Russia’s assault on Ukraine has led to an attack on environmental regulations by Colorado Republicans, who are saying, falsely, that America needs to abandon or weaken its weapons against climate change and other environmental threats in order to replace oil imported from Russia.
Yesterday the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), the state’s regulatory body for oil and gas activities, passed a major reform of rules to reduce risks posed by orphaned wells in the state, the first such Colorado reform in 28 years.
Retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Rich Cimino, a Republican Grand County commissioner running for state Senate district in the central and northern parts of Colorado’s Western Slope, believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal for his brutal invasion of democratic Ukraine.
Dan Haley is president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, a group representing the state’s oil and gas industry. Last week, Haley appeared on Kim Monson’s Colorado KLZ 560 radio show to discuss the state revising its oil-and-gas-well bonding rules and low-producing wells.
Over the past three years, Garfield and Weld Counties, in northern Colorado, spent nearly $2 million total to fight government regulation on oil and gas pollution, the bulk of it doled out by Garfield County to lobbyists and lawyers, according to an analysis of county budgets by environmental groups and the Colorado Times Recorder.
On February 1, 2022 the federal government announced the first infusion of tens of millions of dollars that will be sent to Colorado to clean up orphaned oil and gas wells. Our U.S. Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennett (D-CO) celebrated the incoming funds. Not only is it a chance to clean up dangerous wells, but the act of plugging wells will provide jobs and reduce our climate-changing methane emissions. (It’s interesting that they only call natural gas by its true name — methane — when no one is making money from the gas well anymore.)
Nearly all of Colorado’s oil and gas companies own nonproductive, unprofitable oil wells, which leak climate-change-causing pollutants, because it’s cheaper than plugging and retiring them, say environmentalists.
This week, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) is holding public meetings concerning new, stricter rules on well operators that would ensure the state does not have to pay for plugging abandoned wells if the operators go bankrupt.
The retirement fund for employees of the state of Colorado has over $2.1 billion invested in fossil fuel companies, according to a new report released by the environmental advocacy group Stand.earth.
Inscribed on the walls of the downtown Denver Hyatt Regency hotel is a poem by John Ruskin titled “O’ Truth of the Earth.” The poem is an ode to mountains, fitting for a building with a pristine view of the Rocky Mountains. It reads:
