A Good Fracking Week for Ann and Phelim

Working hard to get the truth out — no, really!

Hydraulic fracturing — fracking — is the wave of the present and the future. A means of releasing vast new amounts of American fuel, it will give this country more decades of wealth and energy, plus lead us to the energy independence we so desperately need. In their primitive superstitious terror of standard fuels — not to mention of business and the United States of America — reactionaries like Barack Obama, the EPA and various other luddite environmental groups are trying to hamper this technological miracle. I believe they will ultimately be seen as bugs on the windshield of progress. But in order to stop them from stopping us, their powerful media-approved disinformation campaigns have to be countered by truth-tellers.

Which brings me to my Irish filmmaker pals Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer of the eponymous Ann and Phelim Media. Their first documentary Not Evil Just Wrong made inconvenient mincemeat of Al Gore’s dishonest campaign to spread global warming hysteria. And now they’ve produced a new film in defense of fracking, FrackNation.

The great fracking news is that FrackNation has now been picked up by Mark Cuban’s cable network. Here’s the word from the Hollywood Reporter:

AXS TV, the cable network owned by Mark Cuban, Ryan Seacrest, CAA and AEG, has picked up rights to FrackNation, a right-wing answer to Gasland, a documentary that sought to show that hydraulic “fracking” is harmful to the environment. FrackNation makes the case that dangers associated with fracking, a technology for extracting energy from rock formations, are way overblown.

The debate, though, no doubt will expand beyond the relatively small audiences who view scientific documentaries, as fracking also is put front and center inPromised Land, a movie opening Jan. 4 that stars Matt Damon as a natural-gas salesman and John Krasinski as an environmentalist. Promised Land is one reason AXS wants FrackNation to air in January.

And speaking of Matt Damon’s film, Phelim’s work exposing the bogus narrative of the movie was quoted in this week’s excellent WSJ column by Holman W. Jenkins Jr. “Good Will Fracking: Hollywood wimps out and makes a formula film.”

If a screenplay leaked by the pro-fracking activist Phelim McAleer is accurate, art dies in Mr. Damon’s movie in an ironic way. In the real world, water-pollution fears put forward by fracking’s opponents have proved largely hokum. The movie deals with this inconvenient fact by turning its eco-activist protagonist into an agent provocateurof the oil company, whose job is to discredit the environmental opposition from within.

Which is very much like what ideological critics are saying about Mr. Damon’s “Promised Land”—that the film’s backers are an unholy alliance of green money and oil sheiks out to abort America’s fracking windfall.

The whole column is well worth reading.

So holiday congratulations to Ann and Phelim. We should all be grateful to them for working so hard to get the truth out.