Hollywood’s Attack On Fracking
Promised Land is a new film starring Matt Damon which takes aim at hydraulic fracturing.
It’s about what you’d expect from Hollywood. Corporations are evil. They’re destroying the environment, etc., etc. Forget that fracking has set off an energy revolution here in America that has dramatically lowered prices, created hundreds of thousands of jobs in the midst of a gloomy economic downturn and done more to reduce carbon emissions in America than any environmental policy ever passed by Congress.
And forget that fracking has never been linked, even once, to contaminated drinking water.
This movie aspires to be to fracking what The China Syndrome was to nuclear energy. Which is to say, it’s a bunch of environmental fear mongering intended to scare people away from modern energy innovations.
Let’s also admit that there’s an element of crony capitalism in this. The “green energy” people – solar and wind, etc. – are invested heavily in portraying themselves as the replacements for a dying fossil fuel energy. Except, thanks to fracking, fossil fuels aren’t dying.
You think the Big Green industry isn’t delighted to see their useful idiots in Hollywood beat up on fracking? Of course they are. But it’s not about the environment, really. It’s about hamstringing the competition.
Meanwhile, here in North Dakota, the real-world implications of fracking are positive. The truth of fracking in North Dakota doesn’t match the fiction created by Hollywood.
