Environmental Protection Secretary Gina McCarthy said at a recent National Press Club event, “This was one science advisory board that was as fractured as the subject matter.” The subject matter she referred to is drinking water and, according to McCarthy, the board became fractured over the decision whether to remove the unsupported claim that the researchers who conducted the agency’s controversial study had not found “widespread systemic impacts” to it from fracking. Her exaggerated claim was just as misleading as the one she referenced.
Only four of the 30 members dissented when the EPA’s Science Advisory Board recommended that the claim be struck from the final report. Three of the four who dissented have among them decades of ties to companies including Halliburton, Talisman Energy, BP America, Anadarko Petroleum, and others while the fourth owns a Colorado-based oil and gas consulting firm.
Of course, McCarthy was making an attempt at humor with her ‘fractured’ comment. Nobody in any frontline community is laughing. In Pennsylvania alone, the last official count provided on the Department of Environmental Protection’s website shows that at least 283 private water supplies have been contaminated by gas drilling operations, and that doesn’t count the cases that have gone undetermined by the DEP, like that of the Woodlands in Butler County, Pennsylvania, where dozens of families have relied on replacement water distributed by volunteers at a local church for more than five years. Impacted landowners from Pavillion, Wyoming; Parker County, Texas; and Dimock, Pennsylvania, wondered why their cases weren’t included in the study. After all, the EPA had found fracking contamination in each of the locations before abruptly ending all three investigations without explanation.
A new investigative report from Marketplace reveals that the problems with the ‘widespread systemic’ claim go far beyond a minority opinion motivated by self-interest. One might ask how the claim ended up in the report in the first place. Easy answer, it didn’t. The claim only surfaced in the executive summary and press release for the study just prior to the study’s release in June 2015. The ‘widespread systemic’ claim was not in the June 3rd version of the release, and was not only in the June 4th version, it was the key finding.
The Science Advisory Board was correct to question the claim. The board is also calling for the investigations in Pavillion, Parker County, and Dimock to begin again.
After her ‘fractured’ joke, McCarthy said, “While I can’t tell you the direction it is going to take, we are going to listen to all sides in terms of what the members thought, and we’ll come to the best decision that we can.” Even when she’s not joking, McCarthy continues to mislead. This isn’t an honest disagreement that warrants airing of all sides. This is a deliberate manipulation of an executive summary and press release for the purpose of sending a false message to the public, to cover up the truth.
The $29 million study has been fraught with problems from the start. She must direct the agency to reopen the investigations in Wyoming, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Moreover, it’s time for McCarthy to stop misleading the public, pull the ‘widespread systemic’ claim from the report and do it with the same fanfare given to her agency’s damaging lie.