Stop the Hogs!

GASLAND - The Movie

http://gaslandthemovie.com/about-the-film/

About the film

"The largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history has swept across the United States. The Halliburton-developed drilling technology of "fracking" or hydraulic fracturing has unlocked a "Saudia Arabia of natural gas" just beneath us. But is fracking safe? When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his land for drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey uncovering a trail of secrets, lies and contamination. A recently drilled nearby Pennsylvania town reports that residents are able to light their drinking water on fire. This is just one of the many absurd and astonishing revelations of a new country called GASLAND. Part verite travelogue, part expose, part mystery, part bluegrass banjo meltdown, part showdown."
GASLAND will be broadcast on HBO through 2012. To host a public screening in your community please click here. The DVD will be on sale in December 2010.

WATCH Interview on PBS:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1452296560/

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Affirming Gasland

----- Original Message -----
From: Elaine Hughes
To: SK Premier Wall ; Council of Canadians ; Breitkreuz, G. MP ; Sask EcoNetwork ; Sask Environmental Society

Cc: SK Party Caucus ; SK NDP Caucus ; SK Liberal - Leader - Ryan Bater ; SK Green - Leader - Larissa Shasko ; May, E. GPC ; Layton, J. NDP ; Ignatieff M. - Lib. ; Duceppe, G. Bloc

Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2010 11:32 AM
Subject: FRACKING: Affirming Gasland


FRACKING: uses millions of gallons of drinking water and dozens of toxic, carcinogenic chemicals to get at the oil and gas buried deep in rock formations: this insanity is destroying our life-giving water sources . . . . occurring all over the Planet – New Brunswick, Saskatchewan (Pasquia Hills(?), New York State, Overseas, etc., etc…….)

Where is the outrage?

MORE INFO:

http://forum.stopthehogs.com/phpBB2/
viewforum.php?f=31&sid=7d7f932afac0f2926806ce08a906b5fa


Elaine Hughes
Archerwill, Saskatchewan

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Affirming Gasland

Extremely valuable & interesting frac & gas migration facts

http://www.damascuscitizens.org/Affirming-GASLAND.pdf

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SHARE YOUR STORY:

http://gaslandthemovie.com/take-action/share-your-story

Join our national registry. We will deliver thousands of testimonies to Congress this Fall. Share your experience. Whether your story is about leasing, drilling, downstream water or sleepless nights worrying, send it to us using this form.

If you have been directly impacted by hydro-fracking, we welcome you to share your story here. This will serve as the first national registry of stories, which we will use to educate the public about the consequences of fracking and will share with Congress. If you want to help others learn from your experience, share your story. Sharing is caring. Knowledge is power.

Under first amendment law, opinions are exempt from defamation claims. Therefore unless a statement of "I believe", "In my opinion", etc, are included in their testimony, it runs the risk of being challenged as defamatory. Please include these words in your testimony or we will insert them for you to protect you.

Kevin Grandia
Managing Editor of DeSmogBlog
Posted: June 22, 2010 01:37 PM

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Who Are the Spindoctors Behind the Attack on Gasland?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/
who-are-the-spindoctors-b_b_621190.html?view=print

Last night the award-winning documentary Gasland got a big bump in profile when it was aired on HBO.

And by the looks of the PR attack campaign launched today, it looks like Gasland is starting to get under the skin of the oil and gas industry.

I guess the dinosaurs in the dirty fuel lobby don't like videos of people who can light their tap water on fire after their wells are contaminated with methane gas, like this:
Of course the gas companies say this is all perfectly natural and has nothing to do with their operations, but Gasland documents the many stories of people whose drinking water is just fine until the gas companies come along and start pumping all sorts of toxic chemicals into the ground in an extraction process called hydraulic fracking.

In fact, I have heard this same story for years and as far north as Alberta, Canada where ranchers who have had natural gas drilling operations forced on to their properties can now light their water on fire. Not to mention the chemical burns their children get in the shower or the water irrigation shed that blew up in a ball of flames.

All perfectly natural indeed.

Most of the PR push-back on Gasland appears to be coming from an oil and gas lobby group calling itself "Energy In-Depth" whose anonymous website lists other oil and gas lobby groups, like American Exploration and Production Council, the Indiana Oil and Gas Association and the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, as their members.

While the members of Energy in Depth might be listed, who is actually running the day-to-day operations and mounting the attack on Gasland is a bit of mystery.

No contact information, phone number, mailing address or anything else telling us who is organizing the group can be found on the website.

A little digging, finds that the website is registered to a Washington, DC public relations firm called FD Americas Public Affairs(formerly FD Dittus Communications).

FD's clients include other oil and gas lobby groups with one in particular that stands out, the American Energy Alliance, run by former Republican staffers Eric Creighton, Kevin Kennedy and Laura Henderson. The Energy Alliance ran an "Energy Town Hall" bus tour last summer attacking the Obama administration's Clean Energy and Security legislation.

As FD explains on their website:

We have managed successful public affairs campaigns for clients on complex energy policy issues such as climate change, increased energy exploration and production, carbon capture and storage, electricity deregulation, natural gas prices, renewable energy development, and business and consumer energy efficiency.

An email that was forwarded to me gives a little further information on who's behind the PR push.

The email was sent by the Senior Public Affairs Representative for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation - one of the world's largest independent oil and gas companies - saying that the company is "actively engaged with groups like America's Natural Gas Alliance, Energy In Depth and the American Petroleum Institute to educate the public, government officials and other stakeholders about the errors in the film, and the truth about natural gas."

