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Adams County is reportedly rejecting an intense lobbying effort from national activist groups who descended on a recent commission hearing as part of their failing campaign to ban oil and gas development in Colorado. As the Denver Post reports:

“Adams County leaders made it clear Wednesday morning that they won’t support a 10-month ban on new oil and gas activity in urban parts of the county after hearing nearly eight hours of testimony that began Tuesday night.”

Spearheading the anti-fracking effort in Colorado is the Washington, D.C-based political activist group, Food & Water Watch (F&WW). At the hearing, F&WW tried to pressure Adams County Commissioners into adopting an “emergency moratorium” on hydraulic fracturing, citing a series of misleading and debunked talking points to scare the public and advance their extreme agenda.

Spreading misinformation

Without any scientific evidence to back them up, F&WW resorted to the often-repeated activist talking points on water contamination. Speaking at the hearing, Food & Water Watch Senior Organizer Lauren Petrie:

“There have been over a thousand cases of water contamination across the country where fracking has occurred and the industry has denied responsibility in many of these cases.”

Perhaps Petrie and F&WW missed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) five year study on the relationship between groundwater and hydraulic fracturing, which states clearly that the process has “not led to widespread, systemic impacts to drinking water resources.” Indeed, if there were any evidence to suggest widespread or systemic impacts to drinking water from hydraulic fracturing, it would have been uncovered during the past decade of extensive study of the process by scientists at the EPA and others.

But Petrie didn’t stop there. She also rehashed the activist claim that hydraulic fracturing is a danger to public health and especially to pregnant women. From Petrie’s View Full Article