Since the release of the anti-fracking documentary “Gasland” in 2010, Hollywood’s been sounding the alarm about the process. A problem with its approach: Middle America seems to like harvesting energy and creating jobs, and is slightly less naive about co sts and benefits than the Matt Damons and John Krasinskis.
In their movie “Promised Land,” Damon is an evil gas-company shill who moves into a small rural town to buy up drilling rights from dull-witted townsfolk. But a concerned citizen (Hal Holbrook) speaks up and tells a town meeting fracking is responsible for a host of maladies, such as contaminated drinking water. Later in the film, an environmentalist (Krasinski) explains fracking to schoolchildren by mixing up a bag full of household cleaning products into a toxic brown sludge and then pouring it all over a model of a family farm as the children cry, “Eww!” Holbrook’s character adds that fracking is going to “scorch the earth under our feet.”
The reality is not nearly as frightening.
Deep under the earth’s surface, shale gas, released by blasting rocks with water and chemicals to create fissures, has proved an unexpected economic and environmentalist bonanza as clean-burning gas displaces coal and oil. America now imports only 40 percent of its oil, down from 60 percent about seven years ago. Moreover, gas emits far less carbon than oil and coal, which is a key reason why America’s carbon emissions stand at their lowest level in 20 years.
Like virtually every kind of fuel, though, gas acquired by fracking comes with an environmental cost. Fracking has been linked to small earthquakes, for instance, but the National Research Council this year said it was unlikely to cause an earthquake big enough to feel on the surface.
In west central Wyoming, fracking at an unusually shallow gas field linked to possible groundwater contamination has been investigated by the EPA, with inconclusive results. A town in Pennsylvania recently settled a lawsuit with a fracking company over alleged groundwater contamination, but federal regulators this year ruled the water safe to drink.
An Associated Press report in June noted that “Gasland” filmmaker Josh Fox has been falsely claiming that breast cancer rates spiked in the area of Texas’ Barnett Shale fracking.
“Another instance where fears haven’t been confirmed by science,” said the AP report, “is the concern that radioactivity in drilling fluids could threaten drinking water supplies.”
So far, fracking’s benefits appear to be far outpacing its costs. But Hollywood needs to keep coming up with new things to be scared of, and new ideas for the kinds of “socially engaged” pictures that win awards. Nobody wins Oscars for saying things are OK.