UB Defends Shale Institute & Study in Response to SUNY Board
An update on the witch hunt at University at Buffalo (UB). You may recall that UB had the temerity, the gall, to establish a Shale Resources and Society Institute (SRSI) in April of this year. When said institute turned out its first report in May, which detailed how environmental problems caused by Marcellus Shale gas drilling in Pennsylvania were isolated, mostly minor and on the decline, the anti-drillers just about came off the rails. It was an all-hands-on-deck, we-must-obliterate-the-credibility-of-the-report-and-the-people-who-wrote-it campaign. And so the witch hunt began (see this MDN story).
Read More “UB Defends Shale Institute & Study in Response to SUNY Board”
It’s interesting to MDN how a politically correct witch hunt has gone forth at University at Buffalo (UB) after the “revelation” that the authors of a new study at the university’s new shale institute had (gasp) done work for natural gas drilling companies in years gone by. Somehow the fact they have made a living outside of academe and (gasp) “in the industry” taints their ability to reason and research beyond acceptable (to the left) limits (
The Obama EPA has bungled a lot—chief among their bungles was their attempt to prove a connection between fracking and water contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming. The EPA hoped that Pavillion would be the smoking gun—the single, solitary case (any case!) they could use as an excuse to (illegally) start regulating oil and gas drilling through the back door of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. But something happened on the way to the “we’ll take over regulating fracking from the states” ball: The wells the EPA used for their data in Pavillion were drilled by the EPA and the high levels of chemicals in the wells may have come from their own botched drilling job. Oops—maybe they ought to leave drilling to the experts. Lots of backpedaling ensued (
It’s fascinating to MDN how a single so-called researcher at a single anti-drilling organization (funded by Teresa Heinz Kerry) can write a 124-page “report” that’s critical of the shale drilling industry and the hard-working people who regulate it, and the mainstream media (MSM) swoons and heralds such shameful propaganda as an important new “study” presenting the gospel truth. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening (once again) with a just-released report from Earthworks titled, “Breaking All the Rules: The Crisis in Oil & Gas Regulatory Enforcement” (copy embedded below).
The witch hunt at the University at Buffalo (UB) continues. This time 83 UB faculty members have taken up their pitchforks and torches to aid in the hunt against the university’s new Shale Resources and Society Institute.
A new paper is about to be published in a scientific journal that will no doubt get misrepresented and widely reported in the mainstream press about assessing the risks of Marcellus Shale drilling. The paper is titled “Water Pollution Risk Associated with Natural Gas Extraction from the Marcellus Shale,” written by a graduate student and his professor at SUNY Stony Brook. The published paper will appear in the August issue of the journal Risk Analysis, a publication of the Society for Risk Analysis (a preview copy of the full article is embedded below).