Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

What has the DRBC been doing for the last two years? Well, it’s been studying fractivist literature, including a collection of materials from an individual who learned about fracking at a church pot-luck.

The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) scheduled a vote on its proposed regulations governing natural gas drilling for September 21, 2011, cancelled and rescheduled twice and then ran for the hills never to be heard from again.  The lack of leadership and cowardice in the face of small but loud special interest groups such as the Delaware Riverkeeper have chagrined landowners and residents of the upper basin ever since.

Earlier this year the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance decided it had enough and started preparing for a lawsuit by making Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests of the agency to find out what in the world was happening and why.  The results to date have been relatively meager as the DRBC has stonewalled in every possible way but NWPOA has learned one important thing – what the Commission has supposedly been studying over the last two years and it reveals an organization of not only incredible incompetence but also stunning naiveté.

DRBC Rationalizations

Here’s how Commission Chair Michele Siekerka, New Jersey’s Assistant Commissioner of Water Resources rationalized the DRBC’s inexcusable delay after Pennsylvania Tom Corbett laid it on the line with a letter calling it unacceptable:

At its Wednesday meeting here, commission chair Michele Siekerka, New Jersey’s assistant commissioner of water resources, responded: “We continue to confer in good faith and with forward momentum.”

Since November 2011, when a vote on proposed regulations was canceled, DRBC staff and staffs of the commission members “have spent thousands, I do mean thousands, of hours” doing more work, said Siekerka.

She said they were “benchmarking new regulations, best management practices and performance standards adopted by states, federal agencies, and other organizations.”

She said the staff also had been conducting water monitoring to establish baseline conditions and had been developing a tool for evaluating the effect of land-based development on water resources.

Really?  Well, the NWPOA’s FOIA request included a demand for “copies of any correspondence, e-mail, file memorandums, research reports or other materials pertaining to research conducted since September 21, 2011, in regard to gas drilling regulations.”  The DRBC, in its reply on July 24, 2013, provided what it described as a “partial response” in the form of a bibliography and compact disk with the various materials it has been studying.  They are eye-opening, to say the least.

Fractivist Literature

The bibliography is a laundry list of what is largely, though hardly exclusively, fractivist literature and it’s some of the worst stuff imaginable.  Here are three of the worst examples:

• Northup, James L. “The Unique Environmental Impacts of Horizontally Hydrofracking Shale Gas,” Report, 2010 – Northrup is a well-known fractivist given to angry outbursts and name-calling and this report is replete with baseless statements claiming fracking amounts to a “massive water bomb,” contaminates water wells and creates “a potential delivery mechanism for toxic chemicals and natural gas into aquifers,” all of which are patently false.  Northrup’s credibility as the kind of source the DRBC ought to be relying upon can be quickly ascertained by visiting his blog, where he uses terms such as “gasholes” in his scientific analyses.
• Howarth, Robert W., Renee Santoro, and Anthony Ingraffea. “Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations: A letter,” Climate Change, (2011) Springerlink.com, April 12, 2011 – This is the infamous report from Cornell fractivists who like to pal around with Yoko Ono.  It was financed by the anti-gas Park Foundation and suggests natural gas was dirtier than coal based on some highly dubious assumptions that were torn to shreds in numerous other independent peer-reviewed studies, including one by another Cornell professor, Lawrence Cathles.  The DRBC study materials, revealingly, includes the Howarth, et al rebuttal to Cathles but not his critique and none of the many others from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and the like.  It’s as if there’s no science but anti-gas science.
• Bamberger, Michelle, and Robert E. Oswald. “Impacts of Gas Drilling on Human and Animal Health,” New Solutions, Vol. 22(1) 55-77, 2012 – This is an openly biased sham study with no numbers, from still more Park Foundation friends at Cornell, that goes so far as to admit their study identifies no causal links between gas drilling or fracking and health.  Rather, it only suggests “possible links between gas drilling and negative health effects.” Worse, it was based entirely on anecdotal evidence. It was, in other words, a study designed to produce headlines, not science.

