The FrackNation page temporarily suspended by Facebook is back up and running.
This means that — thanks to the Streisand Effect — the anti-fracking activists who put pressure on Facebook to close it down have shot themselves in their sandalled feet. Suddenly the whole world knows about the Dimock water trial — and what a huge setback it has been for the cause of anti-capitalist, enviro-Nazi lunacy.
Indeed, it’s possible that this once obscure trial may yet come to be recognised as the case that cost Hillary Clinton the presidential election.
To understand why you first need to appreciate what a hot-button issue fracking is with the liberal base. Bernie Sanders is flat against it. So — she suddenly decided at Flint, Michigan at the weekend — is Hillary.
Hillary Clinton, though, needed more time to outline three conditions in a more nuanced answer on fracking. She’s against it “when any locality or any state is against it,” “when the release of methane or contamination of water is present,” and “unless we can require that anybody who fracks has to tell us exactly what chemicals they are using.”
Until those conditions are met, “we’ve got to regulate everything that is currently underway, and we have to have a system in place that prevents further fracking.”
While this tough anti-fracking line might have played well with liberal activists, it’s unlikely to win widespread popular support when Clinton goes to the country.
First, it is increasingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that fracking has been good for the US. It has taken petroleum production to its highest level since 1972 and not just reduced America’s dependence on Middle-Eastern Islamo-petro-tyrannies but actually turned her into a net exporter of crude oil and natural gas. Also — despite the best efforts of President Obama, who in 2009 said he wanted electricity rates to “skyrocket” — it has provided the US with perhaps the most important of all ingredients for industrial growth and raised standards of living: cheap, abundant energy.
Secondly, it is also increasingly obvious that the claims made against fracking by activists like Josh Fox (of Gasland and Gasland 2 infamy), Mark Ruffalo and Yoko Ono just don’t stand up. Especially they won’t after this Dimock water trial which filmmaker Phelim McAleer has been covering on Facebook.
No one likes being lied to by a politician, even when in Hillary Clinton’s case the practise is so frequent it more or less coincides with every single moment her lips move.
If Hillary Clinton is going to campaign to close down America’s fracking industry on the basis of propagandistic nonsense from Josh Fox movies — faucets spouting methane (which has nothing to do with fracking), water whose contamination turns out to exist entirely in the greedy imaginations of vexatious litigants trying to make easy money out of a blameless oil and gas company — then it’s unlikely to impress fair-minded voters.
Especially not voters in blue-collar states which have tried fracking and come to enjoy its benefits. Hence Grover Norquist’s suggestion earlier this week that Hillary’s attack on the fracking industry may be her undoing.
“Under her new rules, fracking would exist almost nowhere,” the president and founder of Americans for Tax Reform told CNBC’s ” Squawk on the Street .” “Democrats used to be able to insult the energy industry because they lived in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Alaska [and] they don’t vote Democrat. But she declared war on Pennsylvania and Ohio with that statement. That’s not the way to win the election.”
Maybe Hillary should check out that FrackNation Facebook page and keep herself abreast of the collapse in the anti-frackers’ case. It probably won’t put her off her cunning plan to wipe out the US economy by promoting expensive, inefficient “clean” energy at the expense of cheap, abundant fossil fuels. But at least it might stop her sounding slightly less out of date and ill-informed next time she mouths off about “release of methane” and “contamination of water.”
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