HBO’s Gasland II will amp up national fracking debate Partisans will love, hate sequel. What about mainstream?

Competing visions of fracking went head to head last night in upstate New York.

Josh Fox screened his much-anticipated Gasland II at a school auditorium in the City of Binghamton, before a crowd of more than 500 people.* Phelim McAleer, a drilling supporter staking his career on discrediting the work of Fox, screened Frack Nation in front of several hundred viewers at an American Legion post in Vestal, about 20 minutes away.

GASLAND Part II Teaser Trailer #3 from JFOX on Vimeo.

After airing on AXS Cable TV early this year, Frack Nation continues to make the rounds in civic halls throughout the country. Similarly, Josh Fox is screening Gasland II in various communities as part of a “grass roots tour” prior to its television premier on HBO in July. It’s no coincidence that the films aired at the same time at nearly the same place this week. Broome County, which borders Pennsylvania, represents a strategic point in the frack wars, both symbolically and tactically. It sits over a prime part of the Marcellus Shale, a worldclass natural gas reserve, in a state where the fate of fracking is in the hands of an undecided governor, and stakeholders for and against it have been campaigning hard during a moratorium on permitting enacted almost five years ago.

I dropped by the American Legion just prior to the Frack Nation screening and found a full parking lot with strong representation from the pickup and SUV crowd, a horse shoe game going on outside, and a neon sign advertising Coors Light at the bar inside. Frack Nation promotes the industry view that natural gas development is harmless and economically critical, and portrays those who are victimized and their champion, Josh Fox, as phonies.

Running short on time, and having already seen and reviewed Frack Nation (more on that here), I moved on to the West Middle School in Binghamton and the upstate premier of muckraker Josh Fox’s latest film. Gasland II is a sequel to the 2010 film that depicts a deceitful, greedy, and destructive industry building profits off the backs of residents and the environment. It is not without flaws. It is one-sided, didactic, and prone to dramatization at the expense of depth. But it’s underlying premise, the industry wields unmatched influence that allows it to cover up problems, silence critics, and take what it wants through a mismatch of legal and lobbying power, is fair game. Its cinematography is masterful. Those who are skeptical that plutocrats are looking out for the greater social good will find the film a powerful rallying point. Those who feel Big Oil is being unfairly demonized will find it over-wrought and sensationalistic. But the true test of the movie is how it’s received by those with no particular view – the mainstream HBO audience it will reach this summer.

Fox emphasizes the scope and intensity of the on-shore drilling boom, spurred by the massive shale reserves that have become part of President Obama’s domestic energy strategy. These pay zones underlie dozens of states, including areas previously untouched by mineral extraction. Fox again showcases stories that served as the foundation for his original film – contamination in Pavillion, Wyo., Dimock, Pa., and pending development near his ancestral home in the Delaware Water basin in Milanville, Pa. Fox revisits these places for an update, and to establish a connectedness with down home America and a range of characters. In transition he explains: “My back yard is tied to national policy, which is tied to tiny places like Pavillion, Wyoming.”

There are parts of the movie, intended to be provocative, that just seem out of whack. I found an opening sequence pairing explicit footage of the devastating BP Gulf Oil disaster to the thumping groove of the Beach Boys Good Vibrations to be sardonic and more importantly off point. It doesn’t really tell us much. Perhaps the attempt with the music was to instill a sense of ignorantly blissful detachment to the cruel reality of what is happening, and perhaps that might work on a subliminal level for some. Or, it might just be weird.

I found other parts of the film broke significant ground. Fox gets Lisa Jackson, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, on record in an exclusive interview stating that there are “many cases of ground water and drinking water contamination” and that “states are going to have to step up” to regulate and enforce gas drilling.

Fox’s approach is urgent and unsettled – and in the hyper-tasking 21st Century media style, he packs an excessive number of visual cues and audio bites per minute of film. He moves from place to place, issue to issue, victim to victim, story to story, grounding the film in the occasional return to his own back yard, where the gas companies are closing in on a pristine section of the Delaware Water shed. Along the way, he sheds light on some important issues: the revolving door between the government institutions and the gas industry, the psychological war fare tactics the industry employs as a public relations strategy, and the chronic issue of methane migration found at drill sites globally.

