– Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, in a HuffPost repost
I confess to being an early optimist on natural gas. In July of 2009, I wrote a widely circulated op-ed for the Financial Times predicting that newly accessible deposits of natural gas had the potential to rapidly relieve our country of its deadly addiction to Appalachian coal and end forever catastrophically destructive mountaintop removal mining. At that time, government and industry geologists were predicting that new methods of fracturing gas rich shale beds had provided access to an astounding 2000-5000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the lower 48 — enough, they claimed to power our country for a century.
Superb investigative journalism by the New York Times has brought the paper under attack by the natural gas industry. That campaign of intimidation and obfuscation has been orchestrated by top shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake aligned with the industry’s worst bottom feeders. This coalition has launched an impressive propaganda effort carried by slick PR firms, industry funded front groups and a predictable cabal of right wing industry toadies from cable TV and talk radio. In pitting itself against public disclosure and reasonable regulation, the natural gas industry is once again proving that it is its own worst enemy.
These rich reserves might have allowed America to mothball or throttle back our 336 gigawatts of mainly antiquated and inefficient coal fired electric plants replacing them with underutilized capacity from existing gas generation plants. That transition could reduce U.S. mercury emissions by 20%-25%, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain and slash America’s grid based CO2 by an astonishing 20% — literally overnight! Gas could have been a natural companion for wind and solar energy with its capacity to transform variable power into base load, and could have been a critical bridge fuel to the new energy economy rooted in America’s abundant renewables.
American sourced natural gas might also have helped free us from our debilitating reliance on foreign oil now costing our country so dearly in blood, national security, energy independence, global leadership, moral authority, and treasure amounting to $700 billion per year — the total cost to our country of annual oil imports — in addition to two pricey wars that are currently running tabs $2 billion per week.
My caveat was that the natural gas industry and government regulators needed to act responsibly to protect the environment, safeguard communities from irresponsible practices and to candidly inform the public about the true risks and benefits of shale extraction gas.
The opposite has happened.
The industry’s worst actors have successfully battled reasonable regulation, stifled public disclosure while bending compliant government regulators to engineer exceptions to existing environmental rules. Captive agencies and political leaders have obligingly reduced already meager enforcement resources and helped propagate the industry’s deceptive economic projections.
As a result, public skepticism toward the industry and its government regulators is at a record high. With an army of over 40,000 highly motivated anti-fracking activists in New York alone, popular mistrust of the industry is presenting a daunting impediment to its expansion.
I sit on the New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel. I and the other panelists are charged with developing recommendations to the Commissioner regarding rules that will hopefully safeguard New Yorkers from the kind of calamities caused by the natural gas industry to communities just across our border with Pennsylvania. We spend much of our time sorting truth from the web of myths spun about fracking by fast talking landsmen, smarmy CEOs, and federal regulators.
Recent studies have raised doubts about many of the industry’s fundamental presumptions:
- For example, releases of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas, may counterbalance virtually all the benefits of CO2 reductions projected to result from substituting gas power for coal. Robert W. Howarth, Renee Santoro, Anthony Ingraffea, Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations, Climatic Change (2011); Wigley T. (2011) Coal to Gas: The Influence of Methane Leakage. Climate Change Letters. DOI 10.1007/s10584-011-0217-3.
- The human health impacts of gas extraction on local communities may rival those associated with coal. A new study by Centers for Disease Control finds that breast cancer rates have dropped in every county in Texas, but have increased in the six counties with the heaviest natural gas air emissions.
- The U.S. Geological Survey just slashed its estimate on the amount of gas in the Marcellus Shale by 80%, raising doubts about all the industry’s positive economic projections about jobs, royalties, and revenues. Industry based those projections on resource estimates that the federal government has now jettisoned.
- Meanwhile local communities are finding the costs of irresponsible drilling to be ruinous. Contaminated well water, poisoned air, nuisance noise and dust, diminished property values and collapsing quality of life are often the predictable collateral damage of gas shale development in the rural towns of the east. Barth. The Unanswered Questions About the Economic Impact of Gas Drilling in the Marcellus Shale: Don’t Jump to Conclusions. March 2010. Accessed 8/10/11; Christopherson & Rightor. How Should We Think About the Economic Consequences of Shale Gas Drilling? May 2011. Accessed 8/10/11;Stephen G. Osborn, Avner Vengosh, et al., Methane Contamination of drinking water accompanying gas wells drilling and hydraulic fracturing, PNAS Early Edition, April 14, 2011; Riverkeeper, Fractured Communities (Sept. 2010),
- In a devastating admission, the industry now acknowledges that it absolutely cannot afford to pay localities the costs of roads damaged from the thousands of truck trips per wellhead, leaving those ruinous costs to local taxpayers, many of whom will see no benefits from the shale boom, but only declines in their quality of life.
