Is the EPA Just Sloppy, or Cooking the Books?

[Geee]

American Thinker:

After issuing a hastily compiled report last year claiming a direct link between groundwater contamination and hydraulic fracturing at Pavillion, Wyoming, the EPA now admits that it may be wrong. Or, it may be, it was intentionally cooking the books. The only question now is whether the findings in the draft report were purposefully falsified so as to form the basis for national regulation of fracking, or whether they were just incredibly sloppy. Either way, the EPA needs to be held to account.

Admitting that there are grounds for doubt concerning its earlier report, EPA director Lisa Jackson has agreed to retest groundwater around Pavillion, Wyoming. The agency had planned to rush the report through the peer review stage, apparently as part of an effort to justify national regulation of hydraulic fracking. Now, that peer review has been stalled by assertions that the EPA's own test drilling was the source of the contamination.

 

Regardless of how the EPA's retesting pans out, the agency's admission of doubts concerning its initial report should ring alarm bells. Consider that the EPA is now admitting that its initial report, which formed the basis of a nationwide media indictment of hydraulic fracturing, was based on inconclusive data. The agency itself deployed and continues to deploy the findings as the basis for extending its regulatory grasp. Yet it appears that the suggestion of a definite cause-and-effect relationship between natural gas drilling and well-water pollution at Pavillion is based on nothing more substantial than wishful thinking.

This is a truly astounding admission. An agency that seeks to regulate an entire industry, if not the entire national economy, can't get it right even when analyzing a single natural gas well. And yet it rushes out to publicize the results of its initial testing -- an action that biases public opinion against drilling.

This is not the kind of behavior that one expects of a scientific agency in a democracy. It is closer to Stalin's Lysenkoism or the "science" behind Hitler's delusional thinking on eugenics. In both cases, political ends were allowed to pervert scientific findings, with horrific results. The EPA's crusade to regulate and restrict fossil fuel development in America will have disastrous results as well. In a nation without reliable fuel sources, how many persons will be reduced to poverty of Weimar-like proportions? And how many will starve to death, as they did under Lysenko's false science -- or freeze to death without affordable heat?

[RandyM]

The EPA held to account? Not until someone else is in the White House (...and maybe not even then...). That runaway train will be difficult to stop.

[Ghost]

EPA is one of the agencies that should be GONE! along with ALL the CZars.