A first-time documentary filmmaker is outraged by the natural gas industry's "despicable" attempts to kill his movie's chances of winning an Academy Award.
Energy In Depth, a group sponsored by a coalition of natural gas companies, sent a letter to the Academy asking that Gasland -- a film about a controversial mining technique called hydro-fracking -- be removed from the Documentary Feature category.
"I'm continually amazed by all the developments," filmmaker Josh Fox said during a screening of the film at NYU this week, "both in terms of great things that have happened and real acts of courage that I have seen, and also these incredible, despicable attacks from the industry. I find them utterly irresponsible and horrific."
It marked the latest clash between Fox and Energy In Depth over Gasland, which debuted at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. In June 2010, Energy In Depth released a point-by-point criticism of the film. Fox responded with an equally detailed rebuttal on his website in July.
The organization's letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which came a week after Gasland was nominated for an Oscar, contends the film falsified facts and should not qualify for the documentary category.
Jim Smith, a spokesman for the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York, which helps fund Energy in Depth, agreed that Fox's film is not a documentary. "The genre calls for facts by definition," he said in a phone interview. "This was not. It was clearly an opinion piece, entirely fiction."
Horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," is a process that uses massive amounts of pressurized water and chemicals to release natural gas from underground shale deposits.
The practice has raised concerns about environmental and health safety. In December, then-Gov. David Paterson issued a moratorium that would prevent horizontal hydro-fracking in New York until an extensive environmental study is completed by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, no sooner than July.
United For Action, a grassroots anti-fracking organization, co-sponsored the Feb. 1 screening at NYU. The group hopes the film will stir action to permanently ban fracking in New York.
Audience member Elana Bulman, 20, said Gasland inspired her. "I am like fired up about this," she said. "I am ready to get a moratorium passed and get involved in campaigns."
Michael Bopp, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Conservation, said while he doesn't agree that everything depicted in Fox's film relates to New York, he understands the public concerns raised by the documentary. Bopp said his agency is working to protect the state by carefully studying the effects of horizontal hydro-fracking.
"We felt that this required a whole new sort of framework for environmental protection," Bopp said. "We understand the risks associated with it and we are being as diligent as humanly possible."
Fox said he will continue to campaign for a total ban on hydro-fracking and won't be deterred by opposition from the gas industry.
"They're not going to be able to spin their way out of this with PR money," he said.
Post by Alissa Ambrose
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There's no such thing as a clear water act. Hydraulic Fracturing has never been covered under the SDWA (if that's what you intended, it's hard to tell) since it's enactment in 1974, so you're saying an activity got an exemption from a law that that never covered it. Hydraulic fracturing was already in use for 25 years or so when they passed the SDWA so if they had intended that law to cover that activity they certainly could have written it in.
EVERY high school should show it and EVERY POLITICIAN should see this.
THAT is why hydraulic fracturing was in continuous use since 1948 and no one complained about it, until these gigantic mega-deposits were discovered here in the US.
There's only so much oil in the world. America has almost none.
Really, the point isn't that there is more oil in the entire rest of the world than we have here. The point is that our energy reserve numbers were thought to be permanently declining until recently, and now we know that we have many more times the energy reserves than we thought we did.
T. Boone Pickens used his media-trained words, "haven't seen it in my 3,000 wells," wisely when he was a guest on The Daily Show – wise for his purposes, of course. But he and no one else has come forward to dispute that gas is flaring through home and farm water pipes cited in the movie, or to propose some alternative cause. Further, they provide no explanation for what happens to the 500-odd chemicals pumped into those massive fracking wells, or why Dick Cheney finessed a rule that prevents us from even knowing what some of those chemicals are. They simply say it's deposited safely below the water line. As if that somehow will magically prevent any of those 500+ chemicals from coming back up the wells, into the aquifers, in five or ten or fifty years.
Too many unanswered questions. And too much money driving a rationale for drilling without regard or respect for future generations.
Have you looked? Because data regarding that is easy to find. Let's examine one case at a time, starting with the the Markham well - one of the starring "scare" props of the propaganda film:
Colorado regulators in charge of protecting the environment from oil & gas activities and settling disputed claims state: "we concluded that Mike Markham’s and Renee McClure’s wells contained biogenic gas that was not related to oil and gas activity. Unfortunately, Gasland does not mention our McClure finding and dismisses our Markham finding out of hand." And that is contained here: http://goo.gl/45sBa
That document has a lot of good information in it, such as that "the water well
completion report for Mr. Markham’s well shows that it penetrated at least four different coal
beds. The occurrence of methane in the coals of the Laramie Formation has been well
documented in numerous publications by the Colorado Geological Survey, the United States
Geological Survey, and the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists dating back more than 30
years."
Just out of curiosity, in what part of the country do you live? Because I believe that a lot of the freak-out over fire and faucet water is from people who do not live in areas where that has always happened.
http://www.dep.state.pa.us/dep/deputate/minres/oilgas/FractListing.pdf
http://assets.bizjournals.com/cms_media/pittsburgh/datacenter/DEP_Frac_Chemical_List_6-30-10.pdf
http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/ogdsgeischap5.pdf
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