The Best Defense Against Propaganda Like "Gasland" is to Learn How Things Are Actually Done

26Feb2011 MORE:New Scientist looks at the questionable tactics and claims of Gasland. The New York Times -- lately more of a tabloid rag than a purveyor of accurate news -- makes some new claims about threats of radioactivity released by wastewater from fracking. Time will tell. Certainly the developed world needs the energy and fuel from unconventional hydrocarbons to allow it to bridge into the era of advanced fission, advanced biofuels, enhanced geothermal, fusion, and other advanced nuclear and exotic particle reactions.

This video provides a brief summary of the oil and gas drilling process. If you pay attention over its few minutes, you will know far more about oil & gas production than most of the faux environmentalists who write propaganda pieces and make propumentary films on the topic, meant to sway public opinion.

The Oscar-nominated film Gasland is a fine example of the genre known as "propumentaries", or propaganda as documentary. Michael Moore is a master of the genre, but Josh Fox is certainly up and coming in the field with this entry.

Here is a website devoted to debunking Gasland

Here is a PDF from Gasland's maker meant to debunk the debunking of Gasland, called Affirming Gasland

A further debunking of Gasland can be found here and here and here

It should be said that for most thinking persons, Gasland debunks itself. But the film is not aimed at thinking persons, it is aimed at members of the Idiocracy, programmed by a failed educational system not to think at all. With that audience, the film has apparently succeeded -- since it is nominated for an Oscar.

President Obama's EPA and Interior Department have succeeded in proclaiming CO2 as a "dangerous pollutant" and in stonewalling offshore oil drilling at all costs. Obama's minions have shut down several coal mines and coal power plants. Obama's NRC is dragging its feet on newer, safer, nuclear plants. All forms of reliable energy have been targeted by Obama's regime. If the regime were able to find any significant pretense to pull the plug on shale gas, they would have done so by now. As it is, they are still looking for anything at all substantial they can use to shut down yet another form of energy. Gasland is certainly not that thing, but is rather in the category of a joke. But they are still looking -- hard.

You can bet a large number of overseas gas producers from Russia to MENA are very interested in seeing Obama take action against shale gas producers. Needless to say, lefty-Luddite greens of the dioff.orgy persuasion are likewise eager to intensify the Obama program of energy starvation in the US.