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April 14, 2015 - Louder with Crowder
20:25
Fracking Is a Miracle || Louder With Crowder
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I used to have all those default positions that people have.
Big oil companies are evil.
McDonald's is evil.
Starbucks is somehow something bad.
It's kind of a lazy position to have if you're concentrating a lot on drinking beer and partying.
It's kind of like, fine, I'll go along with all that and save the whale and whatever.
I don't want to wear the sandals or get facial hair.
So glad to have this next guest here on Ladder with Crowder.
When I've sub-hosted other shows, I've always had this lady on.
One 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.
Frack Nation is a film I highly recommend you watch.
Thrilled to have Anne McElhenney.
Did I get that right on the program?
Brilliant.
Yes, and it's great to be here.
Thanks a million, Stephen.
We're so glad to have you on.
And so what's funny is what started this was I got an email.
So let's start with this.
You did Frack Nation, of course, which is a rebuttal to Gasland.
For those who are listening terrestrially, go to loudearthcrowder.com.
We'll have the links watching on YouTube.
We'll have an annotation, a propaganda film.
You did Frack Nation.
And I sent you this link that someone sent me of a guy in front of a city or state legislature daring them to drink...
Fracking solution water, but it's a gimmick that caught a bunch of traction with the left.
And I knew it was BS, so I figured you could give me a clear answer.
Let's start off with that.
You 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?
Who are these anti-frackers, you know?
I'll tell you who they are, Stephen.
These are people who lied about breast cancer.
So this is the kind of person we're dealing with here.
You know something?
When people start mentioning breast cancer or cancer in general, we're all kind of, all the laughs are done.
We're all very serious.
None of us have escaped it.
None of us haven't got a family member who has died because of cancer.
And guess who these people are?
That guy, you know who he's part of?
He's part of people who lied about that.
And it's not an opinion.
This is the Texas Cancer Registry said it's nonsense.
There is no evidence of that.
There is no spike in breast cancer in the Fort Worth area.
And this is who these people are.
This is what they do.
And I mean, we make a bit of a laugh about it because every day they accuse fracking of doing something else.
You know, I've got eczema.
My husband doesn't fancy me.
The donkey died.
The donkey didn't die.
I wish the donkey would die.
You know, I've got a funny itch.
I've got a funny this.
But then they're kind of funny, serious about it.
And they say things like cancer.
These are liars.
These are bad people.
Here's the truth.
Fracking is a miracle.
You know, isn't it just extraordinary?
You know, like, you know, what do we need?
We really need energy and the absence of it is death.
And guess what?
We're not doing death, Stephen.
We're not wanting death.
Who wants that?
You know, in places where they live an organic lifestyle and have no energy, people live to be 40 if they're lucky.
So, you know, my father died at 95.
I think energy is a great thing and we want more of it and reliable energy.
Solar panels are great.
Wind, great.
I'm all in favor of all of it.
It just doesn't work right now.
So in the meantime, when we've got our children in hospitals, we want reliable energy.
And, you know, we're going to get that from oil and gas.
It's as simple as that.
And coal, by the way.
So I'm all for that.
But I wish the people who are against fracking would just be honest, just tell the truth.
And it's really disturbing to find that they would lie on something like breast cancer.
Real quick.
You have been paid by Big Oil, correct?
Yes.
Yeah.
All the people who paid me, you can find them.
You can look at them and find their names.
We did a crowdfunding campaign for Frack Nation.
We got over almost a quarter, more than a quarter of a million dollars, I think, from about 3,000 people and all their names are there.
So you can look them all up.
Ordinary people from around the country and around the world, 26 countries, I think it is, that contributed.
Regular folk, that's who made the film and we're so grateful to them.
For doing that.
And it's an incredible film, by the way.
I mean, it's one of those films where...
I mean, you know, with shows and promos and your husband is such a sweet guy.
I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I had seen it at all the CPACs, but not the full thing.
And then when I finally sat down and watched the whole film, I called him right away.
I said, Philip, you have to tell me how I can help with it.
This is unreal.
My wife watched it all the way through and she usually gets bored to tears with these things.
It's one of those deals where you guys don't just do the sting.
You know, the, oh, we got you.
You look stupid.
You 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.
Now, your transition was interesting.
A lot of people don't know this.
You weren't always this way.
Tell our listeners who might not know how you came to be on this path.
I like to say to people, you know, I used to be a liberal, but I'm okay now.
um 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.
And, you know, it's kind of a lazy situation.
It'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.
I don't want to wear the sandals or get facial hair.
But, you know, I kind of was that kind of person.
And then, you know, I was living in Romania.
My husband was a correspondent for the Financial Times, and I was a freelance journalist just doing whatever stories would come up.
And a story came up about a gold mine in Transylvania, you know, which actually exists.
And yes, Dracula did live there for a time.
And, you know, we went up to cover the story.
And we had the story written before we went there.
We had it written in our heads, you know.
Obviously, evil gold mining company, Canadian evil gold mining company, innocent locals, innocent natives being taken advantage of.
