Bob McCarty Writes
6/1/2011
Josh Fox, the director of Gasland, an Oscar-nominated documentary, has admitted he withheld evidence that showed gas can occur in water naturally and is not a result of fracking, the natural gas drilling technique that enables recovery of natural gas from previously-untappable rock formations…
…Journalist and filmmaker Phelim McAleer asked him about a report from 1976 by the Colorado Division of Water which said there was a “troublesome amount of methane” in the aquifer close to two families, the Markhams and the McClures, who are featured in the documentary as having problems with their water.
Mr Fox initially denied the existence of the 1976 report, but eventually admitted that there have been reports of “flammable water” in the US since at least 1936.
He said such scientific reports were not relevant to his documentary because he believed the families and accepted their accounts of their situation.
“The point is this.. The citizens [in Colorado] reported they could not light their water on fire before the drilling. And after the drilling they could light their water on fire. (…) I don’t care about reports from 1976, there are reports from 1936 that people said they could light their water on fire in New York City, but that’s no bearing on this situation at all. “…
…“He knew about these reports but chose not to include them – that is not journalism.”
I couldn’t agree more! To learn some of the reason’s why, read two posts — here and here — in which I shared what I learned about the nation’s natural gas industry during my April 2009 trip to the Piceance Basin in Western Colorado.
Read the entire article at Bob McCarty.com
We have Mr. McAleer’s video here. Unless Fox manages to have it removed from Vimeo as he did at YouTube.
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