Josh Fox gets a letter offering him almost $100,000 to lease his family's Pennsylvania land for natural gas drilling, and instead of signing he grabs a camera and drives across the country to see what hydraulic fracturing has done to people who already did. He finds a woman in Colorado who can light her tap water on fire, ranchers whose livestock lost hair after drinking from contaminated ponds, and residents in Wyoming and Texas describing headaches, nosebleeds, and wells gone foul after drilling crews moved in. Industry representatives and EPA officials get their say, and Fox lays out the 2005 Energy Policy Act exemption that keeps fracking chemicals off federal regulators' books. Banjo in hand, Fox narrates his own unease as he moves from skeptic to alarmed investigator, tracing one company's drilling boom across several states. The film became a flashpoint in the national fracking debate, and the burning tap water is the image most people remember it for.