Photo Credit: IMDB.com
By Rick Manning — Hollywood is releasing another of its preachy environmental epics this fall designed to take advantage of the public’s ignorance about an oil and gas drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing or fracking for short.
Producers of the 2012 environmentalist tale titled Promised Land already had their eyes on the Oscars following in the footsteps of Julia Roberts’ Oscar winning performance in Erin Brockovich, and Meryl Streep’s nomination for Silkwood.
Starring ardent Obama supporter Matt Damon, the movie seems to have been inspired by eleven residents from Dimock, Penn., who claimed that fracking had destroyed their water and their lives. The claims received so much national attention that Hollywood celebrities actually trekked to flyover Pennsylvania to show their concern by bringing drinking water to the people.
Unfortunately for the producers of Promised Land, after they had spent millions producing the movie, the story of the people of Dimock fell apart when their claims were actually tested.
The environmentalist movement, which has made attacks on fracking one of their core fundraising issues, their friends and advocates at Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency tested the ground water in the wells of those who filed complaints and determined that “there are not levels of contaminants present that would require additional action by the Agency.”
In other words, the water is just fine. Fracking has had zero impact upon it.
The implication of the EPA release is even more damaging in that the EPA notes that they had tested water submitted by the residents which, “indicated the potential for elevated levels of water contaminants in wells.”
This means that the EPA has, in nice language, determined that the Dimock eleven flat out lied, and the samples they submitted could not be replicated when actual field testing occurred.
Hollywood itself has struggled with factual manipulation in the fracking arena. Josh Fox, producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland, has been forced to admit that his big scene in the movie is not exactly what it seemed.
The point of Gasland was to show how damaging fracking was to the water supplies of communities, and it has a big reveal where the Michael Moore-wannabe documentarian turns on a water spigot and lights the water on fire. And for those wondering, no, the water wasn’t taken from Lake Erie.
Once again since truth couldn’t get in the way of the point of the movie, the documentary fails to reveal that the people who lived in that community had filed reports that due to high methane content in their ground wells from as far back as 1936, they were able to light their water on fire.
Phelem McAleer, director of the film, Not evil just wrong, confronted Gasland maker Josh Fox about the fact that the water burned well before fracking occurred, and got Fox to admit that he was well aware of the historic reports. Fox dismissed them and chose not to share them with his viewers because they did not fit his advocacy goal in the movie.
Besides the revelation that this has been going on for almost 80 years, kind of takes the edge off the dramatic impact
Now, after the critical success of Gasland, Hollywood is on the fracking trail in an attempt to build the storyline that hydraulic fracking is destroying small towns across America.
At least, unlike Gasland, with Promised Land, you know that it is fiction and should be viewed for entertainment value only.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is the communications director of Americans for Limited Government.
