RuPaul suggests he allows fracking on his 60,000 acre ranch and maybe it’s time he sashayed away

Mar 16 2020
Written by Josh Milton

Yeehaw! RuPaul has fuelled controversy after saying he “leases mineral rights” of his 60,000 acre plot. (Teresa Lee/Getty Images)

Below a 60,000-acre plot of dusty farmland in Wyoming and South Dakota, dotted by dry shrub and miles from the highway, is oil and gas. And a lot of it, apparently.

The patch is owned by none other than the queen of drag RuPaul and his husband, Georges LeBar and speaking to NPR, Ru revealed Sunday that he is “leasing mineral rights” of the land.

According to Fractracker, the farmland appears to be speckled by “oil and gas wells”. The estate sprawls across the two states and is managed by LeBar, but news that the Drag Race host appears to be engaging in fracking ratcheted up tensions online being that hydraulic fracturing has emerged as a chief environmental concern among activists.

Oil and gas production are, research has found, responsible for a far larger share of the soaring levels of methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – in the Earth’s atmosphere. Such studies have intensified the urgency of global efforts to rein in emissions from the fossil fuel industry.

https://twitter.com/ChrisPJGodfrey/status/1239485243679223808

What did RuPaul say?

“That’s like a national park”! host Terry Gross exclaimed when hearing the size of Ru’s ranch, before asking him what he and his husband do up there.

“A modern ranch, a 21st-century ranch is really land management,” Ru said, “you lease the mineral rights to oil companies and you sell water to oil companies, you lease the grazing rights to different ranchers.

“It’s land management.”

Ru previously explained in 2017 that LeBar is based on the ranch as he “doesn’t care for show business at all” and then Ru does drop by, he dresses up “in Western wear and nobody cares.”

‘As if 2020 couldn’t get any more bizarre.’

But people were sufficiently perplexed by the announcement that “RuPaul is fracking”, adding to the greatening surrealness of 2020.

Detractors were quick to skewer Ru for facilitating the extraction of gas and oil by hydraulic fracturing, which many Democrats – including potential presidential candidate Bernie Sanders – are lobbying to ban on a federal level.

Many environmental advocates lament the immediate impact on the earth that fracking has and how the practice, they say, is stalling progress towards clean, renewable energy.

As a result, fuelled by a disdain of, well, fossil fuel, the people of Twitter dragged Ru:

https://twitter.com/jackremmington/status/1239544837076127746