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In the debate over energy resources, natural gas is often considered a "lesser-of-evils." Natural gas burns cleaner than coal and oil, and is in plentiful supply -- New York State sits above some of the largest natural gas reserves in the country. But a new boom in natural gas drilling, a process called "fracking," raises concerns about health and environmental risks.

BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, through his unfamiliar nuances with the English language, made a telling remark in a news conference last week.

He said President Obama “is frustrated because he cares about the small people. And we care about the small people. I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are really companies that don’t care, but that is not the case in BP, we care about the small people.”

HBO's documentary "Gasland" will make you think long an hard about all us "small" people here in the USA, watching the Gulf of Mexico slowly die thanks to corporate malfeasance aided by Government regulators who look the other way, shielded by laws written literally by the corporations that are supposed to be watched over.

Thanks to one earnest American, Josh Fox, who freaked out a bit when he scratched the surface asking some questions when presented almost $100,000 to allow Big Oil to mine natural gas on his rural Pennsylvania land, the curtains have been ripped off exposing how expendable our collective health and well-being is, or how animals and fish that inhabit the lands are just collateral damage for these behemoth corporations.

We are the small people. Meaningless, small people like one interviewed woman whose tap water ignites into flames when a match is struck, and whose well water is so foul that all of her animals' hair is falling out.

HBO's "Gasland" draws you in immediately with an intimacy and quiet narrative by Fox's citizen journalism, who slowly but surely uncovers a path of destruction that is continuing as I type, as you read this, and until brave and honest politicians can remedy with new laws that undo the great harm caused by the 2005 energy bill which was shepherded by then Vice President Dick Cheney.

There is a light, in the form of the FRAC Act, which is lying in committee in Congress, would force these criminal companies to disclose all of the chemicals and re-regulate the industry under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

These oil companies were exempted from Safe Drinking Water Act in 2005 by the 2005 energy bill which was a construct of VP Dick Cheney and his energy taskforce. Fox brings to light the "Halliburton loophole," an exemption for hydraulic fracturing to the Safe Drinking Water Act. These corporate foulers are also exempt from the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which controls storm water runoff and the Superfund Act. There is no liability for these companies to clean up their toxic sludge and runoff.

Fox begins this incredibly sad and eye-opening film by sharing how he had received a letter from an energy company wanting to drill for natural gas in rural Pennsylvania, below the director's home built on 19 acres by his "hippie parents" where a bucolic forest and stream meandered nearby.

Lucky Fox was sitting atop the Marcellus Shale, the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas." Sign here boy, and reap a cash windfall.

Along the way, to 24 states, Fox is our tour guide and investigative journalist who explains how natural gas is drilled, by "fracking" or hydraulic fracturing, which via high pressure injects a stew of over 500 toxic chemicals into the ground and the water shed.

Fox did not sign and collect that windfall, he asked questions, and the unanswered questions begat more, until our intrepid filmmaker was working his way to another Pennsylvania town named Dimock, decimated by gas wells just 50 miles away from his happy hamlet. What Fox found were Halliburton trucks and scared people with their water bubbling and igniting, and children and adults getting sick.

This horror kept Fox on the road and aided by graphics showing the gas rich pockets in the USA, mainly out West and North to Wyoming at the foot of the Tetons, and south to New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana, upwards to Pennsylvania. Fox went into hundreds of towns and found people lighting up their water, presenting dead animals and complaining of permanent neurological damage. And terrible dead ecosystems hidden over hills and in hollers, where gas bubbles up out of dead streams filled with surfactants, glycol ethers and every form of arsenic, benzene and toluene combo a chemist could throw at you.

The state of Texas features the Barnett Shale fields, and in a chilling interview with an Environmental Protection Agency worker speaking without authorization, the problem is revealed that the EPA is by default colluding, aiding and abetting Big Oil thanks to our standing legislation seen through by Cheney and Co.

Fox also goes to Dallas-Fort Worth to interview Al Armendariz, an air quality specialist at SMU, who says that the daily emissions from the oil and gas drilling around Fort Worth are greater than the daily emissions from all of the automobiles in the entire city area combined.

"Gasland" cannot be dismissed as green eco-leftist propaganda, as you meet and see families, like yours, from Pennsylvania to Wyoming, Colorado to Texas, who can no longer drink their water and are stonewalled legally by deep pocketed Corporations.

This is beyond partisan politics, it is classic Big Corporation thuggery that has paid for political friends to shield them from expensive regulations that would cut into the bottom line.

Small people we are.

Ed Note: This is a must see for anyone concerned about the environment, safe drinking water and future life on the planet.

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