Scientific Showdown At Cornell

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

December 20, 2011 | 1:33 PM

The Innovation Trail profiles a scientific showdown over natural gas that’s taking place at Cornell University:

In April, Bob Howarth and two of his colleagues at Cornell University published a report in the journal Climatic Change, with this conclusion:
Natural gas is a dirtier fuel source than coal or oil.
The piece caused an uproar among energy analysts, industry insiders and researchers, and the result is a new article – set to come out in the same journal – by another Cornell professor, that directly contradicts the initial study:
Natural gas is a cleaner source of energy than coal.
And it’s panning out to be a showdown.