Anne McElhenney joins me on the show to talk about her new film, Frack Nation, and why she thinks fracking is a miracle. She's also the creator of GosnellMovie, the most successful Indiegogo campaign to date about the crazy abortion doctor.
00:00:12.000It's kind of a lazy position to have if you're concentrating a lot on drinking beer and partying.
00:00:19.000It's kind of like, fine, I'll go along with all that and save the whale and whatever.
00:00:22.000I don't want to wear the sandals or get facial hair.
00:00:27.000So glad to have this next guest here on Ladder with Crowder.
00:00:30.000When I've sub-hosted other shows, I've always had this lady on.
00:00:35.000One of the creators of the GoFundMe campaign, actually creators for the film, GosnellMovie.com, the most successful Indiegogo, independently funded film ever, of course, about the crazy abortion doctor, has done so much good work on the side of climate change.
00:00:49.000Frack Nation is a film I highly recommend you watch.
00:01:36.000You know, one of the things, I talk to groups about fracking all the time, and I go around the country, and one of my kind of schticks is, who are these people?
00:01:45.000Who are these anti-frackers, you know?
00:04:54.000You actually educate the audience and really get to the bottom of the issue with fracking, which is jobs, saving lives, basically a death sentence for people in third world countries.
00:05:10.000Tell our listeners who might not know how you came to be on this path.
00:05:14.000I like to say to people, you know, I used to be a liberal, but I'm okay now.
00:05:18.000um So I used to, I mean, I used to have all those default positions that people have, you know, big oil companies are evil, you know, McDonald's is evil, Starbucks are somehow something bad, you know.
00:05:31.000And, you know, it's kind of a lazy situation.
00:05:34.000It's kind of a lazy position to have if you're concentrating a lot on drinking beer and partying, you know, and it's kind of like, fine, I'll go along with all that and save the whale and whatever.
00:05:43.000I don't want to wear the sandals or get facial hair.
00:05:46.000But, you know, I kind of was that kind of person.
00:05:48.000And then, you know, I was living in Romania.
00:05:51.000My husband was a correspondent for the Financial Times, and I was a freelance journalist just doing whatever stories would come up.
00:05:57.000And a story came up about a gold mine in Transylvania, you know, which actually exists.
00:06:02.000And yes, Dracula did live there for a time.
00:06:05.000And, you know, we went up to cover the story.
00:06:07.000And we had the story written before we went there.
00:06:10.000We had it written in our heads, you know.
00:06:11.000Obviously, evil gold mining company, Canadian evil gold mining company, innocent locals, innocent natives being taken advantage of.
00:06:21.000And it was just one of those really weird things where we just started asking people questions.
00:06:24.000And we spoke to the people from Greenpeace.
00:06:29.000And found out that the story that was being reported by the BBC, by the New York Times, by CNN, it was nonsense.
00:06:37.000First of all, the locals loved the mine.
00:06:40.000The mine had surpassed all standards for environmental rules.
00:06:46.000Everyone was in favour of it, except for two foreigners, foreign environmentalists.
00:06:50.000And the locals, basically, the village was dying without the mine.
00:06:53.000And I went up a mountain one way and I came down another.
00:06:57.000And the moment that really galvanised me was I met an 86-year-old woman Who was living, who had come to visit a model house that the Canadians had built and said, look, if you give us your house, you can live in a house like this.
00:07:08.000And she was crying and she said, and I thought, oh, here's our story.
00:07:11.000Here's the woman who's being abused by the Canadians.
00:07:13.000We've got to go break real quick, so go ahead.
00:08:12.000But otherwise, he's the gentlest dog going and can't have one of them in the UK. Again, because government doesn't get the full story, they decide we're going to breed bans, ban breeds.
00:08:21.000So before you left, okay, we were talking about Frack Nation.
00:08:24.000You gave us some information that's important, but I wanted to talk about this one specific video that's circulating, where this guy goes in front of some municipal legislature and says, hey, do you guys want to drink this fracking water?
00:08:34.000So I thought, oh, okay, here's some proof that fracking contaminates water.
00:08:37.000He's just going to pour some water from his faucet and tell them to drink it.
00:08:40.000Because everyone was sending this like wildfire.
00:09:06.000Then there's a percentage of sand, basically a corrosive, so that they can, you know, so when they're doing this fracking, which is putting this liquid at a very high pressure down into the earth, that it can actually, you know, corrode and make, you know, release the hydrocarbons.
00:09:29.000A lot of the chemicals that are in fracking fluid are the kind of things that you'd find under your kitchen sink and you're not that alarmed about.
00:09:36.000You know, there's things like this guar, which is an element that's used in ice cream making, actually.
00:09:42.000Yeah, protein powders and stuff like that, too.
00:09:46.000And, you know, if you were to eat any of those elements, you know, a massive, massive quantity of them and eat nothing else over time, yeah, you probably would get cancer.