- With several notable exceptions, like Southwest Energy, the industry has demonstrated a disturbing fervor for secrecy while advocating regulatory policies that favor the most irresponsible practices and the worst actors.
[JR: Here are two other important studies: "Natural Gas Bombshell: Switching From Coal to Gas Increases Warming for Decades, Has Minimal Benefit Even in 2100" and "IEA’s Golden Age of Gas Scenario Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change."]
The shale gas industry’s campaign against The Times illustrates the difficulty in getting solid information upon which to base a regulatory scheme. The Times is doing an unusually rigorous job at covering this extremely important and complex issue. The paper’s ongoing series on natural gas drilling is one of the strongest pieces of investigative journalism this year from any news venue. Thankfully, The Times is covering this extremely important topic with rigor and balance. But it is also going the extra mile in the level of documentation it provides to bolster its stories, a move that raises the bar on public service journalism.
In an era when few papers or news outlets are still willing to take on very powerful interests, The Times has pursued very difficult questions about one of our country’s richest and most aggressive industries. At a time when accessing documents through open records requests faces an obstacle course of daunting roadblocks, the series has spent nearly a year using these flawed tools to collect and publish an extraordinary trove of original documentation. Archives published by The Times include thousands of pages obtained through leaks and/or public records requests. The Times reporters provide page-by-page annotations explaining the documents so that the reader can sift through them in guided fashion.
Among the revelations uncovered by The Times’ admirable reporting;
- Sewage treatment plants in the Marcellus region have been accepting millions of gallons of natural gas industry wastewater that carry significant levels of radioactive elements and other pollutants that they are incapable of treating.
- An EPA study published by The Times shows receiving rivers and streams into which these plants discharge are unable to consistently dilute this kind of highly toxic effluent.
- Most of the state’s drinking water intakes, streams and rivers have not been tested for radioactivity for years — since long before the drilling boom began.
- Industry is routinely making inflated claims about how much of its wastewater it is actually recycling.
- EPA, caving to industry lobbyists and high level political interference reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney era, has narrowed the scope of its national study on hydrofracking despite vocal protests from agency scientists. The EPA had, for example, planned to study in detail the effect on rivers of sending radioactive wastewater through sewage plants, but dropped these plans during the phase when White House-level review was conducted.
- Similar studies in the past had been narrowed by industry pressure, leading to widespread exemptions for the oil and gas industry from environmental laws.
- The Times revealed an ongoing and red hot debate within the EPA about whether the agency should force Pennsylvania to handle its drilling waste more carefully and strengthen that state’s notoriously lax regulations and anemic enforcement.
- The Times investigation also explodes the industry’s decade old mantra that a “there is not a single documented case of drinking water being contaminated by fracking.” The Times investigation of EPA archives exposes this claim as demonstrably false.
A second round of New York Times stories showed that within the natural gas industry and among federal energy officials, there were serious and disturbing reservations about the economic prospects of shale gas:
- Government and industry officials made sure that all of their reservations were discussed privately and never revealed to the American public. Internal commentary by these officials is striking because it contrasts so sharply with the excited public rhetoric from the same agencies, lawmakers, industry officials and energy experts about shale gas.
- Many industry experts have reservations over whether the wells produce as much gas as industry is claiming and whether companies may be misleading investors, landowners, and the public about the true costs of shale gas.
- Shale gas wells often dry up faster than companies expected — sometimes several decades faster than predicted.
- Rather than coming clean, the companies downplay how much it costs to keep these wells flowing and overstate how much profit companies can make by these wells.
- Furthermore, only a small percentage of the land in each shale gas field turns out to be highly productive, even at the start. Nevertheless, companies routinely pretend that all of their acreage will be equally promising.
- These emerging issues also sparked private discussion among federal energy experts, who expressed grave concern that their agency’s predictions were too heavily influenced by the natural gas industry’s over-optimism. The Times found that the EIA was heavily reliant on data provided by companies with shale-gas industry ties.
