CEO Wanted University Scientists Dismissed Over Link Between Fracking and Quakes

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-15/oil-tycoon-harold-hamm-wanted-scientists-dismissed-dean-s-e-mail-says

by CapitalistCartr • 11 years ago

226 52 11 years ago

bloomberg.com

chasing• 11 years ago

Why must nature be so anti-corporate? Guy just wants to drill a few wells.

nickthemagicman• 11 years ago

Nature is a socialist.

johndevor2• 11 years ago

Socialism is terrible at managing natural resources.

ams6110• 11 years ago

Nature is really the ultimate capitalist. Survival of the fittest. No safety nets, no sympathy for the losers... they just go extinct.

Aqueous• 11 years ago

""Mr. Hamm absolutely did not ask to be on the search committee or to have anyone from Continental put onto the committee, nor did he ask that anyone from the Oklahoma Geological Survey be dismissed," [Vice President of Public Affairs of University of Oklahoma Catherine Bishop] wrote.

Email, just paragraphs earlier in the article, from Hamm, verbatim: "I would be very interested and willing to sit on your search committee."

But I guess it's not asking if there's no question mark?

nmrm22• 11 years ago

He was merely stating how nice it would be for the department to have an industry voice involved in the search. Of course it can be hard to find high-quality people in industry who are willing to volunteer their time to the university in order to sit on some boring committee. So we was merely making a charitable offer to take on the burden. ;-)

mikeash• 11 years ago

If you get caught doing something like this, you might as well just blatantly lie. You won't make it worse, and at least some people will believe your lie. Why not try it? (Aside from morals, but it seems we can hardly rely on that.)

Loughla• 11 years ago

Actually, that's not a bad approach. Most people ingest small pieces of news through headlines or whatever the talking heads spout out every ten minutes.

So, lying about it gets you at least a portion of people on your side, because they'll never dig in even a cursory manner, and just believe what they're told.

I assume older folks are susceptible through those yelling news talk shows. I wonder what the impact of click-bait headlines and what-not are for the younger set.

jsaxton86• 11 years ago

One of the biggest problems with politics is that politicians need to raise a lot of money to get (re)elected. That money comes with strings attached, which makes it difficult for our politicians to make good decisions.

I had never considered that the same problem exists in academia, but apparently it does. Hamm has donated tens of millions to the University of Oklahoma, and it's pretty obvious he's trying to use his money to influence the direction of the University. I'm surprised it isn't working.

nmrm22• 11 years ago

I'm surprised it isn't working.

Remember this next time someone suggests getting rid of tenure or cutting federal research funding. Especially for areas of research that are politically or economically hot (climate/environment, privacy, etc.)

Fomite• 11 years ago

Yep. This is the answer to "why do we need tenure".

IndianAstronaut• 11 years ago

This is actually the main reason for tenure. It is to protect intellectual freedom. Granted, nowadays due to excessive abuses by lazy faculty, the whole system is likely to die a slow death.

hackuser• 11 years ago

the same problem exists in academia

This problem isn't unique to this story. As examples, look up Confucius Institutes or the Koch brothers (yes, them again) funding of colleges and programs.

It's not unique to private funds; federal funding is controlled, ultimately, but Congress, which brings politics into the mix. Public universities are ultimately controlled by state governments. Finally, politics affects schools directly; probably not many administrators want to sacrifice their futures to protect an unpopular professor. I'd be interested in seeing how our colleges and acedemics fared during the McCarthy witch hunts.

semi-extrinsic• 11 years ago

I don't know the US system specifically, but industry usually has a say in how public spending on research (particularly applied research) is distributed. Usually the process is that they're consulted on what they think future prioritized research topics should be.

Lawtonfogle• 11 years ago

I'm surprised it isn't working.

Certain very direct actions may not work, but the ability for this funding to slowly corrupt the science produced is still very much a risk and the ability for the rich to influence the very discoveries that science makes is still something to be feared.

ExpiredLink• 11 years ago

Vice versa, you are surprised that academia is working.

mathattack3• 11 years ago

What surprises me isn't that Universities need money, it's how cheap they're willing to sell themselves. $20 million allows one guy to push around a university with an endowment and budget both more than 50x that. [1]

Generally naming rights involve doubling the endowment of a school. And of course you get some added influence, but $20 million in Oklahoma seems like it wouldn't even pay for 5 years of the football coach's [2] (coach's, not coaches!) salary.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universiti...

[1] http://www.ou.edu/publicaffairs/oufacts.html

[2] http://www.coacheshotseat.com/SalariesContracts.htm

ceejayoz• 11 years ago

What surprises me isn't that Universities need money, it's how cheap they're willing to sell themselves. $20 million allows one guy to push around a university with an endowment and budget both more than 50x that.

