I don’t normally post reviews of older
films, but seeing as the news
today frightened the hell out of me, I thought that I would revisit the
brilliant documentary about ‘natural’ gas hydraulic fracturing in America. The process of fracking is already highly
controversial as it basically creates and deep underground earthquake in order
to fracture the rock and release shale gas, which can then be harvested and
sold as energy.
Josh Fox lives in Pennsylvania and has
always been fond of water and nature.
One day he gets a letter that states that if he sells some of his land
to corporate fracking companies then he can make up to $100,000. Thinking this to good to be true he begins to
investigate the environmental and health impacts of these processes on local
people in and around the central states of the USA. On his travels he meets people who have such
contaminated water supplies that they can light their taps on fire; he meets
people who have lost their senses of taste and smell due to breathing the air
around their homes; he meets workers and builders of the fracking
infrastructure who have no idea that they are handling dangerous chemicals;
and, predictably, he meets company representatives who deny all evidence of
contamination and responsibility.
Fox begins to compile a list of problems
that the citizens he meets are declaring, which includes
1.
Water
trouble
2.
Health
problems
3.
Hazardous
explosive conditions inside houses
4.
Destruction
of land
5.
Lack
of confidence in state regulatory commissions
6.
A
feeling of having been deceived
7.
A
feeling of powerlessness
8.
Dead
or sick animals
9.
A
difficulty of obtaining good information about gas drilling
10.
The
idea that there is a cover-up taking place.
If you ignore the conspiratorial angle
and the inevitable emotional reactions, there are still a number of scary
problems in this list. The film looks at
a legislative phenomenon entitled the ‘Halliburton
Loophole’ named after Dick Cheney’s insisted exception to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which allows
fracking processes to be exempt from clean water regulations – a blatantly
corrupt adjustment of the law. Fox also
includes a wonderful quote from a concerned citizen discussing the ‘corporate
business model’, which in her eyes goes like this: Corporation moves into an area, develop as
fast as they can, contaminate local environment, make citizens prove it in the
court of law, pay off the last person standing, move on, repeat ad infinitum…
The film is brilliant and terrifying and
manages to make the vitally important point that all water on the planet is
connected – from condensation and evaporation in weather cycles, to streams and
oceans, to animal food production and human consumption. This means that it is not just the local
areas that are directly affected, but also the wider country, which is
indirectly affected.
So why do I post this today? Because this is a process that needs to be
used as a last resort and regulated properly.
I’m no scientist (obviously) and have no idea of the details of any of
this, but if it is in its early stages in this country then there should be a
proper debate with scientists and environmentalists in order to move forward in
the most scientific way possible. Surely…
What worries me about energy policy is
that it is so political. Without knowing
anything else about a person you can probably guess their political affiliation
by whether they support controversial alternatives such as wind turbines or fracking. (The very notion of putting those two
processes together and labeling them controversial just goes to show how hard
it is to be bipartisan). The division is
much stronger in America, but I would have a guess at the people who hate wind
turbines offshore would probably be comfortable in exploring fracking…
The new GasLand 2 has been released
recently and focuses on the myth that natural gas is a clean energy resource
and that inevitably these wells leak toxins out over time.
Here is a bonus video of Josh Fox on democracynow.org explaining the problems
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