Food and Water Watch (FWW) is already licking its wounds from its recent defeat in Loveland, Colorado, where voters ignored the misinformation campaign of its surrogates FWW Colorado and Frack Free Colorado to vote against a fracking moratorium. Now it’s come to light that FWW altered Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) documents to hide their references to fracking’s safety.
The documents, an ODNR fracking op-ed and talking points memo, were obtained by FWW through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and showcased on the junk-science blog Ecowatch. But, as reported by Energy in Depth, the documents contained blacked-out (redacted) sections that FWW obviously didn’t want people to see.
What was this redacted information? A quick Google search shows that the op-ed had already been published in full in a local Ohio outlet last year. Comparing the two versions shows that FWW redacted the following sentence from its version: “To date, there have been no proven cases of groundwater contamination linked to injection or hydraulic fracturing.”
Energy in Depth received an unaltered copy of the talking points memo through its own FOIA request and when compared with FWW’s version found that the redacted portion was similar: “There has never been an instance of groundwater contamination related to the injection of oil-field waste.”
FWW obviously doesn’t want to recognize the scientific consensus – led by the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the Ground Water Protection Council, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – that fracking doesn’t contaminate groundwater. But to resort to such depraved tactics as fudging state documents is a step that only those familiar with FWW’s tactics would expect. (Remember, this is an organization that sought to capitalize on last year’s tragic Colorado floods to push a bogus anti-fracking message.)
These shenanigans are par for the course for FWW and the rest of big green, who recognize that they don’t have facts on their side. Increasingly though, such actions – as with the redacted portions of these documents – are being exposed.