The Huffington Post Slams Matt Damon, Yoko Ono for War on Fracking

The Huffington Post published a stern rebuke to celebrities attacking the process of fracking one day before the release of Hollywood’s most strident anti-fracking feature.

“Promised Land,” starring and co-written by Matt Damon, pits a small Pennsylvania town against a very big, very evil natural gas company looking to gobble up fracking-friendly land.

The film is getting lukewarm reviews at best, with even Time Magazine’s liberal film critic Richard Corliss calling out “Land’s” unabashed biases.

Left-wingers in the mainstream media — by which I mean me — are supposed to lap up a movie that plays to our farm-loving, tree-hugging prejudices. But even we know that well-meaning does not automatically equal good movie.

Raymond J. Learsy’s HuffPo article takes both Damon and anti-fracking celebrity Yoko Ono to task for demonizing a process which could be a game changer for both the American economy and energy independence as a whole.

In essence, to prohibit fracking, as is Yoko Ono’s wont, is tantamount to ripping out the nation’s rail system and all that it would entail to the economy, to the management of carbon gas emissions, to the workforce, to the wellbeing of communities, all because of the risk of an occasional train wreck.

Yes, fracking has its problems and they became clear very early on with low budget excursions into the new realm of fracking, with little oversight and little knowledge of the full dimensions of fracking technology. But within the few years, that fracking technology has been implemented to source shale gas, that technology has improved significantly, oversight has become singularly sensitized to the downside risks, communities have heightened awareness resulting in rules of the road that take into account the need for constant oversight and regulation….

What has also became remarkably apparent is that we are dealing with an American resource that is in such abundant supply that it portends to become a major game changer for our economy, bringing thousands upon thousands of jobs into the field and to ancillary industries that are supplying the infrastructure hardware.

The column’s timing is interesting, no doubt, as are the responses from some dyed in the wool liberal film critics. Are even progressives piling on a movie made by their ideological peers? Do they sense a wave of common sense behind the fracking process that won’t be dented by a propaganda piece like “Land?”