Business and Government Continue Partnership to “Frack Over” Colorado

We don’t mean to be hyperbolic about the issue (in fact, that would be next to impossible), but the following editorial from the Boulder Daily Camera helps delineate how Colorado serves as another example of fascism. When government and industry work this closely together, there’s really no other way to describe the warm and cozy relationship.

Deep Green Resistance also notes with continued anger the assault on the rights of citizens to govern their localities, and serve as agents for their open landbase. We urge those who share this outrage to check out the possibilities offered by organizations such as the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Is Colorado’s fracking battle over?

Editorial: Is Colorado’s fracking battle over?
POSTED: 06/09/2015 08:00:00 PM MDT | UPDATED: ABOUT 14 HOURS AGO

Tiffany Taskey stands on a path just behind her family home in the Vista Ridge subdivision in Erie last fall with an Encana Corp. fracking well in the background. Encana closed down operations at the site after measurements showed noise levels that exceeded state-mandated levels. Encana said it would be back when it resolved its “low-frequency noise issues.” Many residents said the well site was too close to their homes in any case. (Paul Aiken / Daily Camera)

The national debate over hydraulic fracturing extends from one extreme to the other. New York state has banned the practice, while Texas recently passed a new law giving drillers carte blanche and local communities little recourse so long as a drilling site is “commercially reasonable.”

To listen to Gov. John Hickenlooper, the debate in Colorado is all but over, with the industry having won a Texas-style victory. At a joint appearance with Sen. Cory Gardner last month in Denver, Hickenlooper suggested fracking opponents no longer have the enthusiasm or support to put regulatory measures on the ballot, as they did a year ago before the governor brokered a last-minute deal to remove them.

“There will be proposals, but I don’t think there will be something that will be funded to any significant extent, and therefore I don’t expect something to get on the ballot,” Hickenlooper said, according to the Durango Herald.

Boulder Congressman Jared Polis, who backed the ballot proposals and then agreed to remove them a year ago, says it’s too early to say what might be proposed for the 2016 Colorado ballot.

“Given the pending Fort Collins and Longmont lawsuits that will hopefully confirm local authority to regulate fracking, and that we are 18 months out from the 2016 election, I can no more predict whether a ballot initiative is needed or would be viable in 2016 than I can predict who is going to win the World Series that year,” Polis told the Daily Camera. “But if the governor is clairvoyant, I’d love to schedule a trip to Vegas with him soon.”

Polis sees more uncertainty in the outcomes of the Fort Collins and Longmont appeals than we do. A Boulder County judge overturned Longmont’s fracking ban last July. A Larimer County judge overturned Fort Collins’ five-year fracking moratorium in August. Everywhere it has contested such community actions, the Colorado Oil & Gas Association has won, citing preemption by the state, which “fosters” oil and gas development by statute.

Until now, there has been an uneasy but delicate balance between the state’s ability to preempt local limits on fracking and the traditional right of localities to engage in land-use regulation. But if the alliance between the state government and the oil and gas industry prevails in the Longmont case, it could change all that. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, representing the state, and the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, representing the industry, are contending in that case that state law implicitly preempts all local regulation in this area. If the appellate court agrees, the COGCC would have “exclusive authority” to permit and regulate fracking.

The deal Hickenlooper brokered to get the fracking measures off last year’s ballot relied upon a task force to find a compromise. One member of that task force, former Colorado Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Kourlis, daughter of former Republican Gov. John Love, proposed that the legislature change the state’s official posture from fostering oil and gas development to administering it, making it less of an industry enabler and more of an impartial arbiter. Thirteen of 21 task force members supported that proposal, but that was one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to make it an official recommendation.

A cynic might contend that this is exactly the outcome Hickenlooper, a former geologist in the oil business, wanted all along. The citizen initiatives were removed from the ballot and no meaningful changes were imposed on the industry.

Last month, the state of New York issued a 2,000-page report, the result of six years of work, describing the concerns that underpin its fracking ban. It cited a lack of sufficient data on a host of fracking impacts, including air quality, climate change, drinking water, surface spills, earthquakes and community impacts such as traffic, road damage and noise.

While the industry claims, for example, that fracking fluid has never polluted underground drinking water, a study last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found chemicals used in fracking fluids in the drinking water of three Pennsylvania households. Methane was also detected in those families’ water. A powerful greenhouse gas, methane leakage rates into the atmosphere during fracking are only just now becoming the subject of serious study.

Fracking has been a boon to the Colorado economy and a major contributor toward meeting America’s goal of energy self-sufficiency. While we join many critics in looking forward to the day when clean energy takes over from fossil fuels, we recognize we are not there yet. But that does not mean that the state needs to be in bed with the industry it is supposed to be regulating. That’s never a good idea.

The political center of gravity in Colorado is nowhere near New York’s, but it’s a little troubling that Hickenlooper seems to want to push it toward Texas on this issue. The recent troubles in Erie illustrate the potential problems when oil drilling is located less than 1,000 feet from people’s homes. Common sense suggests local communities should have some control over such land-use issues.

Colorado has a history of greater concern for the environment and for local control than the governor seems to appreciate. If the industry wins from the courts the right of implicit state preemption in all matters relating to oil and gas development, we hope the governor’s declaration of surrender on behalf of those who would regulate fracking more stringently proves premature.

—Dave Krieger, for the editorial board. Email: kriegerd@dailycamera.com. Twitter: @DaveKrieger