The science writer for the Knight Ridder Journalism website summed up the significance of the Times’ revelations about the industry’s ballyhooed economic prospects. “From here, it appears that the Times and [the series principal author] Mr. Urbina are calmly saying we should learn a lesson from the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, suggesting investors and regulators and gov’t planners step with care and not be blinkered by all the money that’s pouring in.”
The organized attack on The Times and its reputation by well financed industry spin machines is illustrative of the perils and real challenges facing public service journalism today.
The Times piece has been the target of massive industry blowback. Industry funded front groups like Energy in Depth, an army of slick PR firms, and former regulatory officials like PA DEP Commissioner John Hanger, now on industry’s payroll, have artfully manufactured deceptive talking points and posted blogs that are parroted by journalists looking for an industry response to The Times coverage and then emailed as “facts” to the industry’s supporters and its indentured servants in Congress.
Ironically, many of the attacks against the series have claimed that the articles were poorly sourced or under-researched. Yet, The Times has not printed a single factual correction. This is certainly an admirable reporting record for a series that has been running in the paper for nearly a year. This is because, despite massive efforts by the industry to find errors, no critic has been able to identify a single fact that The Times actually got wrong. The Times posted thousands of pages of closely annotated original-source documents along with its news articles.
Rarely has a series had such wide-reaching and immediate impact. The New York Times articles have led to major changes in how the industry as well as state and federal regulators are handling one of America’s most important energy issues.
Documents uncovered by The Times have already been put to use in litigation by injured parties seeking to force some treatment plants to stop handling the frack wastewater. The Times series has also pressured the EPA to begin a review of treatment plant permits (signaling the agency’s possible intent to prohibit plants from discharging treated waste into rivers without comprehensive testing for shale gas contaminants). Healthy skepticism raised by the series has dampened some of the thrilled exuberance among Wall Street bankers ecstatic about the latest gold rush, federal lawmakers in the thrall of industry money, and in hard pressed rural communities seduced by hollow promises of massive royalties, local prosperity and abundant jobs.
As our panel grapples with these complex and difficult problems, we have found that the principal impediment to going forward with recommendations regarding regulations that could allow fracking in our state is a general mistrust of the claims we are hearing from industry and federal regulators. Revelations from The Times series and elsewhere have cast doubt upon all the industry’s assurances about fracking and have complicated the task for those of us charged with advising the regulatory agencies on developing rules that could allow the industry to proceed while safeguarding the public interest.
For many of us on New York State’s fracking panel, the one bright light has been the presence of Southwest Energy’s Vice President and General Counsel Mark Boling. Boling is bullish on shale gas but his passion for public disclosure and a rigorous and rational regulatory framework, his candor about the perils of certain practices and his honest assessments of the costs and benefits of gas shale extraction have inspired trust and confidence among his fellow panelists. Boling’s candor may have made him a pariah in his industry, but the panel’s confidence in his integrity is the one thing that might allow us to go forward with recommendations regarding a regulatory scheme that could allow certain kinds of fracking to proceed in New York State. None of us wants to be in the position of getting seduced by sweet and lofty promises that quickly turn into a sour gas and impoverished communities.
Gas fracking flacks routinely make extravagant promises about bringing jobs and income to the depressed rural communities. If those jobs and royalties don’t come — the way they have not come for people in Bradford County, PA — New Yorkers will be justifiably angry, as they wonder why the government and our panel did not protect them when there were so many warning signs.
– Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, is President of Waterkeeper Alliance and a Professor at Pace University
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Video reveals gas leaks under US cities
More than 8 billion cubic metres of natural gas are lost in the US each year, somewhere between the point of production and reaching homes across the nation.
Now, thousands of previously unreported leaks are turning up under the streets of Boston and San Francisco. For the first time, the video shown here reveals methane concentrations on the streets of both cities as much as 15 times higher than the global background level of 1.86 parts per million. The green peaks in the Google Earth fly-around animations indicate areas where gas is leaking from underground.
The map is part of an ongoing effort between researcher Nathan Phillips of Boston University and San Francisco based start-up Picarro to map the exact location and volume of gas emitted from pipeline leaks nationwide. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/07/video-reveals-gas-leaks-under-us-cities.html
Ironically, the Natural Gas leakages successfully destroys the “wedges approach”:
The idea was very simple: each wedge represented one in-hand technology or societal practice that could be implemented, relatively slowly at first and increasing linearly with time, to make a small but growing dent in the rise in CO2 emissions, stabilizing them at 2004 levels (about 7 Gigatons C/Year) over the next 50 years http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/10/the-cost-of-inaction/
One gigatonne is one billion metric tonnes ( 1 Gt = 1 x 109 tonnes) http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/conversion-factors-for-ice-and-water-mass-and-volume/
well, better late than never. It’s nice that RFK finally gets religion with regards to trying to use mined methane (natural gas) to replace coal and nukes. It was a bad idea long ago, and it still is.