In public relations, it is always a bit of a tricky decision about when to begin countering your opponents' message. If you hit back too early, you may give the story "oxygen" and inflame a controversy that may have gone away if ignored. But if you wait too long to counter your opponent you risk jumping in too late and losing the war of words. The trick is to watch for the tipping point.

Looks like the tipping point for Gasland's opponents was last night's HBO screening, so watch out because we're all about to (be) subjected to more spin than the teacup ride at Disneyland.

Gasland: Get the frack out of here

http://www.nationalpost.com/Gasland+fra ... story.html

Chris Knight, National Post · Thursday, Jul. 22, 2010

Film Review: Gasland (3 stars)

Certain notions are so patently true they require no demonstration. Fire is hot. Gravity pulls. Water doesn’t burn.

Josh Fox’s astonishing and frightening documentary Gasland turns that last one on its head with the Biblical image of flaming tap water. The reason, he maintains, is that when energy companies use a process called hydraulic fracturing to get at natural gas, the ground water becomes so polluted it’s no longer fit to drink -- though apparently you can use it for cooking.

The demonstration comes at the midpoint of the film, which got its start when Fox was offered US$100,000 by a gas company for the right to engage in hydraulic fracturing under his property in rural Pennsylvania. Equally alarmed and curious, he started to investigate the process known as fracking.

What he found fit the unfriendly nickname: stories of families made sick by their well-water; of legislation aimed at circumventing environmental protection standards and the Clean Water Act; and in one dramatic moment of literal kitchen-sink realism, of burning water. “Can I try it?” he asks the farmer who has just obligingly set his tap water alight.

- - - SNIP - - -

The result is a call for better standards, more monitoring and some degree of transparency in the natural gas industry, which has been tight-lipped about exactly what chemicals are used in fracking. The mayor of Dish, Tex., (formerly Clark, it changed its name in exchange for free satellite TV service) commissioned his own study of the town’s air and water. “The results,” Fox says, “read sort of like the back of a pamphlet that you don’t want to pick up at the American Cancer Society.” High levels were found of such carcinogenic nastiness as methyl-ethyl disulphide, ethyl-methyl disulphide, ethyl-methyl-ethyl disulphide and, presumably, other combinations of those words.

The film ends on a more positive note than many clarion-call docs. (See next week’s Countdown to Zero, about the proliferation of nuclear weapons.) Congress is trying to pass a bill to put natural-gas drillers back under the regulations of the Clean Water Act, though industry is fighting back hard and the mainstream media aren’t much interested in covering the hearings. Fox, banjo in hand, is trying to get the message out one note at a time.

• Gasland opens today at the Royal cinema in Toronto.

MORE: http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/Gaslan ... e/3310725/
story.html#ixzz0uieoB4Jd

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Exposing the Natural Gas Industry's Attempt to Silence Its Critics

http://www.alternet.org/story/147600/

By Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet
Posted on July 23, 2010, Printed on July 26, 2010
In June, just before Josh Fox’s documentary Gasland was about to premiere on HBO, a document seeking to discredit the film’s account of the hazards of natural gas drilling suddenly appeared. "Debunking Gasland" was posted on a Web site for Energy in Depth, a petroleum industry public relations concoction that had been whipped up the year before to defend the radical new drilling technology called horizontal hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) from growing investigation and criticism.

EID, which claims to be a gas industry “coalition,” sisseminated "Debunking Gasland" far and wide, releasing it to media outlets and aggressively advertising its existence through its own Twitter feed and YouTube channel, as well as through pop-up windows on Google and Facebook. Fox, whose film had racked up awards from Sundance to Big Sky, and whose International WOW theater the New York Times has called “fearlessly inventive and virtuosic,” was an amateur film director from the fringe of theater. "Debunking" claimed that Gasland was a montage of misstatements, misrepresentation and outright lies.

Energy in Depth presents itself as the voice of the “small-business industry” that is “American oil and gas.” Executives of the Independent Petroleum Producers of America are listed as “personnel” on the site’s Contact Us page. No address is given, only a telephone number, which is the same as that of the Institute of Energy Research, a petroleum industry think-tank. An earlier version of the page, reposted on Sourcewatch, listed Brian Kennedy as a contact. Co-founder of IER, Kennedy is now managing director of the public relations firm FD Americas Public Affairs, which boasts the energy industry as its “backbone,” touts work for both IER and IPPA, and no doubt, as recently asserted in the Huffington Post, can claim Energy in Depth as its latest strategy to sway perception and policy for the petroleum industry through a multi-million dollar campaign of mis- and dis-information. No amount of mom-and-pop spin can morph the industry from the giant it is, with vast financial reserves not only for toxic petroleum production but for media invention on its behalf.

Now, in a rejoinder called “Affirming Gasland,” released last week, Fox debunks his unnamed industry debunker. His piece contrasts dramatically with EID’s, not only in its information and analyses about what fracking is and does, but in its methods and tone. From the personal prefatory note, to the introduction of his panel of expert collaborators (each of whose contributions are clearly marked), to the updates of the lives of people in the film, to the abundant facts and references (a 3-page bibliography on the technical issues, science, regulation, congressional activity, and more), Fox's “Affirming” is everything that Debunking is not: transparent, humane, respectful, and accountable. Affirming Gasland will grow over time, Fox tells us, as he and others add insights and information to aid in the grassroots compaign to protect water and air from the petroleum industry's fracking onslaught.

I’ve interviewed Josh Fox before, always on the phone, and always when he's on the move to a Gasland screening or a public event on fracking. Last week, we talked as he dashed from Brooklyn to Trenton, New Jersey, on his way to a hearing about the future of fracking in the Delaware River Basin, where he makes his home and where Gasland, the journey and the movie, began.

MORE: http://www.alternet.org/story/147600/