Industry Pressure Kept Oklahoma’s Scientists Silent on Earthquake-Fracking Link Since 2010: Report

[jakeXT]

For years, the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS) avoided acknowledging that Oklahoma’s dramatic increase in earthquakes had anything to do with the oil and gas industry, even while federal scientists fully acknowledged the link.

...

“Since early 2010 we have recognized the potential for the Jones earthquake swarm to be due to the Hunton dewatering (oil and gas project),” Austin Holland, an OGS seismologist wrote to USGS science adviser Bill Leith in 2013, according to documents obtained by EnergyWire. “But until we can demonstrate that scientifically or not we were not going to discuss that publicly.”

According to EnergyWire, Holland was called into meetings with his boss, University of Oklahoma President David Boren, and oil executives, to discuss the link. Among the oilmen was Continental Resources Chairman Harold Hamm, who was also a leading donor to the university. According to a Tulsa petroleum geologist named Bob Jackman, Hamm may have had an influence on Holland’s statements on the issue.

Jackman described to EnergyWire a conversation with Holland in which he pressed him regarding Oklahoma’s earthquakes after a conference in September. Jackman said Holland let slip, “You don't understand—Harold Hamm and others will not allow me to say certain things.”

http://www.newsweek.com/industry-pressure-kept-oklahomas-scientists-silent-earthquake-fracking-link-311307

[djean111]

1. Oh noes! I have been told many times, right here, that industry would NEVER put pressure on a

scientist.

[truedelphi]

3. Good to meet another

fellow "conspiracy theorist!"

I have been told the same thing, myself. And if I argue from my own experience, not only from day to day observations, but also from my having made road trips to Sacramento to view first hand how industry presents its version of "science" to the political elite, then I am told that what I am saying is merely "anecdotal."

[truedelphi]

2. Thakn you JakeXT for this information.

My own feeling on this is we in the US no longer have much science.

between the creationists who attempt to tell us "scientifically" that the world is less than 7,000 years old, to the Big Pharma, Big Energy, Big War industries which are keeping researchers and scientists held back from speaking the truth on many many topics, and unless those same scientists and researchers want to be unemployed, divested of their pensions, and blacklisted, and made into pariahs, they do keep silent. And sometimes they must alter the results of the data in order to keep their jobs.

And from weathercasting to headline creation, the news media does their best to honor the Big Pharma, Big Energy and Big War Industries and their need to keep a lid on the truth.

[MisterP]

5. pinned between technocracy and fundamentalism--what a nasty place to be stuck indeed

[bearssoapbox]

4. What do they care.

Hamm and others like him can afford to live any where they want when OK and other states are no longer habitable.

http://earthquaketrack.com/p/united-states/oklahoma/recent

There's a fault line that runs through OK City. With any luck maybe fracking will break the south away from the U.S. and it will drift into the Gulf. They get what they want and we get rid of the assholes.

If they drift far enough south they will be South Americas problem. That way we wouldn't even have to build a fence.