Surprise! GASLAND Loaded With Half-Truths
With GasLand 2 on the horizonand just in time to influence the 2012 election, more and more discrepancies are coming out about the film. The documentary, directed by Josh Fox, details the horrors of fracking and the environmental damage it leaves in the process. One of the most famous scenes in the film deals with flammable water. You lift the tap, light a match, and boom the water ignites. Pretty scary, however, water has been flammable for centuries.
Furthermore, as Peter D. Robertson, former chief of staff and deputy administrator the EPA during the Clinton Administration, wrote today on The Hill that “the signature scene… shows a man lighting his tap on fire. What the film’s director didn’t show the audience was that the man’s water well had been drilled through four pockets of shallow naturally-occurring methane. State regulators determined well before the movie was released that the flaming tap water had nothing to do with natural gas development.” In all, Robertson is exposing Fox’s hack job.
Furthermore, he states that:
According to an EIA monthly report, for the first time ever, natural gas produced as much electricity as coal. And that’s not all. The safe and responsible development of this vast resource drives economic growth; provides generations of workers with good-paying jobs; produces affordable, clean electricity; and contributes to revenue used by communities and states across the country… the industry is responsible for nearly 3 million jobs and $400 billion in economic activity. Thanks to low natural gas prices, the average U.S. household is expected to have an extra $926 in disposable income each year for the next three years.
Ann McElhinney, the scourge of the Environmental Left, is also known for exposing environmentalist lies and has a highly anticipated documentary, called FrackNation, due out later this summer. Flammable water has also been reported in areas of West Virginia, New York, and Kentucky where natural gas bubbles up into the water making it flammable. That’s a good thing. It means your land is filled with natural gas and you probably have a prosperous future ahead of you.
I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. McElhinney at AFP’s RightOnline in Las Vegas last June. She brilliantly detailed the lies in GasLand. She travelled to Dimock, Pa, the epicenter of this whole debacle, and discovered that the news outlets only used eleven people to build a narrative that fracking was an evil venture. Besides finding 1500 residents, most of them senior citizens, who said that the water was never good, the EPA released a statement on July 25th stating:
…It has completed its sampling of private drinking water wells in Dimock, Pa. Data previously supplied to the agency by residents, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and Cabot Oil and Gas Exploration had indicated the potential for elevated levels of water contaminants in wells, and following requests by residents EPA took steps to sample water in the area to ensure there were not elevated levels of contaminants. Based on the outcome of that sampling, EPA has determined that there are not levels of contaminants present that would require additional action by the Agency.
Overall during the sampling in Dimock, EPA found hazardous substances, specifically arsenic, barium or manganese, all of which are also naturally occurring substances, in well water at five homes at levels that could present a health concern. In all cases the residents have now or will have their own treatment systems that can reduce concentrations of those hazardous substances to acceptable levels at the tap. EPA has provided the residents with all of their sampling results and has no further plans to conduct additional drinking water sampling in Dimock.
Dimock,Pa doesn’t have great water, but surely not a major health risk as many on the environmental left like to advertise in association with fracking. It was here that McElhinney did the math. Eleven divided by fifteen hundred is less than one percent, therefore, she decided to make a film for the ninety-nine percent who were marginalized by the media. An initiative that collected over $200,000 from Kickstarter to start production.
In all, Dimock is not a wasteland, Fox’s lies were also exposed by a former Clinton administration official, and Ann McElhinney continues to do her job in debunking the myths environmentalists use to flood the airwaves to curb economic activity. I think GasLand 2 could be a good piece of comedy at best and left wing drivel at worst. I’m betting that the latter will be the case.
& what about the earthquakes caused by fracking?