In the marquee scene from the 2010 documentary Gasland, nominated earlier this year for an Academy Award, a man is shown warily holding a lighter underneath his running kitchen faucet. The flame quickly ignites the tapwater, briefly producing a fireball in the sink. Something appears to have gone wrong—and the culprit, the film inveighs, is the sinister local shale gas industry.

Gasland’s incredulous depiction of flammable drinking water is but one expression of the anti-shale gas sentiment that is increasingly permeating American popular consciousness. A series of articles in The New York Times has depicted an industry eager to bend both the truth and the law (one anonymous source was quoted calling shale gas a “Ponzi scheme”). In pop culture, too, the shale industry is increasingly synonymous with insidious motives: On an episode last November of the CBS crime show “CSI,” detectives were to investigate the suspicious deaths of a group of shale gas whistleblowers. It’s no wonder that the industry has come under public fire in some areas, with communities in Pennsylvania and New York now resisting development of their gas deposits.

Many of the attacks have been unfair—but their impact is real. The burden now falls on the shale industry to restore the public’s confidence. Rather than denying or bemoaning their woes, shale gas producers should be calling for firm but sensible oversight of their activities, both at the state and the federal level. Otherwise, public antagonism may put a big damper on the industry—an outcome that not only producers but also the broader public should want to avoid.

THE PROBLEM WITH the attacks on shale gas isn’t that the gas producers need our sympathy; it’s that we’re in need of their product. Shale gas has been increasingly and rightly recognized as a game-changing source of energy for the United States. President Obama has called the resource “terrific,” asking, “Are we doing everything we can to develop [it]?” Economic experts have hailed the advent of a cheap source of domestic fuel; security strategists have talked about undermining gas powers such as Russia and Iran; even climate campaigners, normally wary of the fossil fuel industry, have become enamored of its potential as a cleaner alternative to coal.

Shale skeptics have since tried to dim the resource’s glow, and, while some of their criticisms ring true, many of their most explosive arguments don’t hold up. In its series, The New York Times quoted several people, for example, who suggest that shale gas will never make economic sense. But while it’s almost certainly true that current gas prices make little economic sense, most independent analysts agree that slightly higher gas prices would make extraction work just fine while preserving the social benefits of shale development. (If it’s impossible for anyone to make a profit at present prices, those prices will inevitably go up.) And, while some environmental advocates have argued prominently that shale gas is worse for climate change than coal, their numbers simply don’t add up. Analysts at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory have found that, while shale is slightly worse for the climate than other domestic sources of natural gas, both are far superior to coal.