Seminal! – in the absolute truest sense of the term. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century, as well as one of it’s greatest conspiracies (still very much playing out). Engineered & pioneered by? yep! – USA (a spot of dejavu in cases of catastrophic new technology & its integration into either market or military appliance). This supreme two hours & five minutes documentary remains one of the most definitive pieces of media/information on the fracking catastrophe. For those looking for the truth about this obscene industry & the toll it’s taking, the Gaslands films are a power-house of irrefutable, non-nuanced evidence & indisputable footage & facts that damns the deliction with it’s own data & information along with a trove of other show-pieces & direct testimony that will shock even the most ardent of petrol-heads. & it really is unbelievable. Unbelievable that these fuckers would actually do this, that they have not been slammed, derailed & jailed by the state for doing so & that it’s still going on? – with state backing? – with international roll-out? – with so few even knowing what it entails (non-disclosure agreements, cowed-media cohorts)? You watch this to know about fracking but also to know about state-corporation collusion taken to the absolute extreme. You watch it also to learn about suppression/omission/denial, cover-up, conspiracy & fantastical free market criminality/corporate coup that can be described neither as short-sighted nor even flat-out blind, – but as frankly cannibalistic, anti-life, apocalyptic & criminally insane in the first degree. Fracking is so bad that it’s almost hard to believe. When all ramifications & negative factors are accounted for, it becomes the worst form of fossil fuel currently undergoing extraction! Yes! That’s even worse than the monumentally awful tar sands. There’s a myriad of insanely damaging & dangerous reasons for this, but the worst are as follows – “uncontrolled discharge” (don’t laugh) or “fugitive emissions” in industry speak. This is from the methane flaring that the drilling causes to vent, straight into the open-air 24/7. Methane as you will probably know, is something like 50 times more potent than CO2! It is literally billowing out, unabated, non-stop until presumably the source is depleted? Hundreds of thousands of wells equals hundreds of thousands of vents (not including the well itself that will disseminate it’s own contribution), discharging one of the most damaging gasses straight into the atmosphere round-the-clock. This is not just environmentally apocalyptic, it’s bad for humans or animals in the vicinity, & wells are actually being opened right next to people’s homes – WITH THE STATE/LAWS APPROVAL! Next comes the chemical cocktail. It just gets worse. Fracking uses staggeringly abnormal quantities of water (the type of quantities that can cause very serious problems/paucity), but it’s the ridiculous volume of “secretive” & barely declared chemicals that are added in high dosage to this water & then “forced” under gigantic industrial pressure hundreds of meters into the ground to disturb the gas. The disclosure procedures of what chemicals are being inundated deep into the soil have been deliberately impaired by industry objective (this, in the US’s case included the revoking of the Clean Air & Water Acts thanks to our boy Dick Cheney), but by sending samples to the lab independently (the government & companies won’t tell you what they are pumping into your soil but you can send it off on your own accord for analysis once it’s coming out of your taps at your own expense), it’s revealed that the liquid contains a profusion of highly toxic, supra-carcinogenic & cancer generative mega poisons/petro chemicals that should be nowhere near soil or water. This is where the infamous “flaming water” clips have come in their thousands, as ground water/aquifers are polluted around residents who have been unlucky enough to reside close to a gas source & have a multi-national roll in & impose a well on their land (because you own what’s on the surface of your land, not what’s beneath it). film/images of victims igniting their water are now everywhere, as this is often the result of this bogglingly pernicious industrial crime. So to partially sum-up, – you have the major over-consumption of water for extraction, the poisoning of ground water with acutely toxic chemicals (which may well be irreversible), an “uncontrolled” & largely undeclared exiting of some of the strongest greenhouse gasses known to man churning out constantly with no oversight. Basically, it’s a death cult chasing extinction, with the rest of us involuntarily in tow. I am not even getting to the earth quakes, the disruption, noise & heavy traffic pollution, the nosebleeds & airborne pollutants etc’ etc. to be honest…when you really look at it all… it seems that it’s actually no longer about money. It’s as if that’s the ‘cover story’, & that really, the goal is planetary termination, extinction, industrial Armageddon, cataclysmic climate fall-out & irreversible mass land contamination. I don’t say that as a joke, exaggeration or as hyperbole or prose, that really seems to be the drive/ulterior objective here when you examine this indescribable action. I am not interested in anything the industry, government official or industry advocate could say in defense – I look only at what has & is being done – the face of the facts. Words are just a side-show to this biblical horror. As if polluting the air, felling the forests & “scorching the earth” were not bad enough… now it’s got to go underground! Hundreds of meters beneath the ground. Billions of gallons of death drenching god knows what. & just to place the cherry on the pile of bones – they dare to declare this a “green” fuel! A “transition fuel” to renewables that with just a little political will could be implemented right now for less than this holocaust hungry madness.
Josh Fox! We reviewed his scintillating How To Let Go Of The World documentary here already. He is an exceptional director, part back-woods redneck, part gentle intellectual. His great films manage to be enjoyable & funny as well as fucking frightening & extraordinarily informative concerning conundrums of the utmost urgency (fracking, climate extinction). Gasland & Gasland part 2 are no exception. Everybody needs to see these urgent classics! Especially as fantastical misinformation & factual concealment that defies belief have so badly deprived public knowledge about this most grotesque & perilous of super crimes.
I should really run another paragraph about the state collusion/corporate capture & barely plausible misinformation campaign (a largely global phenomenon). Also, as this doco illustrates so graphically, the notion, totally erroneous, that you are somehow “safe” from this kind of criminality in the West (this behavior is generally associated with, ha ha, “despotic” or “rogue” regimes from the depths of the 3rd World). As is pointed out in extremes here, this is Americans getting absolutely destroyed, devoured & abused by their own government & corporate sector on a level that’s frankly gone into overdrive. This is not new, but the scale & consequences definitely are much’ much worse than anything seen before. It’s also really worth noting that this industry was massively expanded under Obama. It’s also Obama, & then Secretary of State – Hilary Clinton who enacted the Global Shale Gas Initiative in April 2010, to push fracking across the world (it’s now in action in over 30 countries! Thank you Amerikkka). I definitely don’t want to attribute exclusive guilt to those shits, as it was the Bush administration (particularly senator Dick Cheney) that paved the way & breached the gates. Inevitably, the Chump disintegration will gleefully shovel their country/future generations into the oven with even greater favoritism & biased for this insanely destructive madness & is already gushing at expanding this hellish industry.
The great thing about the Gaslands duo (particularly the sequel), is that it’s pretty much impossible to withstand. The shit is so exponentially shocking, with So much clearly indisputable evidence crammed in that any witness besides the deranged who watches this will get it & gravitate towards the obvious conclusion of total rejection & repulsion. It’s irrefragable, & I would go so far as to say that any “hire-a-liar” that would publicly stand & support this destruction should face prosecution & incarceration. If you don’t know then how can you advocate? & if you do know then you’re a threat to the planet & the species.
For your own safety, watch both Gaslands films (Dayne Pratzsky’s “Frackman” is another shocking documentary on Australia’s imposition of the same crime).
Josh Fox
HBO Documentary Films
http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/