I just finished watching "Fracknation", a documentary film by Irish director Phelim McAleer that purports to be a "journalist's search for the fracking truth". What a blatant piece of propaganda! Very slickly produced, the film was funded through a Kickstarter campaign, which was a very clever ploy to avoid disclosing the filmmakers' obvious love affair with climate change deniers and the oil and gas industry. Far from searching out the truth, this film is a one-sided (and, on the surface, convincing) attempt to debunk the anti-fracking documentary GASLAND and its sequel, Gasland 2.
It does not take long to see where this film is going, as it demonizes Josh Fox (the director of Gasland) and discredits anybody who appeared in that documentary. The film is filled with clever editing, tear-jerking scenes of farmers who claim that gas leases are the key to their survival, interviews with academic scientists who remind you of the types of so-called scientists who would deny that smoking cigarettes causes cancer, and the type of imagery that is a cross between Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" and the public relations films that came out of the chemical industry back in the 1950s and 1960s.
If you were to believe this film, there is not a single documented case of water contamination or seismic activity associated with fracking. Among other things, the film suggests that: 1) broccoli contains more carcinogens than fracking fluid 2) geothermal wells are the greatest cause of earthquakes 3) the manufacture of solar panels is one of the most toxic processes on the planet.
There is no mention of discharge wells and no mention of the massive volumes of water that are used (and subsequently contaminated) in the fracking process. To the contrary, the film suggests that there are only 3 days when a fracking well represents even the slightest risks, followed by 20, 30 or 40 years of clean energy production, satisfying the world's insatiable love of energy. It even goes as far as to suggest that Vladimir Putin is orchestrating opposition to fracking in Europe and the United States because he does not want to see inexpensive natural gas production interfering with the export profits of Gazprom, the Russian gas giant.
This film is anything but a search for the truth. It is nothing more than slickly packaged bunk disguised as journalism.
It does not take long to see where this film is going, as it demonizes Josh Fox (the director of Gasland) and discredits anybody who appeared in that documentary. The film is filled with clever editing, tear-jerking scenes of farmers who claim that gas leases are the key to their survival, interviews with academic scientists who remind you of the types of so-called scientists who would deny that smoking cigarettes causes cancer, and the type of imagery that is a cross between Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" and the public relations films that came out of the chemical industry back in the 1950s and 1960s.
If you were to believe this film, there is not a single documented case of water contamination or seismic activity associated with fracking. Among other things, the film suggests that: 1) broccoli contains more carcinogens than fracking fluid 2) geothermal wells are the greatest cause of earthquakes 3) the manufacture of solar panels is one of the most toxic processes on the planet.
There is no mention of discharge wells and no mention of the massive volumes of water that are used (and subsequently contaminated) in the fracking process. To the contrary, the film suggests that there are only 3 days when a fracking well represents even the slightest risks, followed by 20, 30 or 40 years of clean energy production, satisfying the world's insatiable love of energy. It even goes as far as to suggest that Vladimir Putin is orchestrating opposition to fracking in Europe and the United States because he does not want to see inexpensive natural gas production interfering with the export profits of Gazprom, the Russian gas giant.
This film is anything but a search for the truth. It is nothing more than slickly packaged bunk disguised as journalism.