This weekend marks another wave of oil savvy films for your entertainment – and in the case of GASLAND – your immediate action. If you have driven anywhere beyond the metro area, you might wonder – as Josh Fox did – how the rows of rural land spotted with gas wells is working out for the landowners. The movie, perhaps the biggest blow yet for CNG and it’s ardent supporters like T. Boone Pickens, demonstrates the risk that the United States has with it’s troubled energy policy.
GASLAND deals with the tough choice of choosing bling over green like an earlier film LUBIE LOVE-The Movie. Yet what GASLAND delves into is the now obvious problem of big oil tacking advantage of national resources – in this case water – without adequately protecting the water supply. Fox’s own option to sell use rights in Pennsylvania for his financial gain could have funded his film career. Rather, he might just have made his career because of the national problems that companies like Encana, BP, Williams, Chesapeake and once again Haliburton present to citizens of this great country.
The advocacy of energy independence is of tantamount concern. When fellow citizens, be it politicians or business men and women loose sight of their own human needs for financial gain, their product, their goals seem to be a national disaster bubbling in your backyard. GASLAND narrowly shows how national water supplies – supplies that are about to become national superfund sites because of the way gas wells work (fracking specifically) are likely to silently and drastically pollute your tap water.
In one section of the film, KDVR Ron Zappolo and Libby Weaver, try to shed light on the Weld County families now being impacted by natural gas well exploration and use. The short term benefits of CNG seem more than obvious that Coloradans should support only Wind and Solar alternatives that are safer for all involved. Representative Diana Degette is one who specifically questioned the natural gas lobby about their true safety record with Americas most plentiful energy resource. GASLAND only demonstrates that market forces alone will yield energy alternatives that favor the company over the landowner – especially when consumers are uninformed and preoccupied. As T. Boone Pickens likes to say: “Without an energy policy, Americans are going to go down as the dumbest of the lot.” GASLAND clearly proves his point.
