Editor’s note: This opinion piece was submitted to The Permian Press for publication. Readers interested in submitting an opinion on this or another local issue can visit our Submit a Story page.

The Hon. Jason Isaac is the CEO of the American Energy Institute and a former Texas state representative.

Apparently, what’s good enough for the Los Angeles Times’ Climate & Environment section is good enough for the Oil Report of the Midland Reporter-Telegram.

On Aug. 29, MRT chose to run a Los Angeles Times wire story claiming oil and gas companies are partly responsible for California’s water problems. But MRT did not simply pick up the story. It placed it in the Oil Report and changed the original Los Angeles Times headline from “Big oil and gas companies are partly responsible for California’s water woes, study finds” to the more accusatory “Big Oil is partly to blame for California’s water woes.”

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Words matter. “Responsible” describes the study’s claimed causal relationship. “Blame” assigns guilt. MRT took a story written for the Los Angeles Times’ climate section, placed it before readers in the heart of America’s most prolific oil-producing region, and gave its headline more moral certainty, not more scrutiny.

That scrutiny was badly needed.

The headline rests not on a measurement showing that an oil company caused a particular decline in snowpack or streamflow, but on a complex attribution exercise. In the peer-reviewed study, researchers combined observational data with climate models, constructed counterfactual scenarios, used a reduced-complexity climate model and pattern scaling, and then ran additional hydrology and groundwater calculations to estimate how much of the resulting changes could be attributed to 122 fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.

Peer review does not turn modeled estimates into measured facts. No instrument measured that those 122 companies caused nearly half of a particular decline in Western snowpack or streamflow. That figure is the product of the researchers’ attribution framework, with assumptions, models, and estimates separating the observations from the final conclusion.

Yet the resulting numbers are presented with remarkable precision: Western snowpack down 36%, warm-season streamflow down 13%, with roughly half of the modeled effects assigned to those companies. By the time all that modeling reached MRT readers, the complexity had disappeared, and the conclusion was simple: “Big Oil is partly to blame.”

Other journalists thought the distinction was worth exploring. Inside Climate News, hardly a mouthpiece for the oil and gas industry, spoke with UC Davis hydrogeologist Graham Fogg, who was not involved in the study. He described this kind of attribution as “extremely difficult.”

That is exactly the sort of independent perspective MRT readers never received. Finding such a voice would not have required MRT to defend the oil and gas industry. It would have required the basic journalistic instinct to ask what the study can prove, what it cannot, and how confidently a series of models can trace changes in Western water supplies back to 122 companies.

Instead, the story quotes the lead researcher, Stanford climate scientist Rob Jackson and Carly Phillips of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a coauthor of the study. The article concludes with Phillips arguing for lawsuits and legislation to hold fossil fuel companies financially accountable.

That context matters. UCS is not hiding its objective. Its own press release announcing the research promotes “Make Polluters Pay” legislation, attacks proposed legal protections for fossil fuel companies, and declares that “pathways to justice” through lawsuits and legislation “must be protected.”

There is another problem with the tidy blame narrative. The study itself acknowledges that water has long been limited in the West, where high demand has contributed to overallocated resources and rapidly depleting groundwater. California has spent decades confronting groundwater depletion, competing water rights, agricultural demand, population growth and infrastructure constraints.

Those are complicated problems involving hydrology, agriculture, water management and public policy. Reducing that complexity to “Big Oil is partly to blame” may make for an attention-grabbing headline. It does not make for particularly thoughtful journalism.

And this headline appeared not in the Los Angeles Times’ Climate & Environment section, where the original editors placed it, but in the Midland Reporter-Telegram’s Oil Report. That should have prompted more editorial scrutiny, not less.

MRT’s responsibility is not to defend the oil and gas industry. It is to serve its readers. That means applying the same skepticism to extraordinary claims regardless of whether they come from an oil company, an environmental organization, a university researcher or the Los Angeles Times.

Readers in the Permian Basin, of all readers, know the difference between a study and a verdict.

Their newspaper should too.