A U.S. judge on Wednesday halted a plan to allow fracking on public lands in central California, saying a federal agency’s environmental plan should have taken a “hard look” at the potential impact of the process. The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald, was at least the second setback in three years for fracking in California and came as the Obama administration’s rules for hydraulic fracturing on federal lands have been tied up in another court. The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which periodically leases out land to private producers, offered a plan that would have allowed fracking on about a quarter of new wells drilled on some 1 million acres across central California. The final outcome is not clear as Judge Fitzgerald […]