Public Accountability Initiative Produces New Report on SUNY Buffalo's "Shill Gas Study"
The Public Accountability Initiative (PAI) has upped the ante on DeSmogBlog's reporting on what we coined a "Shill Gas Study" recently conducted by SUNY Buffalo.
In our critique of the "study" we pointed out the fact that all of the authors and nearly the entire peer review board of the study, other than one person, was or has been connected to the oil and gas industry.
The study, published by the brand new SUNY Buffalo's Shale Resources and Society Institute and titled "Environmental Impacts During Shale Gas Drilling: Causes, Impacts and Remedies," was also, as we pointed out, based on likely purposefully flawed methodology. We wrote:
The Shale Resources and Society Institute "study" concluded that between Jan. 2008-Aug. 2011, "1,844 of the [Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP)] violations [by the gas industry], or 62 percent, were administrative and preventative in nature. The remaining 1,144 violations, or 38 percent, were environmental in nature."
Left out of the study is the fact that, as a May 10 Cleveland Plain Dealer report shows, a majority of wells are not even inspected in the state of Pennslyvania by the DEP. In 2009, the DEP inspected 23% of its wells, 24% in 2010 and 35% in 2011, with 84 hired inspectors to examine what grew to 69,000 wells by 2011 in the state.
Taking our reporting a step further, PAI published a study this week titled, "The UB Shale Play: Distorting the Facts about Fracking," which offered additional critiques of the methodology of SUNY Buffalo's "study." PAI explained in a press release:
Read more: Public Accountability Initiative Produces New Report on SUNY Buffalo's "Shill Gas Study"
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This announcement comes in response to a 