He targets those who support gas, but never challenges the motives or stories of those who oppose it. I know that’s not a fit with the narrative line, but an effort to broaden his view would help his credibility and diminish a sense that he is cherry picking. I know through my own reporting that there are indeed many just cases and grievances against the industry from people pulled into the controversy by their own bad judgment or naivete, as well as from victimized innocent bystanders. But there are also cases where the industry becomes an attraction for opportunist, political or otherwise, posing as victims or champions of victims. Beyond that, Fox tends to mix images that are not clearly explained or sourced to amp things up. And while the visual style and frenetic pacing of the film will leave an impression on an audience that otherwise isn’t going to last through a plodding policy discussion, it will likely alienate those looking for a sense of precision and parity. (Surely, there are some people in the industry who are working to improve things?)

As with his first film, Fox excels at showing the gas development through deeply personal moments, and he improves, to some degree, his explication of the mechanics behind the problems. The flaming faucet that became iconic of Fox’s first film is presented again in various forms in Gasland II. Drilling increases the risks and complications of methane migration – the more holes you put in the ground, the more conduits you create for methane to move into places where it can blow things up. The risks go up when drilling into and through pressurized methane-baring zones. In this film, Fox uses Cornell University professor and fracturing expert Tony Ingraffia – a good choice -- for a tutorial on cement casing failure that plagues the industry. But flammable water is also a natural phenomenon, and by failing to explain this or even address it in either Gasland or Gasland II, Fox has left open the door for McAleer and other industry supporters eager to attack his work.

Still, Fox scores critical points for accuracy in a part of the discussion that has been muddied by the gas industry propaganda and they come at a place where McAleer’s movie runs aground as credible journalism. That is the part detailing the EPA’s investigation in Dimock, Pa, where methane migration and other problems associated with shale gas development became Exibit A for the anti-fracking movement. (I'm very familiar with this, as it's one of several story lines in Under the Surface.) It is a matter of record that, after Norma Fiorentino’s water well exploded on Jan. 1, 2009, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection found nearby drilling had caused water contamination in an aquifer that supplied homes along Carter Road. A subsequent investigation by the federal EPA also found high levels of methane, arsenic, and various heavy metals – all elements associated with drilling -- in some of the Carter Road wells. The EPA ended its investigation late last year without “need for further action,” as Fox correctly documents, amid the election season and growing pressure on the Obama administration and Congress. Government officials in Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and other gas states did not like the EPA looking over their shoulders and, further, there was fear that federally documented problems would encourage political action that would eliminate industry exemptions to the Safe Drinking Water Act and hazardous waste disposal laws. Without these exemptions, the industry would have to disclose the hazardous chemicals that go into and come out of the ground.

The mainstream media, encouraged by industry press releases, generally interpreted the EPA’s handling of the Dimock case as a signal that the water was “safe.” In fact, the EPA said in the text of its analysis that, although pollution was found at "levels that could present a health concern ... no further action” was required because the companies had offered filters and bottled water to residents with contaminated wells. Then the agency quietly turned the case over to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a sister agency that handles health investigations. That ATSDR review, which Fox doesn’t address, is still pending. You can read more about it here.

McAleer, along with various industry PR firms, seized the headlines that touted Dimock water as safe and presented them as vindication. There was no problem, and malcontents on Carter Road had made it all up to bolster their legal claims. This detail is important because it cuts to a point made in Fox’s film that rings true to me, after years of reporting. As with an addict, the industry’s unwillingness to recognize it has any problems is the biggest hurdle to any meaningful reform or improvement.

(Spoiler alert) Fox saves the most compelling scene for the end, and it will surely resonate with a broad audience without need for technical interpretation. As the industry presses Congress to have the EPA stand down, Fox is denied entry to document a Congressional hearing questioning the agency’s role in investigating water pollution cases. Fox persists, citing his First Amendment rights. After a few tense moments, Committee Chairman Andy Harris – a gas supporter with financial ties to the industry -- has Fox arrested. Harris had denied Fox’s prior request for media credentials to attend the hearing, and the ensuing scene likely makes more compelling video and gripping narrative than anything Fox might have gained at the hearing. It will surely resonate with mainstream audiences who are skeptical of government ties to Big Oil or any corporate interest.

