Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf says research will address “the concern that there is a relationship between hydraulic fracturing and childhood cancers.”
In my stats class on Thursday students were upset that they couldn't ever "accept" the null hypothesis: it seems to them that one should either reject the null hypothesis or accept it. Well, here's one reason why not: as the article says, “The fact that there is no known environmental factor associated with
the development of Ewing Sarcoma does not mean there is no environmental
factor in the development of Ewing Sarcoma,” Dr. Ketyer said. “It just
hasn’t been studied. The cancer is very rare.” Just because we don't find evidence doesn't mean that the truth is elsewhere!
In other news, natural gas is showing a lot less promise than it did as little as a few years ago. For one thing, it has proven to be really cheap, and for another, renewables are proving cheaper still.
Update, January 2020: "produced water" from fracking is often radioactive, and workers dealing with it are often ill-protected, according to this Rolling Stone exposé.
