Hollywood Will Not Rest Until Windmills Are Powering Every Car – Except Theirs, Of Course

Celebrities just aren’t satisfied unless they’re front and center at the latest progressive environmental cause. What better way to show they care about the environment, while engaging in their extravagant, jet setting, and carbon emission-filled lifestyles without accountability? Plus they can fill their narcissist coffers at the same time.

Hypocrisy is nothing new in Hollywood or with Leftists in general. Al Gore, the king of “global warming” and the face of clean energy, sold his cable station, “Current TV” to the anti-American, “Al-Jazeera,” which is owned by the fossil-fuel-rich royal family of Qatar (some of the biggest oil producers in the world). To add insult to injury, Gore’s Current TV was a big supporter of Obama’s tax hikes on the rich, yet Gore himself made sure to get his epic payday before all those tax increases went into effect. So what happened to saving the planet and making the rich pay their “fair share”? Nothing to see here. Move along.

Several years ago, an opportunity arose for the U.S. to curtail, if not end, its dependence on oil from countries that hate us: the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Keystone XL Pipeline was designed to bring crude oil from Canada to Texas’ Gulf Coast. The nearly 1,700-mile trans-U.S. pipeline would have carried Alberta oil to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, which would have created thousands of American jobs and increased the U.S.’s energy independence.

And, even though the State Department had subjected the Keystone Pipeline to three years of review — the most extensive study of any oil pipeline in U.S. history — and twice concluded that there would be no significant environmental harm, the celebrities came out in force against it, and the pipeline was ultimately nixed by the President (for “further review”), in part due to their histrionics. So what exactly is the effect on the environment if we are not going to take that oil? Nothing. The Canadians will simply divert to China the oil, which becomes a supremely important strategic asset to China.

So with that pesky Keystone XL Pipeline out of the way for now, what is the latest “atrocity” on the celebrity hit list? Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.”

Fracking involves high-pressure injections of water, sand and chemicals into rock formations to open up seams that enable trapped hydrocarbons to flow. The method, combined with advances in horizontal drilling, is helping to substantially boost U.S. energy production. In the last five years, shale gas grew from six percent of U.S. supply to roughly 25 percent, and is slated to account for about half of the nation’s gas by 2035.

The innovation of fracking has done what all the green energy flops could not: reverse America’s CO2 emission trends. In fact, it’s at a 20 year low. Additionally, the U.S.’s electricity prices in 2012 barely increased and natural gas prices have plummeted.

But Hollywood will have none of that. Their attempts to destroy the fracking industry are evident in the movies Gasland (a better title would have been “Hot Air”) and Promised Land (financed by Abu Dhabi Media, which is owned by the oil-rich UAE), which even The Huffington Post, a liberal blog, has denounced.

Essentially, both of these movies contend that fracking causes water contamination. However, at a U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing in May 2011, President Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, admitted the environmental risk of hydraulic fracturing is practically nonexistent. “I’m not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water, although there are investigations ongoing,” she said.

Enter the documentary FrackNation, wholly funded by individuals via the website “Kickstarter.”

Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Unleashing the North American Energy Colossus, said of the anti-fracking movies and subsequent pro-fracking documentary:

“Much of the alarmism can be traced to a widely excerpted clip from GasLand, a 2010 documentary. It shows well water, drilled near fracked gas fields, flowing from a kitchen sink, aflame. Actually, the water in question “contained biogenic methane” not attributable to hydraulic fracturing. But GasLand writer/narrator Josh Fox says that fact isn’t “relevant.”

This particularly egregious distortion is likely what animated Irish investigative journalist Phelim McAleer to dig deeper into GasLand’s claims. McAleer’s resulting documentary FrackNation, opens January 7 in New York City. FrackNation is an elegant antidote to GasLand, and coincidentally to Matt Damon’s new Promised Land, the latter a ‘clumsy crusade against fracking,’ according to a recent NRO review.”

One can only hope that this documentary and future factual reports about fracking will restrain irrelevant and uniformed celebrities, such as Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, from propagating dishonest and inaccurate opinions about fracking. Hey, a girl can dream!

So what exactly is Hollywood’s answer to crude oil and natural gas? Why it’s wind farms! In fact, wind power is the fastest growing component of the California’s green energy portfolio.

But this technology has an unintended consequence: dead birds, including protected species of eagles, hawks and owls.

In 2009, Exxon pleaded guilty to causing the deaths of about 85 migratory birds in five states that came into contact with crude oil in uncovered waste tanks. The fine for this was $600,000.

Yet the state-approved wind farm in California’s Bay Area called “Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area,” built with federal tax credits, kills 4,700 birds annually, including 1,300 raptors, among them 70 golden eagles, which are on the endangered list. To date, the USFWS has not prosecuted a single wind farm company for violating one of the many statutes protecting threatened and endangered birds.

Paging Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon! What, you don’t like birds?

For now, anti-fracking is the celebrity cause du jour. Greg Gutfeld recently said on The Five:

“In the spirit of destroying an industry it harkens back to The China Syndrome, that shrill anti-nuke screed from the ’70s. If you think culture doesn’t shape politics, remember that nuclear power is still recovering from that celebrity-driven smear. Which means you can blame Hollywood for our dependence on oil right now.”

According to the Manhattan Institute, the U.S. stands to gain over four million jobs from the expansion of hydraulic fracturing, as well as over $2 trillion in total economic benefits. That’s a lot to pass up because of hysterical propaganda over fracking.