Liberty is a sacrosanct ideal, but its governmental underpinnings, in practice, can fill a person with a sense of ineffectiveness, tedium, and saturation of discussion ad nauseam. Still, we take comfort in knowing that we are always welcome in this discussion, if and when we choose, whether at public meetings or at the voting booth. We elect officials who enlist wonks and lawyers to make the fine print of government and its service to people, even those with competing ideological values, into policy that hopefully provides net improvement to our everyday lives. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. By extension, we count on media to provide access into the discussion by recording and analyzing government’s workings. While many residents might not find the time to make it to a town board meeting, much less a Congressional hearing, they are reassured in knowing that these hearings are accessible for coverage by reporters with recording equipment. When people are arrested for insisting on their First Amendment rights – the most fundamental tool for government by the people -- alarms should go off with anybody who values liberty.

Gasland aired on HBO in the summer of 2010. It earned Fox an Academy Award nomination and an Emmy, and brought the issue of fracking to mainstream audiences. The sequel is expected to reach similarly large audiences on HBO this summer. I expect most viewers, because of Fox’s gift to combine story-telling with arresting imagery, will sit through and perhaps be moved by a film about issues involving policy that is otherwise dense and obscure.

Frack Nation is a film built on the basis of discrediting Gasland. It will please a political niche, but it’s not enough to gain traction with a universal audience. In this country, powerful institutions have traditionally made attractive targets for mainstream media. Joseph Pulitzer built a newspaper empire on this approach that would set the mold for 20th century journalism; and the work of Upton Sinclair – an earlier recipient of the Pulitzer Prize– popularized a name for it: muckraking.

Shining the media light on rich and powerful people and institutions – raking the muck -- is a revered function of the working press. Exposes of critics of rich and powerful, on the other hand, may find a place in the news hole, but are not typically front page candidates. In this regard, McAleer’s success is married to the success of Fox. The more famous Fox becomes, the more relevant McAleer’s efforts to discredit him.

But there is something more:  We are no longer in the days of Pulitzer or Sinclair.  The post-20st century media is shaped by a business model with less resources for reporting, which is expensive, and more room for talking heads, reality television, and other content that is inexpensive. The Internet has made news reporting and consumption more fragmented and segmented, with endless choices to fit ideological views. (This is not all bad, but that’s another discussion.)

Spread across this media, the shale gas debate is fragmented by political ideology over science, and at the core of this fragmentation are opposing views about the role government plays in a free country. In the shale gas debate, government is seen as both an intruder on free enterprise and a protector of people’s rights from the intrusion of others. In both Gasland movies, Josh Fox represents the liberal view that corporate America has run amuck at the expense of the planet and the well-being of its citizens, and government policing is the first step toward justice for those who have been wronged and the final step to bring things back into balance. McAleer represents the conservative view that free enterprise, in this case represented by gas industry, is benevolent and government is, at best, a hindrance.

It’s a discussion that applies to many facets of our life, including property rights, land use, public health, and standard of living, and it’s a discussion that was easy to ignore when energy was mostly produced in far-away places and global warming was less real. Hopefully, we will all not only get engaged, but think about the broad and collective impact of our personal energy decisions, aside from our political beliefs.

* I originally wrote "about 400" and changed it after an organizer noted that the school auditorium holds 900, and it was more full than not.

Why the fracking waste problem defies a simple answer Recycling sounds good, but what does it really mean?

High volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) is the technological centerpiece to a new era of domestic oil and gas production. It’s also central to the controversy over the risks and merits of using unconventional means to extract gas and oil from mantels of bedrock spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles under dozens of states. What once were thought of as mere rocks are now widely promoted as the key to America’s energy future.

So this is nothing new to students of America’s energy dilemma, although fiction and non-fiction films – most notably Gasland, Promised Land, and Frack Nation – reinforce themes of bad guys and good guys in the industry or the movement that is trying to stop it. And then there’s the work of Kirsi Jansa, an independent journalist with a neutral eye and even hand who has created Gas Rush Stories, a series of short films highlighting the perspectives of different stakeholders in Pennsylvania shale gas development. While some of the material Jansa works with is not new – health claims related to dirty water or shale gas as an economic engine – I find her reporting worthwhile, especially when it takes viewers to places they may not have been to yet, such as a Pennsylvania plant that treats flowback. With Jansa’s permission, I have embedded that episode below, and I will talk a little more about why I think it’s a significant contribution to the shale gas discussion later in this post.



