US Climate Bomb is Ticking
March 9, 2013NY State Can Rid Itself of Fossil Fuel in the Near Future
March 12, 2013By Phillip Doe, Free Range Longmont, March 9, 2013
Editor’s Note: Phillip Doe leaves no stone unturned in describing the dangers and destruction that arise from every aspect of horizontal fracking. It’s a must-read for anyone who truly wants to understand the devastation that the oil and gas industry is wreaking on the people and resources of Colorado with the collaboration and complicity of the state’s government.
I went to a meeting earlier this winter in the Colorado Governor’s Office. I’m not a regular. The Governor, John Hickenlooper, Hick to his friends, had called the meeting with Boulder County Commissioners to discuss the county’s draft regulations governing the recovery of oil and gas found in the county’s deep underground shale formations. The fact is that most of the state is underlain by these ancient and organically rich seabeds. All are ripe for exploitation through the use of the industry’s new mining technique called horizontal fracking.
Fracking Along the Colorado River
In his haste, the governor had apparently forgotten that such meetings require the public be notified at least 24 hours in advance so they can listen in on the public’s business. This law has been on the books since 1972 and is widely used, but imperfectly understood, apparently, by the governor and his lieutenants. Hick was a long-term mayor of Denver before becoming governor. Its use is commonplace in city government.
To an outsider this meeting might sound like a tempest in a teapot, but as in most states with oil and gas reservoirs made recoverable through fracking, the state government of Colorado has said that it, and it alone, has the authority to regulate the oil and gas industry . The counties and cities may write their own regulations, but they must be in “harmony” with the state’s, and can not add conditions or requirements that would harm the industry’s bottom line. They are “preempted” from doing so.