And it was just one of those really weird things where we just started asking people questions.
And we spoke to the people from Greenpeace.
We spoke to the locals.
We spoke to the evil Canadians.
And found out that the story that was being reported by the BBC, by the New York Times, by CNN, it was nonsense.
First of all, the locals loved the mine.
The mine had surpassed all standards for environmental rules.
Everyone was in favour of it, except for two foreigners, foreign environmentalists.
And the locals, basically, the village was dying without the mine.
And I went up a mountain one way and I came down another.
And 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.
And she was crying and she said, and I thought, oh, here's our story.
Here's the woman who's being abused by the Canadians.
We've got to go break real quick, so go ahead.
What's your problem?
I said, why are you crying?
And she said, I hope I live long enough to live in a house like this.
She didn't, because of two foreign environmentalists.
Heartbreaking, but we'll bring you back and then we'll have a laugh on something else.
Ann McElhinney, a louder with Crowder.
So glad to have Miss Ann McElhinney back.
Gosnellmovie.com.
Please go donate.
They do great work.
We were talking during the break.
My wife was calling.
My phone was blowing up.
If you heard it on air, our dog is a little bit sick.
And it's actually a dog who's banned, a breed that is banned over there in the UK. I'm not a big fan of those breed bans.
I'm terrible.
I don't know much about dogs.
I'd like to have one when I grow up.
Well, he's a doggo Argentino, and so they look at him and they think he's, you know, like a pit bull had a baby with a nightmare.
He's just huge.
But they actually send them out.
They hunt in packs with dogs.
So they're not bred for fighting at all.
They're actually very, very dog-friendly, very people-obedient, but very animal-aggressive, like cats or squirrels.
He just cannot stand.
But 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.
So before you left, okay, we were talking about Frack Nation.
You 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?
So I thought, oh, okay, here's some proof that fracking contaminates water.
He's just going to pour some water from his faucet and tell them to drink it.
Because everyone was sending this like wildfire.
That's the title.
People, you know, city officials or state officials won't drink fracking water.
But what he does is he takes a cup of perfectly good water and then adds a bunch of chemicals into the water, mixes it up and goes, huh?
Huh?
Will you drink that?
Will you drink that?
I don't exactly know why that's BS. I'm pretty sure that's not how fracking works.
And correct me.
Yeah.
I mean, the fracking fluid is 99% water.
Then 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.
And there are chemicals.
There are chemicals, by the way, in the fracking fluid.
You know, water itself, of course, is a chemical that not a lot of people know about.
And And there are chemicals.
A 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.
You know, there's things like this guar, which is an element that's used in ice cream making, actually.
Yeah, protein powders and stuff like that, too.
It's like a filler.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, 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.
So they call them carcinogenic.
But they're a tiny, tiny, the amount of them is so tiny that it couldn't do any damage.
I mean, there are carcinogens in cabbage.
But those kind of stunts, by the way, those stunts of having this liquid and saying, oh my God, would you drink this?
It's just very cheap and it's theatrical.
It makes good press, but it's not honest.
This is not honest.
And I don't understand why people don't have an honest conversation about this when we do need energy.
Right, we do need energy.
Well, let me ask you this.
I want the environment to be clean.
I don't think we should be tossing all of our McDonald's cups out the window.
How 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?
Yeah, 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.
You 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.
So I don't understand why we're not going for our own energy source, which is local, organic.
It's right here under the ground.
Why aren't we using our own energy?
I can't understand it yet.
And we have used it successfully.
And it's even funny here in California.
You walk on a beach in Santa Barbara and your feet go black and it's not pollution.
That's how much oil is just seeping up through the sand.
We're meant to be using this.
Really?
Now, is that true?
Am I going to go?
I'll tell you one thing.
I'll tell you how weird it is, Stephen.
I thought this was the funniest.
I was asked to make a speech in Santa Barbara, and they put me in a very nice hotel.
Thank you very much.
Well, there are no bad hotels in Santa Barbara.
No, no, actually, you're right.
In the bathroom, I found a thing that I've never seen in any bathroom anywhere in the world.
They have a little thing in a packet, and you open it, and it's for tar removal.
To 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.
You 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.
This was in Canada, of course, on saving the tar sands.
And I didn't think anything of it and so I wrote about the reason to save the tar sands.
And 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?
They're tar sands.
I mean, I get, you know, save the weeping willows, save the, you know, the endangered German short-haired sparrow.
I don't know.
I'm making up terms.
I was going, the tar sands, it would seem to me that a tar sand would exist for no other purpose if not to extract tar.
Yeah, yeah.
But also, by the way, it's not the tar sands.
They're called the oil sands.
But environmentalists like to misname things as well, just to try and make people get very alarmed.
Well, we did say tar sands, though.
I don't think I'm...
So are you saying that's...
No, they all say...
That's what the environmentalists say.
The environmental movement calls them tar sands.
Okay.
But people in the oil and gas business call them oil sands.
And it's marvellous.
