Anti-energy activist and documentarian Josh Fox believes the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is shilling for fossil fuel companies.
"They will stick with the industry till all our water is contaminated, our air polluted and climate change has made our planet unlivable," the filmmaker director said on Friday following the release of a widely anticipated EPA study on the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
The innovative oil and gas extraction technique has no "widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water," the agency found. There were isolated incidents of water contamination among the wells tested, but "the number of identified cases … was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells."
Fox dismissed the findings in a column on the website EcoWatch.
"What the EPA presented to the public yesterday was PR, not science and proof of the widespread, systemic contamination of our regulatory bodies by the oil and gas industry," Fox wrote.
"It is clear that EPA is a political agency not a scientific one," he wrote on Twitter.
Fox is one of the country’s most high-profile anti-fracking activists. His 2011 documentary Gasland was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary and won a number of other awards.
The film claimed that fracked natural gas wells had contaminated nearby drinking water supplies. It gained broad attention for footage of a Colorado resident igniting the water coming from his kitchen faucet.
The Colorado town where the scene was filmed had reported naturally occurring methane in its drinking water for decades, before any wells in the area were hydraulically fractured. Fox later said he was aware of that fact, but didn’t include it in the film because "it’s not relevant."
EPA’s study directly undercuts Fox’s case for water contamination. Gas from fractured shale formations is "unlikely to extend upward from these deep formations into shallow drinking water aquifers," the study found.
Fox accused EPA of "burying the science with a misleading headline that supports the Obama Administration’s pro-fracking policies rather than reveal the true dangers of fracking."
He has previously said that rolling electricity blackouts would be preferable to the use of hydraulic fracturing for energy extraction.