EPA Releases Plan to Study Fracking, Jumps the Gun
Yesterday, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally released its plan with specifics for how it will conduct research into the question of whether or not hydraulic fracturing contaminates, or otherwise negatively impacts, drinking water supplies. A copy of the 190-page plan is embedded below.
The first (preliminary) results from the study are due in 2012, but a final report is not due until 2014. In order to meet those deadlines, the EPA has already begun collecting field data and water samples. The problem is, that data was collected before the the plan itself was completed—before the rules for how the data collection should be done were established. Industry groups rightly have asked EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson how data collection for the study can begin before the methodology, the “how we will do this” part of the study was complete. It immediately calls into question the veracity of the data itself.
The EPA has “jumped the gun” by starting before the methodology was released. GIGO—garbage in, garbage out.
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An editorial in yesterday’s New York Post says that New York DEC Commissioner Joe Martens is leading a mutiny against Gov. Andrew Cuomo on the matter of allowing hydraulic fracturing to move forward in the state and asks the question, Is Gov. Cuomo up to the task of putting down the mutiny? Good question!
An excellent commentary in today’s New York Post by Abby Wisse Schachter addresses the fear mongering and just plain kookiness heard from anti-drillers. From the opening:
Now that New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Joe Martens has let the cat out of the bag that Marcellus and Utica Shale drilling permits will likely not be issued in 2012, the mainstream media has come along to prop him up with excuse stories for why New York will continue to delay drilling—to give Martens political cover for the coming firestorm. The simple fact is, the longer drilling is delayed, the more likely it will never happen—and anti-drillers know it. MDN believes these delays are by design, not an “aw shucks, things are jest turnin’ out this way” as Mr. Martens wants us to believe.
It appears the fine, upstanding protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement—the same people who want to abolish capitalism and redistribute all wealth from producers to those who won’t work—are prime targets to be recruited to oppose fracking. Birds of a feather…