First a quick review: HVHF, commonly known as fracking, involves pressurized chemical solutions to crack bedrock along horizontally drilled well bores, some extending a mile or more in various directions from the center of a well pad. Fracking is sometimes confused with drilling, because activists tend to use the word as a hook in their broad condemnation of all aspects of shale gas development. But to be clear, fracking – also called well stimulation -- is one step in a multistep process to retrieve gas from bedrock, and it’s distinctly separate from drilling.

Industry proponents also use the word narrowly to serve their own rhetorical purposes. They like to limit the discussion of fracking to what happens once the fracking fluids pass through the water table and enter the production zone, where they are blasted into bed rock with underground charges that perforate the production lining. The industry’s use of the term tends to discount the vast logistics of getting the water to the site, mixing the chemicals, pumping them into a well bore, or collecting and disposing of millions of gallons of waste – flowback – produced with each well. This waste is a combination of chemicals, many of them toxic, injected into the well with water, and stuff like brine, heavy metals, and radionuclides that flow to the surface after 500 million years trapped in the Devonian Epoch.

There is consensus, if not scientific certainty, that chances are negligible that fracking fluids penetrating bedrock like the Marcellus or Utica shales a mile or more deep in New York and Pennsylvania will migrate into water tables near the surface any time soon. This is something industry representatives like to emphasize. But they seldom acknowledge, much less emphasize, the part of fracking – the logistical part – that involves the greatest risk of polluting fresh water zones. That’s when products and byproducts are trucked, stored, mixed, and handled above the surface and injected into the well, or regurgitated with the brine and collected and shipped off for handling and disposal. When things go awry here problems are blamed on “human error” or “mechanical failure.” From a PR standpoint, that makes sense, because it suggests these things can be controlled or prevented, and things that can be controlled or prevented are less scary than the notion of suspect technology interfacing with poorly understood natural systems.

Every shale well produces several million gallons of waste. There are tens of thousands of wells being produced over the short term in Pennsylvania alone, with similar rates of development targeted for the other dozen or more states over shale reserves. The industry is exempt from federal hazardous waste laws, so it is relatively free to handle and dispose of waste without the restrictive reporting measures that apply to other industries using the same chemicals or producing similar kinds of waste.

Sometimes haulers take waste to treatment plants, where it is diluted and discharged into rivers, an option that has been known to cause problems. With the onset of the Pennsylvania Shale Gas Boom from 2008 through 2010, levels of total dissolved solids – which include chlorides and other constituents of production waste -- spiked in major Pennsylvania watersheds, including the Monongahela and Allegheny river systems. The spikes coincided with the disposal of drilling waste to municipal treatment plants that were not equipped to treat it. After TDS in the Mon hit crises levels, the Pennsylvania DEP drafted new rules, under Chapter 95 of Pennsylvania’s Clean Streams Laws, to discourage the disposal of drilling waste at treatment plants by setting TDS ceilings for incoming shipments. But many plants ended up grandfathered into the old standard, and the industry found other ways around the new rule, and the problem persisted. After repeated calls for the industry to voluntarily stop taking drilling waste to plants ill equipped to handle it, TDS levels have recently dropped dramatically in the Mon River. But they remain a problem in the Alleghany. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania DEP is scaling back a proposed law to impose tougher water quality standards. Specifically, the DEP has dropped Chapter 93 Water Quality Standards for the discharge of molybdenum, sulfates, chlorides, and 1-4 dioxane, in response to industry complaints that restricting the discharge of these pollutants would hurt business.

There is an alternative to discharging flowback through treatment plants: Disposal wells. Specifically, waste from the burgeoning Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania is being shipped to Ohio and injected into depleted oil and gas cavities deep in the earth. It’s an option with it’s own set of PR and mechanical issues, including questions about seismic tremors and long-term geological stability.