See
http://wagengineering.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-strategy-of-replacing-coal-with.html
And for good measure, in states like NY with our bizarro marginal price system (NYISO, in this case), natural gas usage to make elecicity actually INCREASES the spot market price of electricity, which incases the rentier profits for those who own old nukes and old coal burners (which is the only kind we have in NY State) in peak times. However, adding more wind derived electricity, which directly replaces natural gas sourced electricity first, actually drops spot market electricity prices and especially those extraordinary profits that would have otherwise gone to the owners of those old coal burners and old nukes. See http://wagengineering.blogspot.com/2011/06/merit-order-effect-in-wny_06.html
Too bad NY State via NYPA trashed any offshore wind prospects recently with its pathetic GLOW decision:
http://wagengineering.blogspot.com/2011/09/offshore-wind-revisted-in-2011.html
DB
this is very good and important news. it becomes clearer daily that the fight has got to be against all forms of ‘extreme’ hydrocarbons, from fracked gas to deepwater oil to tarsands. took me a while to figure it out too, but by now it’s pretty darned clear that the ‘bridge fuel’ is actually a rickety pier leading out into the middle of nothing. forget bridges, time to make the energy leap
Right. Clean energy now!
Right! And forget pipelines, Obama. It time to come clean on climate change!
As much as I like to complain about the NYT (and don’t we all?), the Times is necessary, and when it does good, solid reporting like this, it gets hammered by all the usual suspects.
Good journalism often gets punished like this.
Kudos to NYT and RFK Jr.
Thanks for your work, RFK, and also for your inspiring speech in San Francisco a few years ago, where some of us were moved to tears.
The Times deserves a big round of applause here, but their own Andy Revkin should read his own newspaper (though technically he just hosts his blog there). Instead, Andy likes to talk about the “golden age of gas”, and disputes claims about both emissions equivalency and fracking dangers.
We need to reflexively disbelieve oil and gas company claims about pollution and risks to drinking water. They really don’t know how to tell the truth on these subjects.
Forget Andy. He doesn’t get “it.” He asked my husband what “it” is. He pointed at my husband after a lecture and said, “That man’s grandchildren will be fine.”
It’s a shame that Andy continues to publish as though he’s an authority on “it.”
WOW!
Kennedy is against nuclear on the grounds it has risks and might hurt somebody.
It is the only energy source that can replace fossil fuel and curb CO2 emissions which will eventually very probably kill everybody.
No. Nuclear as it is today is not safe, because climate change up’s seismic activities and current plants can only sustain magnitude 6. Plus france has each year growing problems to cool their plants, because of rivers running dry or waters are to hot for cooling.
So far this major issues are not accounted for, or tell me.
And then it is proven that clean tech can create baseload. Sweden uses bio-energy to the fullest or denmark, scotland are on the path to become 100% renewable.
Technologies like smart grids with an electric battery fleet, new approaches for energy storage (molten salt storage), continental wide diverse energy generation setups, make this possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgFyYkXbHyg&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Rifkin on the business case
Great Movie.
btw
Lower prices mean a shorter payback period for investments. The payback period for a wind project, for example, is a fraction of that for nuclear. Combined with the safety concerns over nuclear power and construction costs – which tend to skyrocket once build-out begins, renewable energy is a much more attractive investment, says Sarasin.
Banks would rather lend to wind projects that can be built in 12-18 months than to nuclear plants, which take 10-15 years to build.
Pension funds are already big investors in renewables, as many of them seek investments that address climate change and decentralized energy that jump start emerging nations.
It’s inevitable that oil and gas firms invest in clean energy to diversify beyond their finite business model. Statoil in Norway is staking out expertise in offshore wind. Many of the majors have had renewable energy divisions for many years, such as BP Solar and Shell Wind. http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/23057
More delusions. Pension funds invest in wind because wind gets heavy subsidies, and wind power works very well with natural gas. Wind power is only economical when paired with natural gas, that is the experience Germany has clearly demonstrated.
The only realistic medium term option for going CO2 free is nuclear energy. France has done it. Germany has shown that you can sink almost an endless sum into renewable sources and only increase your CO2 output (almost all of Germany’s “amazing improvement” over the last decades came from shutting down former east German plants).
