Natural Gas Fracking Industry May Be Paying Off Scientists

[XemaSab]

Last week the University of Texas provost announced he would re-examine a report by a UT professor that said fracking was safe for groundwater after the revelation that the professor pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Texas natural gas developer. It’s the latest fusillade in the ongoing battle over the basic facts of fracking in America.

Texans aren’t the only ones having their fracking conversations shaped by industry-funded research. Ohioans got their first taste last week of the latest public-relations campaign by the energy policy wing of the US Chamber of Commerce. It’s called “Shale Works for US,” and it aims to spend millions on advertising and public events to sell Ohioans on the idea that fracking is a surefire way to yank the state out of recession.


The campaign is loaded with rosy employment statistics, which trace to an April report authored by professors at three major Ohio universities and funded by, you guessed it, the natural gas industry. The report paints a bright future for fracking in Ohio as a job-creator.

One co-author of the study, Robert Chase, is poised at such a high-traffic crossroads of that state’s natural gas universe that his case was recently taken up by the Ohio Ethics Commission, whose chairman called him “more than a passing participant in the operations of the Ohio oil and gas industry,” and questioned his potential conflicts of interest. As landowners in a suite of natural gas-rich states like Texas and Ohio struggle to to decipher conflicting reports about the safety of fracking, Chase is a piece in what environmental and academic watchdogs call a growing puzzle of industry-funded fracking research with poor disclosure and dubious objectivity.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/gas-fracking-science-conflict/

[Lint Head]

1. Ya think so?

Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

[truedelphi]

2. Paying off the experts has been a "normal" protocol for last 20 years.

I know that I came to that conclusion back in1996-1997-1998, when I did a careful evaluation of MTBE, including examining reams of paperwork that the California State Air Resources Board sent me, and I realized that inside the gas tank, under combustion, MTBE produced formaldehyde.

Then the "top" scientist in the field of evaluating MTBE, Nancy Balzer, released paperwork and her research showing that the fumes from MTBE did not in any way, shape or form impact the multiple chemical sensitivity people she had chosen to use in her experiments.

I called her to ask her how these people could not have some symptoms after being exposed to MTBE fumes. "What about the formaldehyde? Formaldehyde is one of the near universal triggers among the MCS crowd. In your group of MCS sufferers, I would suspect at least 40 percent of them to find the formaldehyde to be unbearable."

"Why are you asking me about formaldehyde," said Balzer. "There is no formaldehyde in MTBE."

Her saying this was like a coffee "expert" saying he doesn't think there is caffeine in the brew, and that he doesn't know that people often take the substance with milk, cream, sugar or sugar substitutes added.