And there is another alternative: Recycling. Recycling is the industry’s simple and promotionally effective answer to a complex problem. But recycling is complicated, starting with the lack of a statutory definition for what it actually is or should be. It is voluntary and unregulated. With no regulatory baseline, it’s a catchy word that projects an air of environmental stewardship, while actually meaning whatever the industry wants it to mean. Very much like the term “all natural” on food products intends to give us a good feeling without really telling us anything about them. Recycling, sometimes called closed loop drilling, suggests that all the flowback is collected in steel tanks and then purified, sometimes on site, for reuse. There is little public explanation of how the process eliminates or neutralizes chemicals that are classified as hazardous material when they are mixed with the water, or how the heavy metals, residuals, and brine that come out of well bores are either rendered harmless in this process or are also recycled and put to good use. The industry typically cites the need to protect trade secrets as an excuse for non-disclosure.

The fact that the process is ill-defined, variable, and obscure does not mean that material coming from the wells is not faithfully and effectively dealt with. But there is no way of independently verifying it. In all cases, we are asked to trust the industry. In more than 20 years of environmental reporting, I have learned that some companies are more trustworthy than others.

This brings us to the work of Kirsi Jansa, a Finnish journalist who has attempted to document the flow of wastewater as part of Gas Rush Stories. In Episode 9, she takes viewers on a tour of Reserved Environmental Services, a Pennsylvania company that handles fracking waste. I find Jansa’s work to be a fair attempt to get answers without building a case for or against the industry, and very different from partisan films such as Gasland and Frack Nation that have gained far more publicity. Jansa asks relevant questions and faithfully documents the answers – in the case of Episode 9 the answers come from her tour guide, plant operator Andy Kicinski. Jansa’s minimalist style lets her sources do the talking while offering viewers little in the way of rhetorical lines with which to connect the informational dots. But her work does raise provoking questions, at least in my mind. Where does the residual waste end up? Why is the finished water non-potable? Why do some haulers bring in waste for disposal rather than recycling, and where does that go?

While reporting for Gannett, I interviewed treatment plant operators and found they were free with information to a point that stopped short of technical specifics. So after viewing Jansa’s film, I followed up to see if I could connect a few of the dots. I was interested, among other things, in how the contaminants removed from the flowback were handled when they were concentrated through the recycling process.

Jansa’s answer from Kicinski squared with my own reporting: Flowback distillate is classified as residual waste, which, unlike hazardous waste, can be disposed of by conventional means. She also explained her futile attempts to document the disposal of another kind of shale waste – tailings that are produced from the drilling process. That includes drilling mud used to lubricate drill bits and float tailings to the surface. It really isn’t mud, but a viscous solution engineered to exacting chemical specifications that contans barium and other toxic chemicals. Jansa’s source had to eventually decline the interview because of a non-disclosure agreement with its customers.

“I've been a journalist for almost 20 years and have never worked on an issue where it is so hard to get information and find answers,” Jansa told me. “But then I've never worked on a topic where so much money is involved either.”

As I have stated in previous posts, I take no side on the merits and risks of shale gas development. But I am all for transparency and full disclosure and I approach the concentration of wealth and power with healthy skepticism. That’s an old-school journalistic ambition that is well served by the work of people like Jansa.

Frack Nation hits old themes like pickaxe on bedrock

Frack Nation, a movie to debut next week on AXS cable television purportedly to “tell the truth” about hydro-fracking, features several scenes of Julie and Craig Sautner. Those following the fracking debate might recognize the Sautners. They are the couple from Dimock Pennsylvania who routinely show up at anti-fracking rallies near and far with a turbid jug of water and harsh words about how drilling polluted their well. Their complaint is as much about what they see as the industry’s sustained attempts to avoid owning up to the problem as the problem itself.

I watched Frack Nation, by Phelim McAleen, as part of some homework I was completing for an interview today for WESA’s Essential Pittsburgh. More on Frack Nation in a moment, but first some context for the story line that is not included in this pro-fracking film:



It’s a matter of record that the Sautner’s well went bad shortly after drilling began near their house in Susquehanna County in 2008, that the Pennsylvania DEP recognized that the drill operator, Cabot Oil & Gas, was responsible for the problem; and that Cabot installed a basement full of filtration equipment to attempt to restore Sautner’s water. I covered these events personally, both as a reporter for Gannett and later in the narrative of Under the Surface. It’s also a matter of record that water wells can go bad on their own, but nearby well bores drilled through water tables into pressurized systems increase the chances, as does the handling and mixing of gross quantities of chemicals and waste water above the aquifer. It’s also a matter of record that human error or mechanical failure occasionally cause spills or, as the industry prefers to call them, “releases”.