That's not cheap when you compare it to politics. $5-10M a year for Lockheed Martin helps it win trillion dollar projects like the F-35. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000010...

crimsonalucard2• 11 years ago

I read a book on this that describes the money/politics problem as two categories:

A Guardian Syndrome, and a Commerce Syndrome. Both syndromes are efficient and well when independent, but it's when the categories begin to merge that you begin to get problems and conflict of interest.

I recommend people to check out the book. It's a great analysis of the nature of corruption from a very cultural, anthropological and economic perspective. It's a refreshing angle from the typical character assassinations you see in the news. It's called Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival

gadders• 11 years ago

Coal mines cause earthquakes as well [1]. Not sure if anyone has ever used that as a reason to stop doing it.

[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070103-mine-...

atlantic• 11 years ago

Whether to stop doing it or not is a political decision. Here we're discussing something else: an industrialist is preventing the facts from being established so that an informed political debate cannot take place.

skore• 11 years ago

A casual google search tells me that there are about 1k coal mines in the US. The number of oil/gas wells that use fracking seems to range somewhere between 50k and 1.1m.

pas• 11 years ago

Alas, I'm not aware of better numbers.

There are approximately 550 Class I wells in the United States. (Municipal Waste)
The approximately 144,000 Class II wells in operation in the United States inject over 2 billion gallons of brine every day. Most oil and gas injection wells are in Texas, California, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Enhanced recovery wells are the most numerous type of Class II wells, representing as much as 80 percent of the approximately 151,000 Class II wells. (Oil & Gas related)
There are about 165 mining sites with approximately 18,500 Class III wells in operation across the nation. (Mining via leaching)

http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/

mc32• 11 years ago

Corruption like this is where the mob mentality of social media should come down on people with the temerity to try such shenanigans. People are great at dumping a ton of bricks on their neighbor who muttered a faux pas du jour, get them fired over uncorroborated claims, but important things, substantiated things like this, and all that righteousness of masses evaporates and only but a few care to express disapproval.

This kind of corrupt behavior needs to become unpalatable and intolerable, not just a cause du jour.

omgitstom• 11 years ago

What is the point of research / science if we dismiss it at the cost of generating money?

I find myself asking this question all the time. I feel that capitalism shouldn't be the end goal, with a profit motive. It got us to where we are today, but I do not think it is going to take us where we need to go now or in the future.

iamcurious• 11 years ago

[Capitalism] got us to where we are today.

What got us here today was a kludge of many different things. Often proclaiming to be one thing while being something different. Markets arise everywhere where there is demand and supply. So there was always some capitalism even if it was outlawed or frowned upon. At the same time, families are everywhere and the ones I know follow planned socialistic economies.

uptownJimmy• 11 years ago

What's the point of capitalism if you can't buy the research staff at a flagship state university? Because free markets!

tzs• 11 years ago

If something related to fracking ever appears on my ballot, I'll vote against the frackers not because I necessarily think there is anything wrong with fracking, but rather because they have worked hard to make it harder for us to find out if there is anything wrong with fracking.

In addition to trying to hamper research into the possible connection between fracking and earthquakes, they have worked hard to prevent scientists from finding out what exactly they are putting in the ground (each company has its own proprietary formula for the fluids they use). This means when investigating the possibility of fracking fluids getting into drinking water, the scientists cannot look at what is in the water and match it to what the frackers put in the ground. Sadly, we've put so much stuff into the ground for such a long time, that it is actually possible that it is not fracking that is a source of the contamination where drinking water has been found to be contaminated near fracking sites.

I have a similar policy on ballot issues related to guns. Congress, as a result of NRA lobbying, has made it so there is almost no government funding available for research into gun violence, which is one of the biggest reasons that we have no idea if gun control is helpful, harmful, or neutral.

Cshelton2• 11 years ago

Sitting here in Dallas, Texas...we just had a 3.3 mag shake our tower just today. All of the Earthquakes are coming from mostly one main area of the DFW metroplex...which is an area that has a lot of fracking activity. This is getting stupid..property is being destroyed. Foundations are being cracked and these companies just get off with it while homeowners have to spend thousands to have repairs done.

A city directly north of the DFW metro, Denton, has actually banned fracking all together. Except the Texas state government already has a bill that will not allow cities to ban fracking. Talk about corruption and politics...the same money that's in Oklahoma is behind the politics here in Texas as well.

green-in-gold• 11 years ago

Biggest surprise to me is that it's Bloomberg reporting this. A signal that the mainstream corporate media is starting to care about climate change?

CEO Wanted University Scientists Dismissed Over Link Between Fracking and Quakes

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