A recent musical performance by celebrity activists on the Jimmy Fallon show is, unknowingly, a tribute to fracking for oil and natural gas.
Here’s the scene: An old woman, whose longevity has been extended by oil-and-gas-based agriculture and oil-derived medicine, whose appearance is preserved by oil-based makeup, wears plastic (oil) glasses, a shiny (oil-coated) hat, and clothes grown using natural gas fertilizers and oil-powered farm equipment, holds a plastic (oil-based) globe. Her younger, male companion is also a walking tribute to oil and gas, though he doesn’t know it.
The extravagant building and auditorium could only be built by oil-powered machinery, the building’s massive power consumption is likely powered by a natural gas power plant, as is the subway that brought some of the guests to the New York show; the rest certainly got there by oil-based vehicles.
The leading technology for getting new oil and gas, the two fuels that make New York and the rest of America healthy and happy, is hydraulic fracturing, aka “fracking.”
Unfortunately, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, like most celebrity activists, know less than nothing about what makes their lavish lifestyles possible. All they know is that nothing is socially safer than denouncing Big Oil and Big Gas. Thus, they feel comfortable–no, righteous–in publicly delivering a song (loosely speaking) called “Don’t Frack My Mother.” In case you can’t stomach it, the performance/display consists of Yoko Ono holding a globe labeled “Mother Earth” while Sean Lennon accuses hydraulic fracturing of destroying said Mother.
Here’s the truth, Yoko and Sean. When your “Mother” Earth is left to its own devices, people’s lives are nasty, brutish, and short–it’s not a very nurturing Mother. To flourish, human beings need to improve the Earth by doing things like producing oil and gas–and if our industries hadn’t done this in the past, both of you would probably be dead. Fracking is the best way of producing oil and gas, and our livelihoods depend on it.
So whether you know it or not Fracking IS your Mother. Show it some gratitude.
Alex Epstein is Founder and Director of the Center for Industrial Progress
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