The Sautners were unsatisfied with the inconsistent and largely ineffective results of the collection of tanks and filters that Cabot installed in their basement to purify their water. They grew more unhappy with Cabot’s assertion that the company was blameless, and it was providing assistance to the family merely as “a good corporate neighbor” rather than as a responsible party. So the Sautners joined a lawsuit with 15 other Dimock families who had encountered various problems with their water wells coinciding with nearby drilling operations. The plaintiffs included Norma Fiorentino, whose water well exploded shortly after Cabot sunk a gas well on neighboring property. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection tracked that problem, in part, to explosive concentrations of methane leaking from several faulty gas wells in the area – a finding Cabot refuted.

Meanwhile, some Dimock residents who experienced water problems were less antagonistic to the industry, including some who (unlike the Sautners) were getting compensation for both gas wells on their property and problems with their water wells.

This would have been a natural story line for McAleer, or anybody else who wanted to faithfully recount this compelling tale. But the way McAleer portrays the Sautners represents the broader shortcoming of Frack Nation. He systematically discredits them, along with various regulators, residents, celebrities and anybody else who publically calls into question gas industry’s motives and methods, as hypocrites, liars, and lunatics. Shale gas development is good, and the intentions and methods of the industry are pure.

In McAleer’s view, it’s that simple.

McAleer’s primary target is Josh Fox, whose 2010 film Gasland received acclaim ranging from an Emmy award to an Oscar nomination. Gasland is also one-sided. It focuses on the untold (as of 2010) risks associated with shale gas development, and the lack of oversight that allows the industry to flourish, sometimes at the expense of residents who are promised one thing and get something else.

Both Fox and McAleer are guilty of cherry picking sources and evidence to build their arguments. But at the time of its release, Gasland broke original ground in provoking and articulating challenges to the industry’s public relations campaign to pitch America’s emerging shale gas boom as clean, well regulated, and problem free. McAleer’s Frack Nation, by comparison, hammers away with the same old industry themes that hit home like a pickaxe on bedrock.

If there was anything promising that struck me about Frack Nation, it was the undeveloped implication that the controversy over fracking has split communities. McAleer passes on the chance to address this head on, however, and instead portrays the Sautners as part of a renegade minority. To advance this, he features a grass roots group of residents who are industry supporters – called Enough Already – who mount a protest to counter the claims of injustice by the Sautners and others who go unnamed. Enough Already is McAleer’s silent-turned-vocal majority.

This division gets more at the heart of the real story, in my mind, and it’s a place I attempt to take readers in Under the Surface. But rather than exploring this in a vivid, fair, and compelling way, McAleer, when he is not obsessively discrediting Fox and the Sautners, veers off into conspiratorial territory. He focuses one scene on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interest in discouraging shale gas development in America to preserve Russia’s interests in developing and exporting its own vast reserves. Perhaps the anti-fracking movement in America – with its collection of liberals, hippies, elites, and celebrities-- is subversively connected to Russian interests, viewers are invited to wonder. Sound familiar?

Dimock is not the first drilling community to be split by problems, as examples range from Dish Texas to Pavilion Wyoming. But it is one of the first communities where problems received widespread media attention after Norma Fiorentino’s water well exploded on January 1, 2009. The focus grew stronger when officials from the EPA arrived in the small town to test the water of the Sautners and others. The agency took samples from 64 homes near drilling operations and concluded that levels of pollution in five of the wells – roughly 8 percent -- were high enough to pose health risks, but those risks were mitigated by treatment systems installed in or planned for the homes. At the time of the testing last year, the agency found the Sautners’ water to pass spec. McAleer seizes on this with a candid clip of Craig and Julie Sautner reacting with an angry outburst of frustration and disbelief. (He captures and dwells on the Sautners’ anger in a way that serves his portrayal of them as unreasonable, unlikeable, and unbelievable.) He omits any history or context of the problem, or an explanation that groundwater systems are dynamic, or recognition that a problem that comes and goes is possibly much different than no problem at all. (The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is now assessing health risks of exposure to contaminants in the Dimock groundwater and has not yet released its report – another detail omitted from McAleer.)

