Environmentalists tend to loathe the practice of hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. fracking -- which is weird, because natural gas is affordable, readily abundant, and burns relatively cleaner than our traditional fossil fuels. It's a step in the right fewer-carbon-emissions direction, but, because greenies also tend to conclude that economic prosperity and environmental quality are mutually exclusive (which, by the way, they aren't), they've generated a trumped-up war against the decades-old fracking technique. They dramatically claim that fracking causes earthquakes, contaminates groundwater, causes irreversible environmental damage, and other such nonsense.
One of the most well-known, and most deliberately misleading, environmental propaganda films around is Gasland -- it popularized the image of small-town Americans lighting their water faucets on fire, misattributing the cause to fracking. Despite the fact that the fear-mongering documentary has been soundly debunked many times over, the film is still on the State Department's official 2012 American Film Showcase. At least thirty-two Congressmen and women are not pleased with the obvious environmental bias going on here, and have sent a letter to Secretary Clinton asking that the film be removed (h/t Heritage):
Good. The environmental crusade against fracking reeks of desperation and needs to end -- even the bureaucrats at the EPA are having trouble sticking to their poorly-researched guns. Excuse me while I attempt to hide my glee:
In a sign that the EPA doesn’t have much faith in the science behind its study of groundwater contamination in a natural gas field in Pavilion, Wyoming, the agency announced on Friday that it would delay the creation of a panel to review its draft report until after the United States Geological Survey does its own independent test. According to the EPA’s statement: “The EPA, the State of Wyoming, and the Tribes recognize that further sampling of the deep monitoring wells drilled for the Agency’s groundwater study is important to clarify questions about the initial monitoring results.” The biggest question about the draft report was why did the agency think anyone would fall for their efforts to blame fracking for ground water pollution in an area known to have undrinkable water many decades before fracking was even invented. The gas reservoir at Pavilion (operated by Encana Corp.) is so close to the surface and topped by permeable enough rock that its extremely likely that the gas had naturally migrated up into the water table thousands of years ago.
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