Wick's Review

Summary - Great 4.0

Fracking is a virtual four-letter word for the Environmental Left, and a byword for American ingenuity, economic growth and geopolitical strength for its fans. Irish journalist Phelim McAleer falls into the latter camp for reasons that he documents convincingly and engagingly in FrackNation.

I fall into the same camp, viewing fracking as the most unalloyed boom to benefit America and the world since the invention of the internet. FrackNation is thus a 77 minute tonic from the unremitting slander and negativism that fracking receives in much of the media. I wish I hadn’t waited until mid-2014 to view it.

2010’s Gasland is the fountainhead of that mendacious mountain of anti-fracking agitprop, with its celebrated creator Josh Fox the bête noire of McAleer’s FrackNation. Indeed, Gasland’s central image of a flaming faucet gets thoroughly debunked in McAleer’s movie, in part by highlighting a Flaming Fountain in Louisiana and more than one town named Burning Springs. In short, naturally occurring gas is hardly an unknown phenomena in wells and springs.

Most impressive in FrackNation is the extensive exposure given to working farmers and other salt-of-the-earth types who are benefiting tremendously by gas production, and to similar folks who are being badly hurt by fracking bans. Those bans are shown to be the work of urban sophisticates like Josh Fox and the actor Mark Ruffalo. Indeed, Fox emerges a symbol of urbanites who would send farmers to their doom.

It is no surprise that rich environmentalists like Ruffalo and Sean Lennon oppose fracking, as hydrocarbons have been their enemy since the early advent of Global Warming Climate Change hysteria. Witness how carbon energy was ludicrously characterized in The American President, a Left Wing fairy tale from 1995.

Just when it seemed like the Peak Oil doomsayers were correct, along came fracking to unlock huge amounts of hydrocarbons, dashing the Environmental Left’s push for renewable expensive energy. So of course they’re mad. The world continues to disappoint them.

FrackNation doesn’t disappoint however. It illuminates about how fracking and horizontal drilling work, about the sources and mendacity of fracking’s critics, about many of the people who benefit from fracking or who are being held down by fracking bans, and so much more.

Refreshingly rational and optimistic documentaries like this are rare indeed, more rare even than flaming faucets were before anyone had ever heard of fracking.

Acting - Very Good 3.5

Phelim McAleer sweetly stars in his documentary, a charmingly rumpled guy searching for truth.

Josh Fox gets cornered a time or two, proving that his last name is apt. He’s sly and untrustworthy.

Most interesting are the scads of ordinary people – American and European – that get interviewed.

• A Penn State water research specialist who debunks claims about fracking hurting the water supply
• A Penn State alumnus who moved back to Pennsylvania with his family to work in fracking, stating that it’s a “ludicrous claim” that polluting is winked at in the industry.
• A Pennsylvania dairy farmer who calls the gas well on his property “the best cow in the barn”: The dairy industry isn’t thriving now, so he likes viewing the well from his barn so he can see what’s making him money.
• A longtime TV journalist who says the MSM has adopted the entertainment style that Josh Fox used in his approach to the gas industry, where facts matter less than emotions
• A Berkeley scientist who points out that the natural chemicals in cabbage are scary if you don’t know anything about them, noting they would give cancer to a rat in sufficiently massive dosages
• A Polish pensioner who spends half her income on energy, â…“ of it on gas. Where’s that money go? Vladamir Putin
• A Financial Times editor describes a dinner with Putin, who got visibly upset claiming shale gas is an environmental problem: Why? So it won’t be a threat to Russia’s European gas monopoly.
• English intellectual James Delingpole says “Shale gas is the miracle of the early 21st century.” He’s correct.

Film - Great 4.0

Nice touch of Phelim McAleer to list the thousands of Kickstarter contributors who funded FrackNation at the end of the film. It took forever for them to scroll by, but I watched them all in silent honor.

Edge - Tame 1.0

Reality - Natural 1.0

Fracking continues as a major political issue, with countless columns, posts, comments and tweets every month. FrackNation is full of ripostes to much of this criticism. A few items that jumped out:

• One of many Josh Fox lies is that his supposed Gas Lease wasn’t his, instead belonging to the farmers whose livelihoods he scuttled. Wow.
• Gazprom makes the bulk of its profit in Europe. So of course Putin hates fracking because he wants to keep the West dependent on him for gas.
• Regarding energy production induced earthquakes, geothermal is a real risk for geo-seismicity, not fracking (actually, injection wells that store fracking fluid). There are apparently hundreds of quakes every month from geothermal, most of them in Northern California. Here is a Lawrence Berkeley map of quakes induced at The Geysers north of San Francisco. Man, there’s lots of them.
• Phelim McAleer was interviewed last year for Ten Big Fat Lies About Fracking.

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