God, 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.
Yay!
Isn't that great?
And they allow women to drive cars and everything in Canada.
That's how weird those Canadians are.
So I think getting oil from them is a great idea, you know.
Yeah, no, I think you're right.
I mean, I don't – here's the truth and I've always talked about this.
When people say the United States is an evil English empire, I say, OK, I'm from Canada.
The 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?
By two o'clock, Canada's America.
That's very good.
I never heard anyone say that.
That really makes sense.
God, the Canadians are lucky.
The other place that's very lucky is Australia.
It's true.
Australia and Canada have a lot in common.
Very, very rich countries with very tiny populations.
Yes, except Australia has all the rapists, so they've got to...
I mean, when you're starting off with the civilization of...
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry to the Australian listeners.
We get so many Australians.
I will say this.
It's the one place where you don't get this rampant anti-American sentiment that you get with a lot of places either in Europe or...
They're my people.
Are they your people?
Have they been really accepting?
Have you noticed of your message and things like recognition?
They just love us.
They so love us in Ireland.
It's frightening.
Not.
Not at all.
It's quite weird.
I've had some very super aggressive correspondence with people from Ireland, I have to say.
Thank you.
What is it about the Irish that they don't like you?
I mean, they seem to really embrace their own.
If 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.
Well, I think it's a liberal issue rather than anything else.
I think if I was singing their tune, they'd like me a lot, but I'm not singing their tune.
So it's a bit aggressive.
Well, let me ask you this with the Irish.
Are there any actual conservatives...
Yes, there are.
Yes, there are.
But it's a small minority.
Well, certainly, sorry, that's not right.
There obviously are lots of conservatives in Ireland, but they're not represented at all in the media.
And the media is predominantly, like more than predominantly liberal.
So people don't even get to hear another story.
They just get a very biased version of the news.
Right.
And it's very restricted.
It's very restricted what they get access to.
It 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.
It'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.
But the internet has done something very wonderful about that.
That's absolutely true.
Well, hey, if we were still back in those days, people would believe that Brian Williams was shot down in a helicopter.
Oh, I just love Brian Williams.
I'm so happy about Brian Williams.
I 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.
And 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.
And he had this whole thing about people, these awful people on Twitter and on social media.
Yeah, guess what, Brian Williams?
Those 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.
That's a really good point.
And 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.
It's, well, this person is someone who clearly works for Big Pharma, Big Oil, or they're part of the Monsanto crew.
Oh, yeah.
Do you ever get a little – I mean I've never – the guy from Fract Nation still never actually acknowledged you guys.
Not Fract Nation.
From Gasland.
Right.
He still just really wants to avoid it.
And I get that sometimes I have certain people who I'm like, I'm not going to debate with them because you can't change minds.
But you're both very sensible.
Has he tried to do that with you and say that you're paid off by somebody?
What's the dynamic there?
Well, I think, yeah, I mean, I think that's, you know, if you've got nothing else to say, then that's a, you know, that's a good one.
Throw that one at people and see if it'll stick, you know.
I mean, yeah, he certainly has tried.
I think he has said that.
But at this stage, I'm weary with it, you know.
I'm weary with these people who live these lives fueled by oil and gas and then denounce oil and gas.
He flies around the world, this guy.
He makes a big deal about how many countries he travels to.
Doesn't he wear big plastic hipster glasses?
Totally.
Totally.
100%.
I know.
You 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.
No, I think you'd be looking at more of an acorn.
I 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.
I 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.
I'm not an Oprah soundbite person, but you crystallized something perfectly, and you may not even have remembered it.
It was at some college.
It wasn't even like a giant crowd.
It was something that most people would miss, and some girl was critiquing you.
Temple.
Temple in Philadelphia.
Okay, there you go.
And she mentioned the scientific consensus, and you said something that was brilliant, that science is not governed by consensus.
How about you say it?
We've got one and a half minutes for you to say this.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the people on the climate alarmist side say things like, it's all settled, it's all done, it's all done.
The science is settled, everyone agrees.
97% of scientists agree.
I said, science has never worked like that.
It's never worked by committee.
The boiling point of water is not a committee decision.
You and I can't get 12 guys together in a room and make an agreement and say things.
That's going to be how gravity works from now on.
It doesn't work like that.
So this idea that a great number of people agreeing on something will affect what the truth is in science, it's utter nonsense.
It's not a democracy.
Science is not a democracy.
Truth is not a democracy.
One person saying that the earth is not flat...
Was the right guy.
The consensus was that the earth was flat.
These global warming people are actually aligning themselves with flat earthers by saying that a crowd agrees.
I think it's an extraordinary thing.
It's not how science advances.
And any scientist who speaks about a crowd, he's not a scientist at all.
Jeez.
Mic drop.
You don't even have a microphone.
You can't drop your headphones because then you couldn't hear me.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's true.
I mean, it's just an incredible thing to do.
And 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.
He said...
And then the Gasland guy lied about it.
Consensus is the last refuge of scoundrels.
On 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.
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