The oil and gas industry and its supporters tried their hardest to deny the link between Oklahoma's massive uptick in earthquakes since 2009 and the fracking boom that got underway around the same time - an effort eventually undermined by the state Geological Survey's long-awaited admission that yes, it's " very likely " that wastewater injection wells, used to dispose of fracking's byproduct, are causing the quakes. So desperate was one billionaire oil tycoon to obscure the science, an email uncovered by Bloomberg Business reveals, he tried to get the university researchers studying the fracking-earthquake connection fired.