Now that the Obama administration’s end is near, and a new guy is being put forward to run Obama’s EPA, that agency is changing its mind about the impact of fracking.

Fracking can affect drinking water supplies in certain circumstances….

The report, written by Environmental Protection Agency scientists, includes findings that are more open-ended than those in a draft version last year, when the agency said fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, isn’t having “widespread, systematic impacts on drinking water.”

When pressed on the “updated” report, which contradicts that earlier draft, EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator Thomas Burke conceded the draft’s prior conclusion that only a small number of cases of contamination had been found—even though that was left out of this later iteration of the report.

While the number of identified cases of drinking water contamination is small, the scientific evidence is insufficient to support estimates of the frequency of contamination[.]

Even the identified instances of contamination—surface spills of fracking fluids or poorly done cement casing of a wells—have little to do with fracking, but are failures to execute.

Of course this drives the conclusion that when you can’t find the needle in the haystack, you don’t have enough evidence to say that there aren’t many needles in the haystack.  That’s some science the EPA has there.

Keep in mind, too, that this is same agency whose pseudo-science concluded that plant food—atmospheric CO2—is a pollutant.

Apparently rigorous thinking was outside of these guys’ school safe spaces.