http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/270893/fracas-about-fracking-kathleen-hartnett-white?page=1Just like the Climategate whitewashes, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the NLRB Boeing "investigation" the EPA panel is stacked to deliver a predetermined result.
In deciding on a policy on fracking, we should not wait for a congressionally mandated EPA report on the impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water, due in 2012. A congressional hearing held in May revealed fatal flaws in what was supposed to be a definitive, vigorously peer-reviewed study. For one thing, it will be an inside job from the EPA; the study’s review panel excludes anyone with professional expertise in current industry practices or the technology of hydraulic fracturing. Under the current administration, industry experts, like highly credentialed professors of petroleum engineering, are assumed to be shills for greedy enterprises.
The EPA study has some other serious defects. It will cherry-pick only four wells, out of hundreds of thousands, for full forensic analysis, and it has excluded representatives of state regulatory agencies — which have six decades of experience in regulating this practice, which began in 1948 — from its review panel. Nor do the researchers seem aware of the difference between, on one hand, models of the assumed effects of hydraulic fracturing and, on the other, physical measurements of the results of hundreds of actual fracking treatments. To learn the fundamentals of this issue, the EPA would have to bother to speak with experts on the technology.
The study seems designed to substantiate a predetermined conclusion: that hydraulic fracturing poses grave risks. Therefore the EPA must either assert regulatory control on all drilling using this technology, or issue a “temporary” moratorium — as in the aftermath of the 2010 Gulf spill — until further study is complete. If fracking is delayed or discontinued, massive resources will remain untapped, hundreds of thousands of jobs will not be created, and billions of dollars of potential federal, state, and local tax revenues will be lost.
Wine is sunlight, held together by water - Galileo Galilei
Un jour sans vin est comme un jour sans soleil - Louis Pasteur
Water separates the people of the world; wine unites them - anonymous
Wine is the most civilized thing in the world - Ernest Hemingway
Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance - Benjamin Franklin
