EPA Insider Says Government Covered Up Fracking Emissions For Years

A new report claims that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has deliberately covered up the dangers of fracking for years, hiding the information from the public.  An environmental watchdog says the systematic cover-up proves that toxic emissions as a result of fracking are a danger to public health. Commondreams.org reports: That cover-up, the group says, was at the hands of at least one EPA researcher who accepted payments from the oil and gas industry. In an incendiary federal complaint (pdf) filed on Wednesday with the EPA’s Inspector General, the 28-year-old North Carolina-based group NC WARN wrote that “there has been a persistent and deliberate cover-up that has prevented the agency from requiring the natural gas industry to make widespread, urgently needed and achievable reductions in methane venting and leakage (’emissions’) across the nation’s expanding natural gas infrastructure.” “Studies relied upon by EPA to develop policy and regulations were scientifically invalid,” the organization charged. Specifically, wrote NC WARN in a press statement, “Dr. David Allen, then-head of EPA’s Science Advisory Board, has led an ongoing, three-year effort to cover up underreporting of the primary device, the Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler, and a second device used to measure gas releases from equipment across the natural gas [...]