In the penultimate scene, McAleer stakes out Julie Sautner and successfully provokes her rage. The police arrive. It’s not pretty, but McAleer, the one with the camera, the editing studio, and an agenda, holds all the cards.

McAleer claims to “tell the truth” about fracking. That’s an ambitious goal, and the movie falls well short in depth and sophistication that the topic deserves. It’s all fine to rebut and challenge Josh Fox. But McAleer could have done this far more effectively and helped his own credibility by recognizing some of the merits in Fox’s film and using them to advance the discussion. Instead, he reduces parts of his presentation to a Limbaugh brand of contempt while rehashing the tired industry line that fracking is problem free and the industry is the victim of mean and green liberal forces.

Still, this will be a movie that will be savored by people who are rock sure that fracking does not and cannot cause problems, and that the industry needs only to be left alone – or “turned loose” in McAleer’s words -- to stimulate wealth and comfortable living for all.

Promised Land review stirs passion over fracking debate One reviewer takes aim at another with pie, misses mark

We could expect this. The release this week of “Promised Land,” the Matt Damon movie about shale gas development in rural Pennsylvania, has inspired the industry to run pro-drilling commercials inside theaters to counter anti-fracking rallies outside theaters and the influence that industry fears the film will have on viewers. But could we expect a pie fight?

Matt Damon in Promised Land

“Promised Land” (my review here) is the latest in a cascade of films about drilling – in the categories of fiction, non-fiction and propaganda – vying for the hearts and minds of audiences. Because of the ideological sensitivities inherent to the debate over fracking – the controversial process to extract oil and gas from rock -- and global dependence on fossil fuels in general, movies such as Gasland, Frack Nation, Gas Odyssey and Truthland aim for nerves and they tend to hit their marks with partisan viewers. But “Promised Land” is unique because it will draw audiences who might actually care less about fracking than what they expect to be a good Matt Damon flick. It’s just the sort of mainstream audience that the polar extremes want to win over. This gets interesting from the start, because a fictional firm called Global Energy is the villain of “Promised Land.” Consequently, there is fear among industry supporters – given the star power and down-home appeal of the film’s setting and characters -- that it will misinform or unfairly influence movie goers.

Prospective audiences are naturally swayed by reviews, and here the fight begins. It is often not pretty, and in at least one notable instance, it gets barnyard ugly. That would be the critique by Chip Northrup, the Texas oil and gas man turned-anti-fracking activist, of the work of Michael Wines, who wrote a piece about “Promised Land” for the New York Times earlier this week. Wines wrote about why, in his view, the movie was not grounded in the real world. Specifically, he piqued Northup’s ire by dismissing the movie’s relevance to the battle playing out in upstate New York. This is one of many places where a vocal anti-fracking movement has capitalized on the state’s on-going attempts to come to grips with an industry unlike anything regulators have seen in terms of scope, intensity, and impact on economic and natural landscapes. Wines suggests the anti-frackers are getting in the way of a good thing in upstate New York.

Truthful or not, the opponents of hydraulic fracturing are winning. Otsego County, like much of south-central New York, sits atop the Marcellus Shale formation, a gas-rich sheet of rock that underlies much of the Appalachian Basin. In Pennsylvania, where fracking is already under way, some landowners have made a comfortable living by allowing drilling on their property.

But the critics’ case against the process — that land and groundwater can be poisoned by the chemical cocktail that is forced into the earth to fracture the shale and free the gas — is carrying the day. The number of Otsego towns with bans or moratoriums on fracking has risen in just 18 months to nine, from five, including the city of Oneonta and the surrounding town. And the share of the land under lease to gas companies for future exploration has dropped as well.

Wines then juxtaposes views of people who would gain from gas development with those trying to block it. He articulates the merits – economic development – without elaborating on risks aside from his general reference to “the critics’ case.” He further provokes anti-fracking displeasure by featuring in his article criticism from gas proponents who had not seen the movie.

