The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (COMINTERN) (AMPAS) are a bunch of suckers when it comes to Leftist propaganda films featuring outrageous, junk-science based, anti-capitalist claptrap. Just ask Al Gore, who won an Oscar a few years back for An Inconvenient Truth.

One of this year’s nominees in the Documentary Feature category is a film by Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic called Gasland. Too bad there’s no category for Documentary Fiction.

Here’s Gasland‘s famous image of flammable tap water, from a Mr. Markham’s Colorado water well:

Gasland aims to educate the public about the supposed danger of hydraulic fracturing, a process commonly used in preparing low permeability but gas-bearing rocks for production in wells once they are drilled. In reality, the process takes place thousands of feet underground, separated from underground water sources by a mile or more of rock. In the last 60 years or so, a million wells or more have been fracked, with no documented instances of groundwater contamination.

You’d expect industry to step up and object. But even public officials have been moved to denounce Gasland‘s fast and loose treatment of the facts.

Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, Correcting Gasland:

Gasland incorrectly attributes several cases of water well contamination in Colorado to oil and gas development when our investigations determined that the wells in question contained biogenic [naturally-occurring] methane that is not attributable to such development.

From John Hanger, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection:

Gasland is “fundamentally dishonest” and “a deliberately false presentation for dramatic effect.”

Gasland talks about Dunkard Creek [a massive fish kill] – an environmental disaster – but everything we know about Dunkard Creek at this point indicates the primary source of the problem was a coal mine in West Virginia.

America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) has produced a video further debunking Gasland‘s claims:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1W8MnveFq8[/youtube]

Surely Gasland will win its Oscar. Its inflammatory (no pun intended) theme and predictable hysteria will attract Academy voters like flies to a cowflop. It’s not so much that the Left-coasters are anti-energy, they’re just hostile to forms of energy that actually, you know, work.

[Disclaimer: My employer is not an ANGA member company. It’s likely that we would benefit economically from greater restrictions on hydraulic fracturing, since restrictions will inevitably lead to higher prices of our gas, which for the most part does not require fracking. The success of the process in the shale plays of PA, OK, LA, TX and elsewhere have resulted in a huge supply of natural gas on the market, so that the current price differential between gas and oil ($4 per mcf gas vs nearly $100 per barrel oil) prices a gas BTU at about a quarter of the cost of an oil BTU. For the consumer and for the environment, natural gas is the best deal going. – SM]

Cross-posted at VladEnBlog.