Jazz Shaw:
Erika and I have been covering the Environmental Protection Agency’s, shall we say, “complicated” relationship with the truth under the Obama administration for some time now. One of the many tales coming out of that department was being featured as recently as Thursday, dealing with the widely panned study in Wyoming which finally sought to tie fracking (hydraulic fracturing) to ground water contamination. The study was due for scientific peer review, attempting to determine if the chemicals found in well water were truly the result of fracking in the area, but somehow the process kept getting delayed, over and over for a year and a half.
The EPA has extended public comment periods on the draft report three times since it came out — twice last year and again this year. Each extension delayed the peer-review plans.
At long last the wait is over. As Investors Business Daily reports, the EPA has found a solution which will surely satisfy everyone. They just won’t do it.
The Environmental Protection Agency declines to have outside experts review its study claiming water contamination from fracking in Wyoming. Why confuse an analysis based on ideology with the facts?
…
In 2011, the EPA released the non-peer reviewed report on Pavillion in which the agency publicly linked fracking and groundwater contamination for the first time. However, then-EPA administrator Lisa Jackson stated that there is “no proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”
And really, why would you? If you’re trying to get to the bottom of a complicated science and engineering problem, the last thing you want is a bunch of scientists and engineers coming along and muddying the waters. (If you’ll pardon the pun.) But in the test case cited by the study, there were some traces of chemicals in the well water! Where could they have come from? I mean, it’s not like the EPA put them there, right?
