Cornell Veterinarians Say Fracking Poisons Animals & People
Another day, another attempt by the anti-drilling left to scare people. Honestly, when will the general public wake up to these pathetic attempts to stop drilling?
The latest attempt is from two Cornell professors—from the veterinary department—who came to Endicott, NY to warn people that fracking will poison their cows and horses and chickens and dogs and cats, oh my! (Perhaps the good profs should make a trip to PA, just across the border, where fracking is everywhere and the animals are just fine.)
About 65 people came to the Endicott Visitor Center on Thursday night to join a statewide anti-fracking rally in several locales…
At the crux of Thursday’s questions was fracking’s potential impact on human and animal health, which two Cornell University professors said remain unanswered.
Case reports from eight states documented medical problems in beef cattle, dairy cows, chickens and goats after natural gas drilling wells infringed on their grazing land, according to Michelle Bamberger, of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell.
Bamberger, a veterinarian, studied several cases in which animals’ health deteriorated after drilling, including a horse who succumbed to liver failure.
In the strongest worded anti-drilling message of the partisan rally, Cornell professor Robert Oswald, said residents in drilling areas "will be the laboratory mice" and the land will remain "an uncontrolled health experiment" unless state regulators look at the risks with scientific data in hand.*
Notice that one of the profs, Bamberger, is a member of Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. That translates to: unless energy is solar or wind or water, it’s evil. And of course that’s the twisted ideology that motivates people like Bamberger to, shall we say, play fast and loose with the “research” that she presents. She has a point of view and it colors her views as a so-called scientist. Science is not what’s talking here—an ideology is what is talking. And it appears Oswald is even more rabidly anti-drilling than Bamberger.
*Binghamton (NY) Press & Sun-Bulletin (May 4, 2012) – Endicott anti-fracking rally focuses on human, animal health
Notice that such “Chicken Little’ warnings are based on subjective, anecdotal “stories” NEVER based on hard research, sampling and analysis, or environmental risk assessment!! Horses die, duuuh!!!
Even a half-witted bloke must admit that there is something quite a bit more than a bit unseemly about injecting a cocktail of chemicals into the ground and expecting that it won’t have adverse affects on soil or groundwater used for drinking. Whether or not the particular claim you review here is true or not is beside the point. The real issue is the desires of your wealthy elites to keep the current and prevailing profit making scheme going at any cost. There have been many recent breakthroughs in solar and wind energy, and much could be done in terms of providing mass transit in the US to reduce oil dependency and create a sustainable future. But since none of those things would provide profits for wealthy elites, they are shelved and toxic ruinous schemes like fracking and the mining of tar sands are put forward instead as saviors of your nation and its economy. It is pitiful that common people like you who have so little to actually benefit from these schemes, and so much more to lose, buy into these falsehoods and work to dismiss any claims of counter-evidence.
You are correct about half-witted blokes admitting something they know nothing about based on their limited education, their “feelings”, and a loathing for the production of any energy except what the other kids in class think is sooo cooool. Follow the newest fad and damn evaluations to the contrary.
Scientists and engineers use research, measurements, evaluation to arrive at conclusions. Any half-witted bloke should understand that at the depth of the natural gas, and with the ability of aquatards and shale to confine the gas from the water well above it, any low concentrations, using human health and environmental risk assessment to evaluate any potential pathways (there is none) and incidental exposure (sunlight, air travel, and off-gassing from some trees might be a greater risk), there is no significant risk to human health or the environment.
So far, all the half-witted blokes do is make grand assertions and chicken little tantrums without any science corresponding to their claims. Yes, I will trust true science, and not necessarily the so-called science of the “grant-whores currently populating the universities (recall the many recent scandals related to research fraud – gotta produce the sexy findings and get that grant money).
So, I’ll take the real science we used to see from the honorable scientists of old, such as Galileo, Newton, and Pasteur, who once gave the scientific method its honorable stature rather than the “admissions” of “half-witted blokes”. (By the way, I am a fairly well educated and credentialed scientist and engineer – hydrogeology, chemical fate and transport, human-health and environmental risk assessment, vapor migration, biology and chemistry.)
Brilliantly said my full witted bloke. Now if we can get the self proclaimed ” Anti scientist in the industry” on MDN, Spaceman Spiff to opine or refute anything said in the above post . . .crickets . . .I thought so!
jf- Ihave been using facts on this site for over a year. The Antis want nothing to do with the facts. I have broke it down to the most simplest of terms for even the dumbest Anti lemming to understand. ” With over a million wells in the US fracked, using the Anti ideology that it is unhealthy and fracking will poision you, should ther not be MILLIONS of sick/dead people in hospital beds, morgues, and animals in vetrinary hospitals?”