The bibliography also includes submissions from the radically anti-gas Damascus Citizens for Sustainability (a Manhattan based group) and Delaware Riverkeeper Network plus items with these self-explanatory titles (many nothing more than news stories):

• “Marcellus Shale drilling may take huge chunks out of Pennsylvania forests”
• “Western Pennsylvania Gas Well Blast Injures 3 Workers”
• “Natural Gas: Yellowstone Blast is Reminder of Onshore Blowout Dangers”
• “Sierra Club Blocks Maryland Natural Gas Exportation Terminal”
• “How Corbett Fracked Pennsylvania’s Middle Class”
• “Study lists significant negative impacts of gas drilling in Maryland”
• “We Can’t Drink Natural Gas: Health Issues and Gas Drilling”

Pot-luck Science

Reports issued by Conrad Volz and Theo Colburn, two of the most virulent fractivists around, are also included, although few of their peers take either seriously.  There is one more entry that truly boggles the mind and serves to illustrate the political correctness that pervades Carol Collier’s administration of this agency.  It is this listing (emphasis added):

MATERIALS COMPILED BY E. TATHAM

Ms. Tatham (on behalf of the League of Women Voters) provided a large, digital collection of articles and reports highlighting environmental and health risks associated with natural gas development. These have been maintained as a discrete collection.

“Discrete” is different than “discreet,” the first meaning “apart from” and the latter meaning “prudently and with wise self-restraint” but a review of these materials, which were wisely not specifically listed, suggests this was a Freudian substitution.  Elizabeth Tatham, of Bucks County, is identified in the bibliography as being associated with the League of Women Voters (which is anything but unbiased but that’s a subject for another day).  The compact disk provided to NWPOA and titled “Natural Gas Information Library” identifies her as follows (emphasis added):

Elizabeth Tatham is a volunteer with the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, the Sierra Club, the League of Women Voters and a member of other organizations in PA and the USA that work to protect children and the environment.  While directing three YWCAs for 24 years she started the first shelter for battered women and their children in Utah and her focus has been on helping at risk and low income children and their families build healthy, satisfying lives.  She learned about fracking several years ago at a Church pot-luck in PA and has educated herself through research, attending conferences and hearings and by reading numerous studies, reports and articles.  She testified in September 2010 at the EPA’s National Hearing on the EPA Study in Binghamton and at DRBC and other hearings in the East in 2010 and 2011. Her YWCA resume summary is at the end of the section on Studies.

Seriously?  The DRBC is studying a pile of 199 mostly unscientific fractivist pieces of literature assembled by a woman who learned about fracking at a church pot-luck and made herself an expert?  Or, as is more likely, did the DRBC feel compelled to accept this submission from a Riverkeeper and Sierra Club volunteer because she was a politically allied friend Carol Collier didn’t want to offend? Tatum, by all appearances, is a community spirited and sincere person but does that make her any more credible than dozens of other similarly sincere people in NWPOA?

The Missing Files

Would Collier accept a similar package of materials from NWPOA or the industry? The answer is obvious from the fact NWPOA doesn’t appear in the bibliography despite the fact it made several detailed submissions to the DRBC.  There is no industry material either (save for some information and photos from a Chesapeake tour) and very little truly objective scientific research.  The anti-gas Myers report is there, of course, but not the rebuttal.  Also missing are the dozens and dozens of reports from academia, government and industry that have found gas drilling and fracking to be reducing carbon emissions, providing economic stimulus, saving land from development with a far greater imprint and producing low cost energy safely.  That wasn’t science to DRBC ears, it seems, because it wasn’t fractivist science.

Worse to the ears and eyes of landowners is the fact the DRBC says this activity, and taking money from the fractivist William Penn Foundation to design a model, is what it has been doing for the last two years.  It’s nothing less than a scandal.  When will it end?