Science Board’s Critique of EPA’s Fracking Study
WASHINGTON—Last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a widely anticipated report on whether the “fracking” processes widely used to extract natural gas threatened nearby sources of groundwater. Last Thursday, EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) issued a critique of the agency’s earlier assessment. In it, the SAB expressed concern that EPA did not quantitatively support the assertion that it did not find “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.”
A new blog posted today by Resources for the Future (RFF) now looks at the assertions by both EPA and the SAB: Is the Science Advisory Board’s Critique of EPA’s Fracking Report Justified? Authors RFF Senior Fellow Alan J. Krupnick, co-director of RFF’s Center for Energy and Climate Economics, and RFF Research Assistant Isabel Echarte state that although the SAB could have been more charitable in its criticism of EPA’s “no systemic risk” finding, the SAB was correct in suggesting that EPA faces a high burden in asserting that on a national level there are no systemic effects.
Read the full blog post: Is the Science Advisory Board’s Critique of EPA’s Fracking Report Justified?
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