As if you haven’t had enough of the absurdity of 2020, I’ve got even more unbelievable news for you. RuPaul, as in the host of RuPaul’s Drag Race that everyone is obsessed RN (I know there’s only one of him but I have to clarify because this is insane) literally sells water from fracking on his ranch in Wyoming to oil and mineral companies.
lmao “ru paul is fracking now” there is no way you can tell me 2020 wasn’t designed by some proc gen sinister events generator
— moth dad (@innesmck) March 16, 2020
In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, RuPaul talked about his Wyoming Ranch, explaining that it’s all about ‘land management’ when asked if it was a cattle ranch.
“You lease the mineral rights to oil companies. And you sell water to oil companies. And you then lease the grazing rights to different ranchers. So it’s land management. Yeah.”
Um, excuse me? For some reason this was NOT FOLLOWED UP WITH AT ALL, so good man of Twitter Rory Soloman looked into it.
HOLD UP. (Non-COVID content) @RuPaul was just on @NPRFreshAir and shared that he & his partner own 60,000 acres in Wyoming & they “lease mineral rights … and sell water to oil companies” and Terry Gross did not follow up with one question about the fact that RuPaul is FRACKING pic.twitter.com/KJanHgi0xI
— Rory Solomon (@rorys) March 15, 2020
Gizmodo has an excellent article following up on Ru-Paul’s history of fracking and you should definitely check it out, here.
Why Fracking Is NOT GOOD
To explain, fracking is a slang term for hydraulic fracturing, is a recent way of extracting fossil fuels from the earth where basically fractures are created in the ground by injecting specialised liquid to expand cracks in the ground.
Fracking is super dangerous for the environment. It requires huge amounts of water which leads to more droughts, harming the soil and plants nearby. Plus, it causes lots of air and water pollution, often leads to oil spills, and can literally cause earthquakes.
It’s an aggressor to climate change and banned in several states in the US.
Ru Paul gets cancelled at least once a month and somehow shrugs it off every time so “Ru Paul facilitates a fracking operation in Wyoming” feels like a bit.
— Marxist-Leninist-Māoriist (@oriwa_) March 16, 2020
RuPaul Literally Had A Climate-Crisis Ball Which Makes No Sense
One of the more infuriating parts of this development is that RuPaul literally hosted a climate-crisis themed ball in 2018, despite literally contributing to the fossil-fuel regime that is actively destroying our planet. Make it make sense.
And to make things even wackier, Green New Deal advocate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or as most people refer to her, AOC), who’s known for her climate action stance, and who literally just introduced a federal bill banning fracking, is going to be on RuPaul’s show soon?!
Hey @AOC, are you going to talk about the Fracking Ban Act (S.3247) when you appear on @RuPaulsDragRace?
— Rory Solomon (@rorys) March 16, 2020
People are saying that considering RuPaul’s controversial history (like being transphobic) that this shouldn’t be surprising. That may be so, but consider me shook anyway.
Everyone talking about how problematic Ru Paul is for fracking has reminded me of this absolutely MENTAL story about him letting a man drown. pic.twitter.com/PlkNRCG7lH
— Joshua Zitser (@mrjoshz) March 16, 2020
Image Sources: Twitter