Frackademia: Controversial SUNY Buffalo Shale Institute's Reputation Unraveling
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"By Steve Horn, DeSmog Blog | Report
A storm is brewing in Buffalo and it's not the record snow storm typically associated with upstate New York. Rather, it's taking place in the ivory tower of academia and revolves around hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," for unconventional gas in the Marcellus Shale basin.
Public funding has been cut to the tune of over $1.4 billion over the past five years in the State University of New York (SUNY) public university system under the watch of current Democratic Party governor and 2016 presidential hopeful Andrew Cuomo and his predecessor, David Paterson.
These cuts have created new opportunities for the shale gas industry to fill a funding vacuum, with the SUNY system's coffers hollowed out and starved for cash.
“It’s a growing problem across academia,” Mark Partridge, a professor of rural-urban policy at the Ohio State University, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Universities are so short of money, professors are under a lot of pressure to raise research funding in any manner possible.”
The oil industry's eagerness to fill the void for its personal gain can be seen through the case study of what we at DeSmog have coined the ongoing "Shill Gas" study scandal at the State University at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo).
Among other findings, a DeSmog investigation reveals that one of the lesser-known offshoots of the Scaife family foundations, key bankrollers of the climate change denial machine, may potentially soothe SUNY Buffalo's budget woes with funding for the university-connected Shale Resources and Society Institute.
The Prelude to the Storm
A prelude for what's now transpiring occurred in Spring 2011, when SUNY Buffalo played host to the Marcellus Shale Lecture Series. Throughout the eight-part series, not a single speaker was a university-based scholar and all speakers but one were employed by some element of the oil and gas industry. The Shale Resources and Society Institute (SRSI) arose out of the series, as Daniel Robison of WBFO in Buffalo wrote in a recent article:
The decision to greenlight SRSI came after SUNY Buffalo hosted the Marcellus Shale Lecture Series in mid-2011...Last fall, enthusiasm stemming from the lecture series grew into informal discussions among the speakers, natural gas industry representatives and members of SUNY Buffalo’s geology department.
On Sept. 21, almost a year and a half after the completion of the Lecture Series, the UB Spectrum revealed the Series was also funded in large part by the gas industry, which gave SUNY Buffalo over $12,900 to host it. $5,000 of that cash came from the coffers of the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York (IOGA).
"If the talk series is not part of the institute – if it’s just an independent talk series – then it is unlike any such series I have ever organized or attended in that it fails to acknowledge the moneys that paid for it," Jim Holstun, Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo and the Chair of SUNY Buffalo Coalition for Leading Ethically in Academic Research, told the UB Spectrum.
Speaking at a gas industry public relations conference thought to be exclusively "among friends" in Houston on Oct 31-Nov. 1, 2011 - the same conference where it was revealed the gas industry is employing psychological warfare tactics on U.S. citizens - S. Dennis Holbrook of IOGA of NY confirmed the SUNY Buffalo relationship. Holbrook stated that it's crucial for industry to "seek out academic studies and champion with universities—because that again provides tremendous credibility to the overall process."..............
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