And what’s the worry about seismic activity? Any modern reactor would have safety systems at least equal to Three Mile Island, so that would be the worst case scenario going forward. More people die every year in the construction of wind turbines than died due to TMI.
If you want to keep shilling for the natural gas industry by shooting down the one source of power that can realistically get us off CO2 while sustaining a modern economy, go for it, I prefer to live in the real world.
I have no idea why you tell me that wind only works with natural gas. You seem to forget Biomass -> Bio-Energy entirely. And then you do not talk about the cooling problem. 40% of france freshwater is used to cool their reactors. Plants at the sea side are prone to tsunami threats! France is looking now to replace nuclear plants with solar and other sources of energy generation!
And btw. Nuclear Plant construction takes a lot of cement, which is a major source of Co2.
Then your example with Three Mile Islands and earthquakes? Get your facts straight.
Could Three Mile Island be damaged by an earthquake? Maybe.
Moreoever, the NRC emphasizes that nuclear plants are designed with a margin of safety beyond the strongest earthquake anticipated in that area.
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/03/could_three_mile_island_be_dam.html
But strongest quakes for areas is about to rise. Nuclear plants can only sustain about 6 magnitude quakes. Then things start to break! You can not make nuclear safe, not in this world.
France launches vast solar panel array
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/13/france-launches-vast-solar-panel-array/
The Desertec project http://desertec.org
Greece Expects $27 Billion Solar Plan to Advance by Year-End
Papaconstantinou said he plans to sign a pact with European Union officials and renewable energy companies that will help deliver Project Helios, named after the Greek god of the sun, which envisions luring foreign investors to install as many as 10 gigawatts of solar panels in Greece.
“I have spoken with three German ministers now on the project as well as with the EU, and I’m optimistic we can get a framework agreement by the end of the year,” Greek Energy Minister Papaconstantinou said in an interview in Athens today. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-07/greece-expects-27-billion-solar-plan-to-advance-by-year-end.html
Robert Kennedy Jr. is an enemy of science and does not deserve a place here. He has no credibility whatsoever and merely damages any cause or idea with which he is associated.
Forgive my boorishness, but I am sick to death of people taking forever to figure out the most basic lessons of climate science and our current situation:
1. We have already loaded far too much CO2 into the atmosphere.
2. We continue to add to that problem every moment of every day, and at a horrific rate.
3. In order to avoid massively painful climate impacts humanity has to reduce CO2 emissions far quicker than any country’s current plan or pledge.
4. Converting from one fossil fuel to another is never going help matters, and will only make the situation worse as it will delay the inevitable by kicking off a new round of capital investment in the wrong technologies and energy sources.
Therefore:
A large-scale conversion of electricity generation or transportation to fossil fuels a major mistake. It locks us into emissions for decades much higher than we can afford.
CCS is a bad joke. At best it captures 90% of CO2, and even then at a high energy cost, roughly a third of a plant’s output. If the entire US economy has to be 90% carbon free by 2050 (which is equivalent to an 80% reduction from 1990 levels by 2050), then retrofitting some small portion of electricity plants with CCS won’t do nearly enough. It will leave electricity so dirty that cuts in other sectors can’t possibly make up for it.
The only solution is a combination of efficiency and the swiftest possible movement away from all forms of coal, oil, and natural gas that we can manage. Nothing else move the numbers enough in the time frame needed.
CCS can be applied to biomass-based processes, such that it will give a net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. It appears unfortunately that this will be necessary even with the most optimistic phase-out of fossil fuels. Please remember that much of the forests of N. America are essentially dead from various diseases and pests that climate change allowed to take hold. If these dead forests are not harvested for biomass+CCS they will burn up “naturally”, thereby making CO2 emissions much worse in short time. Climate change will force a transition from the current mix of trees to a different mix or to savanna, grassland or desert. This is now out of our control.
Great article. I just wanted to add that the June 2011 speech RFK made to the Commonwealth Club/Climate One Group was one of the most dynamic and incredible speeches about fossil fuels and renewable energy which I’ve ever heard. Here’s the mp3 http://audio.commonwealthclub.org/audio/podcast/climateone.xml it’s an hour long or so, and fasten your seat belts!
