By Chris Tookey
Last updated at 11:50 PM on 13th January 2011
Verdict: Effective documentary
Rating:
The best film of the week, because it tells a story worth telling and conveys a much more powerful sense of anger at injustice, is GasLand.
Even though it’s over-long, horribly lit and seems to have been edited with a chainsaw, Josh Fox’s documentary effectively investigates ‘fracking’ or hydraulic fraction, a process where companies extract gas from beneath the earth by using toxic chemicals.
Fox criss-crosses the U.S. to show the harm caused by these chemicals, in the form of burning water, balding animals and sick humans.
The dark side of energy: The documentary forces the viewer to confront the unpleasant methods companies use to extract gas
It’s a sombre tale of corporate greed and cynical cover-up, made all the more shocking by the action of the last Bush administration (including Vice-President Dick Cheney) in making ‘fracking’ exempt from the conditions of the Safe Drinking Water Act in its Energy Policy Act of 2005.
This legislation was of particular benefit to Halliburton, a company of which Mr Cheney was CEO from 1995 to 2000.
This is a fine piece of investigative journalism.
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