Matt Damon’s “Promised Land” Twists the Fracking Facts
Michael Sandoval /
What happens when ideology and facts go their separate ways in Hollywood?
Stick to the ideology — and that’s just what happened in Matt Damon’s newest anti-fracking film, “Promised Land,” according to documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer:
So, 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.
In the revised script, Damon exposes Krasinski as a fraud — only to realize that Krasinski’s character is working deep undercover for the oil industry to smear fracking opponents.
Both Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Environmental Protection Agency found no evidence of contamination in the case of Dimock, PA, the likely inspiration for the new film.
Nick Loris, the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, has detailed the positive impact of hydraulic fracturing on energy production and job creation. He also dispels the persistent myths that inform opposition to the fracking process. According to Loris, “… Hydraulic fracturing is subject to both federal and state regulations, and there have been no instances of fracking causing contamination of drinking water.”
Those facts disrupt the narrative Damon, et al. were going for in “Promised Land.”
But when the story’s original bad guys — the fracking companies — were eclipsed by the “fraud or misrepresentation” of the anti-fracking activists themselves, McAleer reveals that the plot twist has now reasserted the blame on the big oil companies. The “anti-fracking fraudsters” are oil company operatives sent in to destroy the environmental opposition’s credibility.
Below is a trailer of “Promised Land,” followed by Heritage’s own short video about fracking’s positive benefits on society.
This summer, Heritage and the Institute for Energy Research sent teams to North Dakota to report on the economic revitalization that’s happened as a result of fracking.