Gasland Part II

We have a supply of natural gas

that can last America nearly 100 years...

And my administration will take every possible action

to safely develop this energy.

The development of natural gas will create jobs

and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper,

where we develop a hundred-year supply of natural gas

that's right beneath our feet.

The boom in oil and gas production

has driven oil imports to a near-20-year low

and natural gas production to an all-time high.

The United States will promote the use of shale gas.

Now I know that, in some places, is controversial.

With 21st-century drilling technology,

you can get it out of the ground in a very safe and secure way.

I don't recall hearing about water being on fire.

We will have North American energy.

We're going to be independent.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, God bless you,

and God bless the United States of America.

MAN, VOICE-OVER: Hi.

My name is Josh Fox.

This is my house.

It's in the middle of the woods, tucked away on a dirt road

in a small town next to the Delaware River

called Milanville, Pennsylvania.

Just past my backyard, there's a stream

that feeds the Delaware.

It's been 5 years since the first proposal

to drill thousands of gas wells in the Delaware River Basin

came knocking at my door.

Every day you wake up with it...

the fate of my backyard,

the watershed for millions of people...

up in the air.

Sometimes, you can't figure out

what's going on in your own backyard

without figuring out all the places around the world

that your backyard's connected to.

And, as we know, in sequels,

the Empire strikes back.

So let's start where we left off...

when the tide came in.

It was hard to believe my eyes.

As far as I could see,

the surface of the Gulf,

streaked with oil like ghosts along the surface.

Nothing could really prepare you.

We hadn't seen pictures like this on the news.

It had been widely reported that journalists' flights

were restricted to 3,000 feet and above.

Journalists would call up the FAA to clear their flights,

and BP would answer the phone.

And I don't know why. Maybe because it was a Sunday.

Maybe because it was the Fourth of July, and everybody was off.

But somehow, we got clearance to fly at any altitude we wanted,

so this is what it really looked like.

Down on the ground, we weren't so lucky...

limited access to beaches...

but we weren't the only ones hitting roadblocks.

I was getting pretty good at this.

You don't really have time to sit back

and say, "Why the hell is this happening?"

Why is BP...

Are they in the back pocket? They got a cozy deal?

Is their lobbyist in Washington controlling this?

But, um, something stinks.

We're fighting harder with the Coast Guard and BP

than we're fighting the oil.

I don't even want to start to imagine things that...

Why would this be? Why would they be protected?

FOX, VOICE-OVER: We found out that BP was spraying chemical dispersants

on surfaces of the Gulf in huge volumes.

A chemical that had been banned in Britain

actually makes the oil more toxic

and sinks it out of sight.

They weren't solving the crisis, just hiding it.

It's going to be ugly if we quit spraying dispersant.

It's going to be black oil all over the surface.

But this monster that continues to grow every day,

at least it's not invisible.

Right now, they're making it invisible, impossible to fight.

For every decision they've made throughout the catastrophe,

there's been huge negative impacts, and we...

the people of Louisiana, Mississippi,

Alabama, and Florida... are going to have to deal

with those negative impacts for a very, very long time.

Years? Decades?

Decades, decades. Generations.

And that's what is so devastating

to the fishing communities.

So all the dispersant does is it makes the oil sink?

It makes it sink, and it spreads it

throughout the water column and into the sediment.

And most of the water column and the sediment

have been damaged or destroyed

as far as aquatic organisms are concerned

because it's toxic.

We lost the Gulf of Mexico

as far as an ecosystem,

as a productive ecosystem.

We didn't lose the Gulf of Mexico

as a source of fuel, fossil fuel.

And that drilling and production will continue,

even though the ecosystem has been destroyed.

FOX, VOICE-OVER: What I was learning in the Gulf

was that no matter how huge the catastrophe was,

what really mattered was who was telling the story.

Let's go catch the sunset, guys, then we'll come back in and check.

You know, if I get sick in 20 years, so be it,

but my kids' bodies are still developing.

They say, "Oh, well, everything's fine,

"but stay inside your house and keep your doors closed

and your air conditioner on recirculation."

You know, I was taught not to throw so much as a Coke can in the Bayou.

This is our home.

This is where we eat, sleep, live.

This is us. We're Bayou people.

People don't understand something. This isn't just about an income.

This is about an entire way of life in its entirety.

We'll go out here and catch 150 pounds of shrimp,

or go craw fishing in the ditches or whatever,

a couple of hundred pounds of craw fish.

5 or 6 families will get together, no alcohol,

boil seafood, barbecue whatever,

and we have family time.

You know, without that there, I mean, yeah,

we could cook other food, but what about going in the bayou

and going in the pirogue with the kids, with no video games,

no TV, no nothing?

One on one, some people go into the mountains behind their house,

and they become one with nature.

That's the bayou for us.

If it's not there, what's the point of being here?

We're going to have a dead fishery, contaminated land,

a bag full of bills, and a court date when this...

when the federal government tells BP that their cleanup has been completed.

Why stay?

FOX, VOICE-OVER: That's when it hit me

how much of this whole culture was going to have to move.

When I got home from the Gulf, there was a new surprise neighbor.

The Delaware River Basin Commission

was debating a new plan to open up the river basin

to 18,000 gas wells.

The Commission had approved

15 exploratory wells,

and one was about a mile from my house.

Wait. Stop.

I really want to start at the middle,

but I got to start at the beginning.

My parents built our house in the Upper Delaware

in the same year I was born, 1972.

It was my father's dream, and my mom filled it with furniture.

He told my mother, "I want to build a house of love."

I want to build a house of love for you."

He ended up building it out of a $2.00 diagram

out of "Popular Mechanics."

For my father...

a Holocaust survivor born in Russia, fleeing the Nazis;

and for my mother, the child of a poor Italian immigrant family from New York City...

on 19.5 acres, just a mile from the Delaware,

home was in the right place,

one of those place that maybe you might say,

"Nothing ever happens."

But then, in 2008,

just like most people in the Upper Delaware,

we got a letter in the mail.

We learned that our land was on top of a formation

called the Marcellus Shale, and that the Marcellus Shale

was the "Saudi Arabia" of natural gas.

We could lease our land to the natural gas companies.

We would receive a signing bonus in the neighborhood of $100,000

and untold thousands more if we only let them...

well...

for the first time, we heard that word.

You know the word. It's just like it sounds.

If we only let them "Frack us."

Fracking. Fracking.

Fracking. Fracking them.

The hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking"...

fracking... fracking.

So-called fracking... fracking...

Fracking... fracking.

The Marcellus. Shale gas.

The shale.

Das Marcellus Shale.

fracking.

FOX, VOICE-OVER: The "F" word isn't in the dark anymore.

It's an outright hit.

"Fracking" was Number 3 on the list of most popular words

in the English language in 2011,

right behind "occupy" and "deficit."

And with one to two million new wells projected,

America is in a fracking frenzy.

Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," is a method of gas extraction

drilling deep down thousands of feet to a shale formation

and then forcing down the well millions of gallons of water

laced with toxic chemicals at such intense pressures