Apparently someone at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency views a statement last week – that an intensive study “did not identify widespread impacts on drinking water resources due to hydraulic fracturing activities” – as a strategic mistake. It could be used to reject an EPA campaign for blanket authority to impose new regulations on gas and oil drillers, after all.

Even the EPA cannot erase comments made by its own press office, however. And that was the source of the widely repeated quote summarizing the study.

By this week, officials had begun engaging in what to them is damage control. Referring to the statement on widespread impacts of gas and oil well “fracking,” an EPA deputy administrator told one reporter, “That is not the message of this report.” He added that the study “identified vulnerabilities in the water system …”

EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn added even more smoke and mirrors to the agency’s stance. “The information available is adequate to qualitatively characterize the frequency of occurrence (of water resources tainted by fracking) as being small, particularly relative to the number of wells that are hydraulically fractured each year,” she said in a statement, adding, “That same information, however, is not sufficient to quantitatively measure occurrence nationwide.”

We’ll translate the bureaucratese for you: Though the EPA spent five years investigating and found few cases of water supplies tainted by fracking, the agency’s contention is that it is impossible to say what could happen in the future.

In other words, though the evidence indicates fracking is not a major threat to water supplies, it could be in the future.

Well, of course. But by the same reasoning, global warming could reverse within the next few years.

Your last visit to the doctor’s office may have taught you those who work in the sciences are reluctant to say anything with absolute certainty. But when public policy is involved, government has every reason to hint at worst-case scenarios. That way, officials can insist they have to have broad regulatory power to protect us against disaster.

State regulators should safeguard the public against contamination of water wells, streams, etc., by drillers. It does happen, though rarely.

But Congress should not permit the EPA to use its waffling campaign to justify one more sweeping crusade against fossil fuels – like the already successful war against coal and affordable electricity.