Forbes: Shale Gas, Gasland, And Truthiness

I should have been pleased to hear that Gasland II is coming out.  It took only a brief viewing of Josh Fox ’s original Gasland to move me to tears—of laughter.  He employs a number of fairly transparent tricks to imply things that aren’t demonstrated factually, most famously playing a banjo while wearing a gas mask, as if the air was toxic.  Although perhaps the audience was meant to think he was at an organic farm after a manure spreading.

He has been called out by any number of people, including reporters, for false claims about elevated cancer rates, saying a toxic spill from a coal mine was actually from a fracking operation, among others.  The biggest error is that he implies that all pollution and health problems in an area with fracking must come from the fracking, on a par with medieval people who blamed the Black Death on the Jews:  there’s plague, there’s Jews, they must be the cause.  MORE