Wines

Perhaps if Wines were writing for a publication other than the New York Times, his interpretation might not have drawn notable backlash. But because the assessment appeares in one of the most influential media outlets in the world, Wines becomes a strategic target for anti-frackers, and specifically Northrup, who has become a significant voice in the debate due to his broad and credentialed knowledge of industry. Northrup responds with his own informed assessment, which he then proceeds to undermine with a lowbrow pie-throwing antic.

Northrup

In a blog post for Shale Shock Media, Northrup reasonably argues that Wines misses a central point to both the movie and the situation unfolding in upstate communities. That is Home Rule, a battle where municipalities are challenging the state for jurisdictional control over shale gas development. Home Rule gets legally complicated. States have traditionally overseen gas and oil development partly because, the reasoning goes, resources and related infrastructure underlying multiple towns cannot be developed efficiently and economically with a patchwork of local ordinances and bans. The public good of bringing the gas to market, in theory, is weighed against the disruption development presents to given areas, much like major infrastructure projects, and the state is in a better position to make this calculation than towns. Towns in New York and Pennsylvania are challenging this on Constitutional grounds. So far they have successfully argued in lower courts that the state does not have the right or authority to limit a municipality's control over land use policies that pertain to shale gas exploration and development within its borders. It is an issue that will have a significant bearing on the outcome shale gas resources over the long term.

In “Promised Land,” the essence of Home Rule is portrayed with eloquent if abstract simplicity. After being approached by landmen seeking property rights, residents gather at a town meeting and decide to put the matter to a vote. This sets the stage for the ensuing battle that becomes the film’s central theme – a battle between divisive outside forces to influence the decision of local residents.

Northup fairly points out that Wines neglected to give fair treatment to this aspect of both the film and the real-life situation in Upstate New York alluded to in the film.

His interviews consisted primarily of sound bites from some local gas bags, who had not bothered to actually see the movie. So they did not talk about the movie, nor did Mr. Wines. The plot of which centered around a town’s right to exercise land use laws. You know, like the Town of Middlefield, not far from Oneonta, which has defended its land use laws in court. Or the Town of Otsego, right up the road, which was the first town to ban shale gas drilling in New York. Or the City of Oneonta itself (which has banned shale gas drilling) where Mr. Wines was when he was conducting the interviews. Towns like the one portrayed in Promised Land.

So far, so good. And then this:

So the piece read as a bit of a hack job – and now I can see why. The reporter is evidently a bit of a hack from way back. Under the heading, really truly can’t make this stuff up. . . . behold a memorable moment in Michael Wine’s brilliant career in journalism:

This is followed by a piece summarizing an incident 12 years ago when Wines was hit in the face with a pie made out of horse sperm by pranksters who had deemed him to be the “worst Journalist in Russia.” Northrup links to a lengthy article that ran in eXile Magazine, an alternative publication in Moscow, detailing how the sperm was gathered and how the pie was cooked. Wines at the time was working as Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times when eXile staff arranged and executed the prank.

Pieing is a weird tradition intended to bring somebody – usually an authority figure -- down a notch or two in the public eye. It’s not unheard of in academia, and it has been employed from the halls of Oxford to the steps of the Capitol in the service of public protest. It may get a lot of views online, but in my view, represents a Three-Stooges approach to polemics with corresponding political effect.

To be clear, Northrup did not physically hurl a pie at Wines. That happened 12 years ago under the direction of a group with questionable motives. Nonetheless, Northrup’s celebration of the event – along with a picture of Wines’ pie-smeared face in his recent blog post -- is clearly a metaphorical pie toss that Northrup assumes will somehow call into question Wines’ credentials. Casting Wines in the light of ridicule might meet the approval of anti-frackers who are regular readers of Shale Shock. But by making a classless event from long ago and far away the centerpiece of his argument against Wines’ assessment of “Promised Land,” Northrup will likely lose more points than he scores with mainstream fans of Damon. Northrup is a tall, gregarious, raw boned, Texas country boy. It’s a role he relishes in his pubic appearances, and he is obviously not bashful about barnyard humor. But subjecting readers to this kind of detail of an event of questionable relevance is surely ill advised if he wants the anti-fracking movement he represents to be heard outside of the echo chamber.