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The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is out with yet another report – this time with the alarmist title “Gasping for Breath”— which constitutes the group’s latest effort to scare and mislead the public. The report (which was not peer reviewed by the way) makes sweeping and erroneous predictions about future health impacts that the researchers blame on fracking, despite the fact that emissions have been steadily declining, and its thanks to natural gas that air quality has been improving across the board in the United States.

Just as a bit of background, CATF has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Energy Foundation, a prominent anti-fossil fuel organization that funds numerous campaigns against fracking. The researchers also thank Earthworks – a group that has essentially declared a “war on fracking” – for its “invaluable contributions and counsel” on the report.

Aside from the obvious bias of the researchers, and the lack of peer review, the report simply ignores an overwhelming number of scientific studies that completely debunk their conclusions. Here are a few things to know:

Fact #1: The researchers use woefully outdated numbers to estimate future health impacts

The researchers admit in the study that their estimates are “based on a U.S. EPA 2025 projection of the National Emissions Inventory (NEI) for 2011.” In other words, they’re basing their argument on an inventory that’s five years old even though technologies and the regulatory environment have, obviously, changed during that period of time. In doing so the researchers left out a plethora of regulations over those years form state and federal governments, which have had a significant impact on emissions.  The researchers even acknowledge ignoring several of these regulations in the CATF report:

“regulations promulgated by December 2014.13 This includes the impact of EPA’s 2012 new source standards for oil and gas VOCs, b...

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