Fake Study Recommends Quarter-Mile Setbacks for PA Shale Drilling
Thought Piece
It’s official. A Pennsylvania environmental group is copying an initiative spawned in Boulder, CO, using a discredited study to advance their cause. Environmentalism has become a secular religion, with no regard for facts or the loss of credibility while they proselytize.
Thanks to Pennsylvania’s best reporter, Jim Willis and the Marcellus Drilling News.
How does one explain why current American “environmentalism” is ignoring the 1/3 the world’s population who need to modernize their sanitation, health care, interior air quality, reliable electricity/grid, and broadband?
High sounding words and phrases like “population control,” “environmental justice,” “100 % renewables,” “clean energy that doesn’t include energy efficiency,” “Leave it in the ground” and “restoration to pre-industrial age” seem so inhumane, short-sighted, uneconomic, and pessimistic to improve the lives of 2 Billion people who are not yet living in the modern world. Several million people die there every year from basic diseases caused by interior air pollution, dirty water, and poor sanitation.
No stinking solar oven will ever end poverty.
“Socialist central planning for economics may be intellectually dead, but global climate planning is alive and well.” Robert Bradley, Jr
Fake Study Recommends Quarter-Mile Setbacks for PA Shale Drilling
More fake “research” on drilling, courtesy the anti-drilling Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project (EHP). This is the same group of antis who brought us the so-called list of the harmed (in 2013) and last year launched a faux health registry that attempts to link everything from the sniffles to “performance issues” to nearby fracking (see Fake Science: SWPA Enviro Health Registry for Those Near Fracking). Here’s the latest laughable “research” published (yes published) in a pay-for-play journal: Setback distances for unconventional oil and gas development: Delphi study results. The so-called researchers from EHP asked 18 of their anti-drilling friends, who are supposedly experts, for an opinion on how far away a building should be located from a shale well. The current standard in PA is 500 feet. That is, a well being drilled must be at least 500 feet away from an “occupied building.” EHP’s anti-drilling friends (16 of the 18) said that number should be 1,320 feet–a quarter mile. EHP wrote it all up, presenting it as fact, and got it published in the very low-standard PLOS One journal–a journal where you pay them and they’ll publish anything. Totally made-up research. PLOS One is “peer reviewed” so voila, there’s now a “peer reviewed study” that says setbacks in PA should be at least a quarter of a mile away when it comes to shale drilling. Which would eliminate about 90% of all shale drilling in the state (which is the purpose of this “study”). We really don’t know how those from EHP can show their faces in public, pedaling this kind of junk science. More to the point, how can any honest, self-respecting organization spend good money to fund EHP?…
Fake Study Recommends Quarter-Mile Setbacks for PA Shale Drilling
