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…
Noble Energy is a global driller involved in a number of shale plays in the U.S. including the DJ Basin, Eagle Ford Shale, Delaware Basin and Marcellus Shale. Noble idled the last remaining drilling rig they were operating in the Marcellus in September (see