fracking human children’s minds

This morning, I was sitting on my master’s lap, trying to go back to sleep, and he was surfing the Internet. (I’m not a morning dog.) Guess what he found? Hard evidence that the natural gas industry is now fracking with human children’s minds. Do you remember Joe Camel? Now there’s “Terry Talisman, the Friendly Fracosaurus”!!!

Terry Talisman, the Friendly Fracosaurus

That’s right, the natural gas industry recently put out a coloring book, in which everyone smiles (even the fish). You can see the coloring book here (it opens as a .pdf).  It’s part of their “Good Neighbor Program.” Oh, dear…

Recently I’ve been wondering why there are not Surgeon General’s warnings on gas leases. Congress has heard testimony that the gas industry pumps carcinogens into the ground, so why isn’t anyone being warned? And why are children now the target of the gas industry’s propoganda?

That’s a simple question to answer: Because human children will believe anything– viz.: Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause, Friendly Fracosaurus. Hopefully, as they get older, they get wiser. Hopefully. The propoganda game reminds me of one of the nastiest dogs of all time: Adolf Hitler, who said, “By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise” (emphasis added).

I suppose the only upside to fracking with young’ns minds is that one needs to be simple when talking to human children. The video at the bottom of this page, posted to YouTube by EnCana, is an example of trying to simplify things for children.

Now, the interesting part of this video isn’t that the gentleman from Canada leaves out the part about carcinogens; rather, it’s the part where he actually undermines one of the gas companies’ big lies: that  hydro fracking as we know it now has “been used for 50-60 years.” He totally contradicts this, stating, “we never knew how to get gas out of [shale] until about ten years ago.” Of course, then he goes on to lie about how natural gas is so much better than coal. Well, you can’t win them all, I guess.

I bet they’ll take this video down after a dog calls them to task. We’ll see what happens. Here ’tis: