Bought & Paid For: NY Anti-Drilling Researcher Gets $1.25M Grant
There’s a new thing going around–it’s called “advocacy science.” And boy oh boy does it ever pay big bucks! Here’s how it works: Attend an Ivy League school like Cornell, do some “research” with a pre-determined outcome (i.e. ignore real science), wait a few years–and collect $1.25 million?! That’s how it worked out for Elaine Hill, currently a University of Rochester Medical Center researcher who did sloppy research that she published as a Cornell student (without peer review) in 2012. The “study” found babies born near fracked wells are allegedly more likely to have low birth weights than those not born near fracked wells (see her paper here). Later studies that grabbed headlines used her work as its foundation (see MSC Devastating Critique of “Low Birth Weight Near Fracking” Study). Hill is now being richly rewarded for her efforts in aiding the anti-drilling cause. The National Institutes of Health (your tax dollars at work) have just awarded Hill–yes Hill, one person–a staggering $1.25 million grant to do more “research.” In essence, she’s set for life. Bought and paid for. A millionaire. All it took was trading on the name of Cornell University and ignoring real science to get there. Here’s the kicker–her degree isn’t in biochemistry or biology or medicine or any hard science. Hill’s degree is in economics…
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The crazies have done it again. Did you happen to watch Monday Night Football this past Monday? It was the Indianapolis Colts playing the Carolina Panthers at the Bank of America stadium in Charlotte, NC. During the game, protesters of the Dominion Cove Point LNG plant “dramatically” rappelled from an upper deck and unfurled a banner that said “BoA: Dump Dominion”. Note that the teams are from North Carolina and Indiana, nothing to do with Maryland where the Cove Point plant is. The only tie-in is the stadium is named after Bank of America and BoA has some financial/commercial connection to Dominion. In fact, 99.9% of the people in the stadium or watching by television didn’t even know what was meant by the banner! The protesters not only endangered themselves, they endangered the people underneath them. What if the protesters had fallen? No, we’re not concerned for the nutjobs if they had Darwined themselves and dropped like a rock. We’re concerned about the people underneath them. What if the banner had fallen on people? What if a shoe had flown off one of these nutters and hit a baby on the head? The protesters finally came down and were promptly arrested for their crime…
A story in Philadelphia Magazine perfectly illustrates the Nazi-like control freaks that inhabit anti-fossil fuel organizations like Food and Water Watch and the fringe group Action United. Philadelphia City Councilman Curtis Jones Jr. is a bone fide, card-carrying liberal Democrat. In 2011 Jones called for a fracking moratorium in the Delaware River Basin. Since that time Jones has actively advocated for no fracking/drilling in the Philadelphia region. Four years ago the Marcellus Shale Coalition invited Jones (and others) to tour a drilling rig, to see how it’s done. At the time, he declined. It’s always so much easier when you stick your head in…the sand. But Jones is a member of the Philadelphia Gas Commission, the group that oversees the city-owned Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW). A recent audit recommends PGW buy more Marcellus Shale gas (see 
About 20 hippie retreads showed up in Harrisburg, PA on Wednesday to protest outside of the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) regional office in Harrisburg to protest the fourth meeting of Gov. Tom Wolf’s Pipeline Infrastructure Taskforce. In May Gov. Wolf announced he was forming a taskforce to study and make recommendations on how the state can better work with (i.e. control) where local gathering pipelines are installed (see 
Hoping to get one more squeeze and a few more drops of juice out of news that’s now years old, the odious Earthworks and equally odious Food & Water Watch organized a protest rally in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday and trotted out the same old tired, lying anti-drillers from Dimock, PA, Pavillion, WY and Parker County, TX to “demand” that the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) simply dump the findings of their four-year study that concluded fracking doesn’t pollute water supplies (see 
A gang of Big Green groups are tickled pink–or is it tickled “green”–that their continuous frivolous lawsuits against the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have once again yield the desired result. Radical leftist “green” groups like Earthworks, Environmental Integrity Project, THE Delaware Riverkeeper, and yes, PennFuture (where PA’s current Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley, used to work), had previously sued the federal EPA to force onerous new reporting rules on natural gas processing plants, using lies about the kinds of air pollutants released by the plants. The EPA cooperates with these sleazy organizations in a “sue and settle” scam. “Hey, you sue us for this, a liberal judge will ‘make us’ do it–then we can bypass Congress and everyone else and set up our own laws outside of that stupid old Constitution.” That’s how these groups collude with the EPA (see 
Here’s something that should scare the #$%@ out of you this Halloween: the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). The CELDF, based in Pennsylvania, is attempting to interfere in other states like Ohio by fleecing local governments into believing they can pass so-called community bill of rights legislation (i.e. “home rule” laws). Problem is, the local communities who have tried it keep getting sued, and losing in court–and taxpayers end up paying tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees in an empty gesture to make a statement opposing shale energy. Our friends at Energy in Depth have put together a video for this Halloween that exposes the CELDF and should scare you to death, especially if you live in Youngstown, OH where a CELDF ballot initiative will be on the ballot this November (next week), for the FIFTH TIME…
One of the Pennsylvania Democrat in-house publishing operations is the Harrisburg Patriot-News. Owned by Dems, run by Dems, slavishly supportive of Dems. That about sums up the Patriot-News. They don’t even pretend to be unbiased in their “reporting” on issues like the Marcellus Shale. This past Monday the Patriot-News began running a series of lying hit pieces against the Marcellus industry–in a transparent attempt to help their boy Gov. Tom Wolf in his bid to hike taxes on the drilling industry. We’ve read some of the articles. Lie after lie after lie. We haven’t commented on it here in MDN because it’s just more of the same. Why bother? The paper is obviously agenda-driven and cares nothing whatever about reporting real, actual news. However, MDN friend Tom Shepstone has put together a brilliant expose of their lies, so we’re bringing you a copy (from his always-excellent 
The legal beagles at energy law firm Babst Calland are raising the alert that another “sue and settle” lawsuit has been filed against the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by seven radical environmental groups. This is the latest attempt at forcing the EPA to comply with a lawsuit that they intentionally lose. What? Yes, they intentionally lose the lawsuit and then tell Congress that they “have to” comply with a court order “forcing” them to enact certain unlegislated rules and regulations in order to comply with a judge’s order–in effect giving them one more weapon in their arsenal to illegally regulate the oil and gas industry. Regulation of oil and gas is Constitutionally left up to the individual states. The EPA, especially under Obama, has been innovating ways to circumvent the Constitution and Congress and cease regulation authority. So-called “sue and settle” lawsuits are one of the ways they do it. Here comes another one. This time radical environmental groups (which should be sued themselves) have sued the EPA to force them to regular oil and gas drilling wastes under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Here’s a summary of what’s happening…
In December President Obama will travel to Paris to sign a climate treaty that forfeits the sovereignty of the United States of America–the country he swore to protect. The Paris climate treaty is another in a long line of attempts (like Kyoto) to convince stupid Americans to give up the right to control their own country and destiny–to sell ourselves out and let non-American, un-elected socialists from other countries determine how we will live in the future. They use the bogeyman myth of global warming to do it. They are all aiming to commit mass energy suicide by outlawing fossil fuels–but it won’t work if we don’t play along. We pray Congress stops this madness, but now we despair. You see, big business is in bed with big government and funds the political ruling class in Washington and in return the politicians pass laws favorable to them. Some 81 of the biggest big businesses (who contribute heavily to Congress and receive preferential treatment in return) have signed on to a pact to support Obama’s climate madness. They actually want him to sign the treaty that gives up our national sovereignty. Without these 81 big businesses (full list below) you literally could not live–from Walmart to Hershey to Nike to Apple to Google to Kellogg’s to American Express…the list goes on. Sadly, even some in our own industry have signed on, including Invenergy. Shame on them. If we were to boycott them (as should happen) we’d have to live like hermits in the wilderness. No one can live without the goods and services provided by this list of 81 mega corporations. And each and every one of them have sold us out. It’s truly a sad and depressing day…
What many rank and file members of the New York anti-fracking movement may not realize, or perhaps chooses to ignore, is that the people at their rallies and meetings standing behind the microphones are being paid to do so. The organizers of groups like New Yorkers Against Fracking and Frack Action are funded by the odious Park Foundation to pedal their smears and lies against fossil energy. The Park Foundation gave New Yorkers Against Fracking $125,000 earlier this year, in part to pay for organizers to travel across the country spreading the word (i.e. lie) that a little rag-tag bunch of protesters convinced the mighty Andrew Cuomo of the righteousness of their cause–and you can do it in your state too. In other words, the anti-fracking movement has become a cottage industry where people get paid to mouth off at rallies, before reporters–before anyone who will listen. They are paid by the Park Foundation and other Big Green groups to do so…
We wonder, do the liberal editors of the Democrat propaganda machine known as the Scranton Times-Tribune consider it “fair” to close down legitimate businesses that provide jobs and tax revenue to the state by targeting them with even higher taxes, forcing them out of business because they no longer turn a profit? Is “profit” a bad word around the news room of the Times-Tribune? Is the word “capitalism” banned from so-called reporters’ lips at the Times-Tribune? Those are the kinds of thoughts that roll around our brain box when we read yet another sycophantic “we need to tax the Marcellus industry more than we do already” editorial from the brainiacs at the Times-Tribune…
If landowners along the route of the PennEast Pipeline don’t sign a lease with the company, PennEast says they will be forced to (and will) use eminent domain to gain lease rights. The PennEast, as a reminder, is a proposed pipeline costing $1 billion that will run from Luzerne County, PA (near Wilkes-Barre) all the way to Mercer County, NJ (just outside of Trenton), flowing 1 billion cubic feet of clean-burning Marcellus Shale gas each and every day. Landowners along the pipeline’s route will still own the land, but there will be restrictions–you can’t erect a building over top of a pipeline, for example. PennEast looks at eminent domain as an absolute last resort. However, according to the radicals at the PA Sierra Club who are opposing the pipeline, around two-thirds of the landowners along the pipeline’s route have not yet signed a lease to allow the pipeline across their land. PennEast recently filed their official application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (see