HOLLYWOOD FRACKS UP

Matt Damon’s new film Promised Land – scheduled for theatre release on December 28 – sounds really promising.

It’s about a cynical young man sent by a large wind farm company to a lovely village in rural Pennsylvania to seduce the locals with tales of the massive sums of money they’ll make if they sign a deal to have huge wind turbines built on their farmland.

Dollar signs flash in the greedy hicks’ eyes. This wind farm scam is crazy: no way would they have made that much money in their entire lives from just farming. Every one rushes to Damon: "Where do I sign?"

But Damon has begun falling in love with a local farm girl who tells him the truth about wind farms: that they’re ugly, that they kill birds and bats, that they ravage the countryside, blight views, divide communities and make people sick with their Low Frequency Noise.

So instead of bribing locals to have these bat-chomping bird-slicing eco-crucifixes erected in their village, Damon leads the fight back. NO MORE WIND FARMS!

The village is saved and he and the girl live happily ever after.

If only.

The sad truth is that this lame eco-propaganda movie has nothing whatsoever to do with the genuine threat of wind farms but with the almost wholly imaginary one of fracking.

Fracking has been a godsend to the US economy, blessing it with clean, cheap, abundant energy which has enriched those states lucky enough to have big shale gas reserves, created jobs and increased America’s energy security by reducing its reliance on imported gas from unstable countries.

What’s not to like about shale gas?

Well, indeed. And this is proving something of a problem for America’s showbiz bleeding hearts. Being opposed to shale gas is the new black for every two-bit celebrity these days. Like having a "Free Tibet" bumper sticker on your Porsche Cayenne, it shows you care.

The propaganda machine opposing shale gas development is massive and very well-funded. Its opponents include the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom, the Park Foundation (which since 2009 has spent over $3 million funding ‘grassroots’ opposition to shale gas), and pretty much everyone involved in the renewable energy scam. The environmental movement loathes shale gas because it renders expensive, environmentally unfriendly "alternatives" like wind and solar essentially superfluous.

But back to that Hollywood problem I mentioned a moment ago. If shale gas – and fracking – aren’t bad, how the hell do you make a half-way convincing movie in which they are the villain of the piece?

Answer: with considerable difficulty.

In the New York Post, Phelim McAleer – co-producer/director of the forthcoming Frack Nation – relates the amusing story of how Matt Damon and John Krasinski (who co-wrote the screenplay and co-star in the film) were driven to increasingly desperate measures to make their Promised Land movie look vaguely credible.

It turns out that the script’s seen some very hasty rewriting because of real-world evidence that anti-fracking activists may be the true villains.

In courtroom after courtroom, it has been proved that anti-fracking activists have been guilty of fraud or misrepresentation.

There was Dimock, Pa. – the likely inspiration for "Promised Land," which is also set in Pennsylvania. Dimock featured in countless news reports, with Hollywood celebrities even bringing water to 11 families who claimed fracking had destroyed their water and their lives.

But while "Promised Land" was in production, the story of Dimock collapsed. The state investigated and its scientists found nothing wrong. So the 11 families insisted EPA scientists investigate. They did – and much to the dismay of the environmental movement found the water was not contaminated.

There was Wolf Eagle Environmental Engineers in Texas, a group that produced a frightening video of a flaming house water pipe and claimed a gas company had polluted the water. But a judge just found that the tape was an outright fraud – Wolf Eagle connected the house gas pipe to a hose and lit the water.

Other "pollution" cases collapsed in Wyoming and Colorado. Even Josh Fox, who with his Oscar-nominated documentary "Gasland" first raised concerns about flammable water, has had to admit he withheld evidence that fracking was not responsible.

These frauds and misrepresentations created huge problems for the Damon/Krasinski script.  According to sources close to the movie, they’ve come up with a solution – suggest that anti-fracking fraudsters are really secret agents employed by the fossil-fuel industry to discredit the environmental movement.

Damon and Krasinski said they were making a movie that "defines us as a country" but then shoehorned ideology into a script – and when real-world events became a problem, they shoehorned in more ideology.

The simple truth about fracking is that much of the opposition to it is being driven by proven liars, charlatans and fraudsters – some driven by zealotry, others by hunger to win a big lawsuit.

There is a war going on in parts of America between impoverished locals and urban elites. These elites are using fraud, exaggeration and celebrity star power to stop rural communities from prospering through gas drilling.

Sounds like a great setting for a movie. Unfortunately for America, it’s not one Hollywood is going to make anytime soon.

Phelim McAleer is an Irish journaalist and director of Frack Nation, a documentary about hydraulic fracturing.