00:10:26.000I don't think we should be tossing all of our McDonald's cups out the window.
00:10:31.000How would the cleanliness of energy from, say, fracking compare to the cleanliness of energy extracted in oil fields, let's say, in Saudi Arabia, then transported to the United States?
00:10:44.000Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, there's a pretty big carbon footprint in that, actually, if you're going to be transporting that all the way from Saudi Arabia.
00:10:50.000You know, the standards here, the environmental laws that exist here in the United States far surpass any other country in the world and certainly would surpass Saudi Arabia's environmental standards.
00:11:00.000So I don't understand why we're not going for our own energy source, which is local, organic.
00:11:38.000In the bathroom, I found a thing that I've never seen in any bathroom anywhere in the world.
00:11:42.000They have a little thing in a packet, and you open it, and it's for tar removal.
00:11:48.000To help you remove the tar from your feet when you've walked on the sand because your feet will be black and it's really hard to get it off.
00:11:55.000You know, it's funny that you mention that because I remember when I was a kid, it might have been the 5th or 6th grade, I had to do some project.
00:12:01.000This was in Canada, of course, on saving the tar sands.
00:12:05.000And I didn't think anything of it and so I wrote about the reason to save the tar sands.
00:12:08.000And then I remember thinking when I was in high school, I was about 15 or 16 thinking, Why the hell do I care about the tar sands?
00:12:16.000I mean, I get, you know, save the weeping willows, save the, you know, the endangered German short-haired sparrow.
00:12:53.000God, Canada, how great that our nearest neighbour, who don't behead women funny enough, who don't stone women funny enough, that those people would have this incredible supply of oil.
00:13:17.000I mean, I don't – here's the truth and I've always talked about this.
00:13:20.000When people say the United States is an evil English empire, I say, OK, I'm from Canada.
00:13:24.000The fact that a country like Canada, one of the biggest countries geographically – I think it is the biggest next to China – in the world, one of the most rich in natural resources – I think?
00:14:42.000What is it about the Irish that they don't like you?
00:14:45.000I mean, they seem to really embrace their own.
00:14:49.000If an Irish person makes it in the States, they tend to reclaim them as their own, yet they seem to not be doing that with you, no offense.
00:14:55.000Well, I think it's a liberal issue rather than anything else.
00:14:59.000I think if I was singing their tune, they'd like me a lot, but I'm not singing their tune.
00:15:33.000It's very restricted what they get access to.
00:15:35.000It makes me realize how incredible talk radio is here, how amazing that is, that people have these options and the fact that Fox News exists here.
00:15:43.000It's quite amazing because otherwise people are stuck with this version of the world of ABC, NBC, CBS and whatever they say just goes and that's the only thing that anyone ever hears about.
00:15:56.000But the internet has done something very wonderful about that.
00:16:07.000I just love, and I love the idea that somebody called Super Mexican, that Super Mexican, who I gave a shout out to the other day, like Super Mexican really brought down Brian Williams.
00:16:16.000And Brian Williams, the beautiful irony of this is that Brian Williams was very disparaging of people like Super Mexican, who he described as Vinny, Vinny in a bathrobe, in a sad bathrobe, in an apartment in the Bronx.
00:16:33.000And he had this whole thing about people, these awful people on Twitter and on social media.
00:16:40.000Those people in their bathrobes took away your $10 million a year job because they did a better job of investigating journalism than you could do or than anyone else could do.
00:16:51.000And do you feel like it's the same thing, I guess, sort of in reverse with the environmentalism, where if someone comes out and says what you say, it's as opposed to Vinny in the bathrobe.
00:16:59.000It's, well, this person is someone who clearly works for Big Pharma, Big Oil, or they're part of the Monsanto crew.
00:17:59.000You take away petroleum, that guy, and he'd be left naked with a little leaf on his front, which, yeah, we're not even going there, Stephen.
00:18:05.000No, I think you'd be looking at more of an acorn.
00:18:07.000I think at that point, when you've ceased to act like a man for so long that your nether regions just shrivel up and die.
00:18:13.000I want to get to something here before we go to the break, and we have to have you on for a third segment, but you said something that stuck with me, and I've tweeted it out.
00:18:20.000I'm not an Oprah soundbite person, but you crystallized something perfectly, and you may not even have remembered it.
00:19:57.000I mean, it's just an incredible thing to do.
00:19:59.000And I remember, oh, you know that amazing writer, the guy who wrote for ER, that beautiful doctor who died of cancer, whose name I won't remember.
00:20:07.000And then the Gasland guy lied about it.
00:20:09.000Consensus is the last refuge of scoundrels.
00:20:16.000On a side note before we go to break, because I realize we don't have enough time to really get into that, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Michael Caine, from your neck of the woods, one of my favorite actors, one of my favorite films, Ladderworth Crowder.