Don't these people have children, grand children?
Is money really so important?
My father the (retired) hydro-geologist (and former professor) is not alarmed by fracking; and to the best of my knowledge he hasn't taken big oil and gas money (or he's been holding out on me). He never did big research projects, although he did also consult for a civil engineering firm analyzing and remediating super-fund sites and drilling contamination-free water wells for various communities across the north-eastern US.
Oil and gas companies give/grant/donate money to universities for a variety of reasons, not least of which is to improve the talent pool for recruitment. And if you want to commission a study, you go to where the experts are.
Addressing the concern of the actual article:
The fact is that you can't escape from having researchers having some kind of tie to their subject matter, on one side of an issue or another.
The reason that people have chosen a given area of research is that they've got some kind of interest in it -- for or against. There's really no way around this, and so we rely on openness of results, and the peer review process to police research.
The same problem looms in governmental regulation, where regulatory capture [1] is an unavoidable problem. If you want someone to write regulations who actually knows what the heck they're doing, you're going to have to go with someone who got experience from somewhere, which is more than likely from working in the industry. The problem here, of course, is that there is no openness nor peer review in regulation.
And that's what's purportedly being studied. And what the article alleges is likely being perverted by corporate contributions.
After all, we know that drilling for oil can be acceptably safe. And we also know that in the absence of effective oversight, some drillers will lean as far from safety and caution as is economically feasible, to the point of running decidedly unsafe operations.
This research is meant to answer the question of whether fracking companies are sufficiently safe on their own, or whether the public interest can only be protected with increased oversight. [1]
[1] There is no serious policy argument that we stop fracking altogether. Natural gas has become the cornerstone of the United States' energy independence strategy. The only policy question is whether we consider natural gas "good enough" or we view it as a transitory step toward renewable sources. In every case, it will continue. The debate here is merely about oversight vs profits.
But what does that have to do with being American? Pocketing money from industry at the expense of public health and safety would be disappointing given any nationality.
Still agree with you though - pretty shameful if true.
One note on public funding, I believe that there is just as much if not more pressure to shape conclusions from public funding sources. After all these organizations are composed of people as well who are often pursuing an agenda of some sort whether its overt or not. If a researcher is dependent on funding from an agency or a group inside an agency it is often in their best interest to ensure that their conclusions align with that agencies view. If not there is significant risk to future funding.
AFAICT most corruption can be mitigated by clean interfaces that reduce if not eliminate conflicts of interest.
The discussion of whether cell phone radios cause brain cancer is instructive. There are many people who do not fully understand the physics involved, but tend to be suspicious of technology and industry, who continue to bang the drum about the dangers of cell phone use. I've had conversations with a friend who holds a Ph.D. in toxicology in which no amount of data I could reference could shake her conviction that cell phones cause brain cancer. That is not because of where she draws a paycheck. It is simply a belief she has developed.
You see the same thing in any discussion of large-scale energy technology. We've all seen the discussions of nuclear energy here on Hacker News, for instance.
Is fracking dangerous? It seems almost certain it could be--any type of engineering on such a large scale has that potential. But there are almost always safer ways to engineer things. And a balanced accounting should attempt to include the benefit that natural gas as an energy source can create for our society. For example, it burns a lot cleaner than coal. This is the aspect of energy development that is most often hand-waved away, in favor of assertions that we should be 100% renewables. Of course solar, wind, and hydro all create their own safety and environmental concerns too.
