APPEA (Gas industry body) recently derided a paper by Dr Geralyn McCarron regarding a link between a rise in gasfield toxic pollutants and hospital admissions for circulatory and respiratory diseases.  Their only rebuttal to the paper was to refer to the paper as ‘pseudo-science”.  Of course this is lazy and they do not produce a  counter argument because they cannot (see Dr McCarron’s excellent rebuttal here).  This is of course their super power.  Only a cursory glance in the direction of the mysteriously changing story on this topic that metamorphosed in the main stream media reinforces their sway for spin.

So lets look at some independent local data that has been produced.  When the following 4 papers are read side by side, the evidence speaks for itself.

First of all Tim Forcey’s Testimony image shows before and after.  How can there not be a significant impact to the atmosphere with such an intensive industry?

He goes on to identify that the way that emissions are reported in Australia are based on outdated irrelevant assumptions as a basis for estimates rather than direct measurement.

Secondly as Douglas Tait et al from Southern Cross university proved (and were similarly derided by the industry) there is a measurable increase in fugitive emissions within the gasfield, and provide a conceptual model to explain how the industry alters the gas pathways and enhances fugitive emissions.

Thirdly, Vickas, M et al 2015 showed that there is large inconsistencies in the conduct of assessment of emissions by the CSG industry, including how complete and transparent assessments were, as well as how effectively they addressed project emission intensity and cumulative impacts. 

So the bottom line is that while the government and the industry are using their super powers to UN-measure the emissions from this industry, an honest experienced assessment from a GP (who, unlike APPEA’s spokesperson, is not paid for her work) of raw data from hospitals show that there is very likely an impact occurring right now regardless and that suggests if the psuedo-science shoe fits……