The climate One podcast is here http://audio.commonwealthclub.org/audio/podcast/climateone.xml
I can’t believe people here actually support this clown RFK Jr. He has done immeasurable damage to the cause of science and public health, he’s a charlatan and a liar who adamantly refuses to own up to his mistakes and who has viciously smeared many good people who were doing their jobs in the service of the public. In case anyone doesn’t know what I’m talking about, you can start here, and it got even worse from that point forward.
This man has no place in respectable discourse. Please do not give him any respect or credit in the future.
Thank you.
I think people should be judged on the topic at hand. There has been recommendations to remove mercury from vaccinations. Mercury is highly toxic substance and has been removed because of health concerns…
Dr. Neal Halsey, director of the Institute of Vaccine Safety, strongly advocating removal of thiomersal from vaccines due to possible safety risks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy
Animal experiments suggest that thiomersal rapidly dissociates to release ethylmercury after injection; that the disposition patterns of mercury are similar to those after exposure to equivalent doses of ethylmercury chloride; and that the central nervous system and the kidneys are targets, with lack of motor coordination being a common sign. Similar signs and symptoms have been observed in accidental human poisonings. The mechanisms of toxic action are unknown. Fecal excretion accounts for most of the elimination from the body. Ethylmercury clears from blood with a half-life of about 18 days in adults. Ethylmercury is eliminated from the brain in about 14 days in infant monkeys. Inorganic mercury metabolized from ethylmercury has a much longer half-life, at least 120 days; though it appears to be much less toxic than the inorganic mercury produced from mercury vapor, for reasons not yet understood.[11]
Risk assessment for effects on the nervous system have been made by extrapolating from dose-response relationships for methylmercury.[11] Methylmercury and ethylmercury distributes to all body tissues, crossing the blood-brain barrier and the placental barrier, and ethylmercury also moves freely throughout the body http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal
Sorry, but everything you are saying is completely bogus. RFK does not have a “controversial” view about autism, he is an anti-vax nut case and a science denier. There is no controversy about Thimerosal, any more than there is a controversy about anthropogenic global warming. These are in the identical category. You need to educate yourself about this issue.
Go here:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/06/robert_f_kennedy_jr_has_declared_a_crank_1.php
and here
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/02/stupid_cubed_david_kirby_rfk_jr_and_gene.php
RFK Jr. is indistinguishable for Anthony Watts or Ken Hamm. He absolutely does not deserve to have a public platform. Whether you agree with him about this issue is irrelevant — he damages any cause with which he is associated. There isn’t space for me to provide the evidence in a comment here — follow the links. And my language is dispassionate. It’s just the truth — RFK Jr. is a liar, a fraud, and a crank.
BPA in pregnant women might affect kids’ behavior
CHICAGO — Exposure to BPA before birth could affect girls’ behavior at age 3, according to the latest study on potential health effects of the widespread chemical. http://www.ajc.com/health/bpa-in-pregnant-women-1208609.html
Cervantes, before you start impugning and insulting other people, how about you provide some evidence (and use dispassionate language please).
All your link really shows is that RFK has a “controversial” view about autism. I think you have undermined your argument both by flimsy accusation and by your antagonistic rhetoric. Finally, even if you don’t like RFK for reasons X,Y,Z, why is that relevant to the discussion about the harms of natural gas? What is stated here about natural gas that you disagree with?
I’d say because RFK lacks credibility among those who take science seriously. It isn’t just that he holds a “controversial” view on autism, it is that he only seems to support scientific evidence when it supports his preconceived ideas. I’d love to see an article like this written by a scientist, or public health expert. But I don’t trust Kennedy because he has shown in the past that he lets his views color his interpretation of scientific studies.
As an example:
The article he wrote for salon.com regarding the supposed vaccine-autism connection has been retracted by salon.com (check retraction watch: http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/salon-retracts-2005-robert-f-kennedy-jr-piece-on-alleged-autism-vaccine-link/). The article remains on his website. His article displayed a truly ridiculous confusion of correlation and causation, suggesting that either he doesn’t understand statistics, or is willing to lie about them.
He’s still going on about this topic years later, after the original study suggesting a vaccine-autism connection has been withdrawn because of outright fraud in the data and experiments.
So I may not disagree with what this article says, but I don’t trust anything RFK writes that touches on scientific topics. And I know there are others like me.
Actually, I believe Abrahm Lustgarten and other staffers at ProPublica kicked this story off well before Urbina, not that he hasn’t done excellent work as well. PP has done scores of investigative pieces, going back to August 2008. Just to give credit where it’s due.
And I have to agree: How many times do we have to learn these lessons? We get the (smoldering) planet we deserve.