EARTHblog » Alan Septoff
The biased fracking debate - Pennsylvania’s contribution
On Monday, I blogged about the biased mainstream fracking debate citing the Associated Press – which, so slow to acknowledge the health risks of fracking-enabled oil and gas drilling, was very quick to cite fracking’s (speculative) health benefits.
Today, it’s state government’s turn.
Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection was legally mandated to publish a report by spring of 2012 on how climate change will affect the state. It has missed the deadline, and there’s no telling when it will be published.
One reason for the missed deadline? State government pressured Penn State report authors to remove mention of science showing natural gas’s potential climate impacts.
Tagged with: fracking, pennsylvania department of environmental protection, climate change, bias
The biased mainstream fracking debate
Yesterday’s Associated Press story about the health impacts of fracking-enabled oil and gas drilling in southwest Pennsylvania inadvertently reveals the bias that underlies much of the “mainstream” fracking debate.
The story covers results from the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project’s study:* fracking-enabled oil and gas development harms the health of residents living nearby.
One might think that a story about fracking’s threat to human health shows how robust the debate is – or even that there’s an environmental bias in fracking reporting. But one would be wrong.
Tagged with: fracking, health, associated press, bias
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