Who watched Gasland II on HBO tonight? Anybody?
Here's a pretty good summary:
We Can't All Just Move
And so Gasland II begins much like 2010’s Gasland, with connections defined by similar experiences with odious oil and gas industry representatives. He begins this film with the 2010 BP oil spill, a means to set up both the industry’s need to seek out alternative fuel sources and its inclination to deceive. The film emphasizes the cover-up part of the BP spill, as Fox films images not captured by journalists whose access as restricted at the time (“This is what it really looked like,” he narrates mournfully, over shots of waters darkened by oil).
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As in the first film, these water-on-fire shots here help to express citizens’ frustrations. As Fox travels from Dimock, Pennsylvania and Dish, Texas to Baldwin Hills, California, each speaker has his or her own footage of contaminated tap water or methane flames shooting up into the sky above a processing facility. The common solutions for this dilemma are two: leave people to endure or not (Texas Representative Lon Burnham says, “We’ve got a lot of upper middle class white people with college degrees getting ticked off because they’re being treated the way third world people have always been treated by corporate America”), or move them.
Driven to desperation—their water is unusable, their properties are unsellable, their children are sicker by the day—many victims take the only option they can, which is to sign deals with the gas-drilling companies whereby the must move off their land, leave behind their homes, and never speak of what’s happened, owing to non-disclosure clauses. Again, Fox underscores the significance of who speaks, who tells the story. For even if the gas-drilling representatives of their lobbyists remain off screen, their money speaks loudly. Kucinich cites the effects of Citizens United specifically, as this Supreme Court decision allows such particular storytellers to remain undisclosed.
Fox goes one more step in this story of how stories are stifled. He films his own effort to record a public hearing in 2012, where the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment was to consider the EPA’s report on the links between fracking and water contamination in Pavilion, Wyoming (it was, he notes, “the first time EPA verified that fracking chemicals were in the water because of fracking,” and its eventual disavowal by the Obama Administration precedes Lisa Jackson’s February 2013 resignation as EPA administrator). The film includes footage of Fox being handcuffed and led outside the hearing room—despite his legal right to be in the room with his camera—and as he appears in canted frame, the exterior lighting and architecture creating a weirdly science-fictiony effect, he narrates his own story, his sense of “freedom” in the arrest and subsequent fingerprinting at the police station, his inability to film, to act, to speak, after three years of working on the film. At this moment, he says, his sense of freedom is at once ironic and horrific: “I didn’t have to do anything,” he says, his hands behind his back.
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/173326-gasland-ii-fracking-revisited/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Waiting for the whistleblowers now, because we don't have a safe air or water department anymore.
Josh Fox is standing behind that scene, evidently.
I've not yet seen Gasland II---no access to HBO
Do you remember the winger Judges in New Orleans after the BP oil catastrophe?
I've got a bridge to sell you. Perfectly good bridge, not much for the wear. I did see Gasland II early this AM on HBO. Will watch it again and try to find more about this Judge's decision and more articles. Need more sources and followup. Until then, I call this report bogus. I do not mean this as a personal affront to you. We just need to be careful & check other sources. 
