Large Spills, Leaks, Casing Failures Happen

“In praise of the science” — Too much politics in our federal agencies

From the Editorial on the Opinion Page, Morgantown Dominion Post, June 7, 2015

Another EPA study, another EPA overreaching finding. No, on Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a study that acknowledged what everyone knew. Everyone as in the gas and oil industry and its supporters, in politics and elsewhere.

One U.S. senator, who once compared the EPA to the Gestapo, described the report as “the latest in a series of failed attempts” by the Obama administration to link fracking to polluted drinking water. Never mind, that the EPA was formerly the devil’s spawn of the Obama administration, according to that senator and many in that industry.

Interestingly, that industry and its supporters are not championing another study. Also this week, a new study from University of Pittsburgh’s researchers found women living close to areas of high-density natural gas operations are more likely to have babies with lower birth weights than women living farther from such operations.

Let’s be clear. We, for one, have suspected for years that fracking posed a threat to drinking water and our water resources. However, we are willing to accept science: Fracking has not caused widespread harm to drinking water.

That study did cite instances where drinking water was affected by fracking, yet that number was small. The EPA insists that the question this study answered was not whether fracking was safe or unsafe.

Its purpose was to study “how do we best reduce vulnerabilities so we can best protect our drinking water and water resources.”

No one needs a study to know that in the past decade that the EPA has become an easy mark for criticism from across the board. But especially by some industry lobbyists, uh, rather, members of Congress and the Legislature. (We get them confused.)

Has the EPA made mistakes, implemented some misguided policies and overreached at times? Absolutely. However, since its creation, in 1972, the EPA is the primary reason for ending a range of industries’ best-worst practices.

Few who were not young adults and older then can understand how much has changed. Just think of our environment then and today in these terms: Night and day.

Still, it’s odd, how this agency is everyone’s scapegoat for everything, except when it agrees with them. Though some assert that the EPA is a tool of the Obama administration we don’t buy that.

Men and women grounded in science don’t take direction from politicians, or should not. It’s counter-intuitive to act according to politics and agendas, rather than research and data.

Science is no game where we can afford to accept or deny its results. Nor should clean water ever become a political football.

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Global Warming is a Fact

A recent editorial in the Charleston Gazette points out that there are still many decision makers that doubt the relationship between greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the warming of the earth. “What’s next?  No science of any sort allowed in public schools?”

Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, has written that reputable biologists agree that evolution is a bedrock fact of biology — just as all reputable climatologists agree that global warming is real. The Los Angeles Times has said that the doubting scientists are “fossil-fuel-industry-funded ‘experts’ who tend to have little background in climatology and who publish non-peer-reviewed papers in junk magazines.”

Study: Global Warming is Real

“Global warming is real,” a team of scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have reported. Since the 1950s, the earth has warmed about 1° C. Richard Muller and a team of colleagues, including Saul Perlmutter, 2011 Nobel Prize winner in physics, started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study to review and assess the accuracy of existing land temperature data. The team looked at temperature data from 15 previous studies—amounting to some 1.6 billion combined records dating back to 1800—on the subject. 

Muller says that concerns raised by global warming skeptics were specifically addressed, including the urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and data selection bias. The group’s results aligned closely with previous studies’ findings, including ones carried out by groups such as NASA, the Hadley Center, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously,” Muller said in a statement. “This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”