federal government completes its study under the Environmental Protection Agency to determine, hopefully once and for all, what really are the risks.
No one is saying this is risk-free. No one is saying it's accident-free. No one is saying that one cannot develop an acceptable level of risk in the technologies. What New York State is saying with its moratorium is that we do not have adequate scientific information on which to base adequate regulation and enforcement.