All have felt the stress that comes when their work leaves the lab and enters the world. Others have walked a fine line between advocacy and activism. Some have been harassed by mouthpieces for the oil-and-gas industry and, lacking tenure, have been forced out of academe. A handful of scientists have chosen to investigate the environmental effects of fracking. Robert Jackson, now at Stanford, managed to anger both supporters and foes of fracking. He wanted to provide answers, but much of the world had already made up its mind.
Jackson got was a pair of furious companies, including one run by a donor vital to his university an online campaign to discredit his research legal threats and, later, the ire of antifracking activists. Which explains some of my naïveté about some of the responses we got.” “I don’t think that I’m the white hat, and everybody else, especially everybody else in industry, is the black hat. “I’m not a white-hat, black-hat kind of guy,” Mr. He thought the world would welcome a little scientific clarity. The discussion was polarized, and facts seemed thin on the ground. He looked but could find no studies on whether fracking was associated with water problems, his particular interest. Was drilling benign? Corrosive? Would it pollute groundwater or air, cause earthquakes or more warming than expected? There were movies and websites about it, but little research.
But as he saw the wells erected at Hard Scrabble, followed by fevered national debate over hydraulic fracturing-"fracking,” as it’s come to be known-he saw a need for science. Jackson, then at Duke University, studied climate change. When scientists and the public think about fracking, they often hold very different thoughts in mind, whether about the most likely environmental risks, the depths involved, or the simple definition of the word.
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