Ted Zukoski's blog

Greed is usually the reason we see so many companies foul up our lands, air and water. But in Colorado, where a coal mining company is refusing to make money off the gas it is releasing, a little greed could actually help the environment.

For years, coal companies in Colorado's North Fork Valley have been spewing millions of cubic feet of methane into the atmosphere every day from their underground coal mines. They have to get rid of the methane because otherwise it's a safety hazard.

But methane pollution is a lose-lose-lose proposition. The planet loses due to the global warming impacts. That's because methane (AKA natural gas) is more than 20 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

What a difference a year makes! Or maybe not.

Last year, the oil and gas industry and its supporters were spending tens of thousands of dollars in Colorado to attack some modest proposals to protect the state's property owners and public health from the natural gas boom that was consuming the western part of the state.

They hired lobbyists. They papered the state with glossy mailers. They bused in oil field workers to talk about their families. They said the regulations would kill jobs and cause the industry to flee to... um, somewhere else. Maybe someplace where the politicians cared less about about healthy families, property rights, clean air, clean water and wildlife habitat.

Recently cleared well pad on a Shell oil shale research lease in June 2009. Photo (c) Peter Hart.

It's no secret oil shale is one of the dirtiest fuels around, when considering its impacts on the climate, on air, on water, and on land. 

Now from the Los Angeles Times comes word that the Department of Justice is investigating some allegedly dirty dealing that helped foreign-owned Shell win the rights to half of all federal lands leased for oil shale research and development. The allegations are that Shell got a sweet deal in snagging three of six R&D leases when Gale Norton was Secretary of Interior. Not long after Interior awarded the leases to Shell, Ms. Norton resigned and got a job working for Shell on "unconventional fuels" including ... oil shale.  

We like to think of our national parks as places that are protected for generations, where outside the visitor center and a few heavily used trails, the vistas, the streams and the wildlife are there now as they have been and ever will be. But some of the West's most iconic parklands—Canyonlands, Bryce, Zion, Death Valley, Glen Canyon, Yosemite—have been under assault in recent years.

Those assaults come from a few renegade counties deciding that the Park Service can't protect rivers, habitat, archaeological sites and wilderness by closing old cattle trails and streambeds to dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles. The counties claim they own highway rights to these rough tracks under a repealed, 19th Century law known as R.S. 2477.

Earlier this week, a court of appeals ruling turned back one of these assaults in a way that will make sure parks across the West are a little better protected.

Development on an oil shale research lease in Western Colorado. Copyright Peter Hart, 2009.

Climate change deniers like to say there's no proof of global warming, or no proof that it's human caused, or no proof that's it's a bad thing.

But it's those who are hoping to torpedo efforts to do something about global warming that have recently been exposed as liars and frauds. Last month, media reports confirmed that opponents of the cap and trade bill resorted to just making stuff up, sending in forged letters to Congress on behalf of advocacy groups who did not, in fact, oppose the House legislation.  

And this week, Congressional investigators found a new batch of forgeries prepared by the same lobbying firm representing the oxymoronically-named "Clean Coal" coalition.

For a group of folks unconvinced by mountains of data, global warming deniers certainly are good at creating their own alternative reality.

For the past month, the klieg lights have been squarely focused on attempts inside the Beltway to cobble together compromise legislation to address global climate change (AKA the Waxman-Markey bill), and President Obama's commitment at the G-8 summit to keep the planet from heating up more than two degrees celsius.

Meanwhile, out here in the West, it's CO2-emitting business as usual, with the federal Bureau of Land Management this month proposing to lock in long term federal coal leases to giant mining firms. And not small amounts of coal either.

You'd think Colorado's two Democratic U.S. senators, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet, would be in the forefront to protect one of Colorado's most valuable natural resources: our water. Unfortunately, the jury is still out on whether they will be.

As has been amply detailed by Earthjustice and in a recent op-ed in the Denver Post by Trout Unlimited's Melinda Kassen, the federal Clean Water Act turned America's water from a polluted (and sometimes burning) mess into much cleaner lakes, rivers and streams.

One of the many dirty little secrets about oil shale is that it will take huge amounts of energy to turn rock into a product we can put in our cars and trucks.  That's because the currently proposed technology for producing oil shale involves using what amounts to glorified curling irons underground, heating them up to hundreds of degrees and melting the "kerogen" into something that can be sucked out of the ground and could be refined into a useable product.

To heat all those curling irons could require 10 or more new coal-fired power plants, making oil shale one of the dirtiest source of energy per unit in terms of greenhouse gases.  This production process would also be incredibly thirsty - producing one barrel of fuel from shale may require 3 or more barrels of water.

Shortly after his confirmation, Secretary Ken Salazar declared that there's a "new sheriff in town" at the Department of Interior.  If there was one part of the swamp that is DC that needed draining, it was DOI, what with the sex and drugs scandal at MMS and many of former Secretary Gale Norton's cronies sentenced to time in prison.

In addition to cleaning up that mess, the new sheriff - formerly Colorado's Attorney General - has also talked and acted tough about a Utah college student named Tim DeChristopher.

We knew the proposed Red Cliff coal mine in western Colorado had a lot of problems.  It's no secret that coal is a dirty fuel.  On top of the predictable global warming impacts from burning the mined coal, this mine each year will spew thousands of tons of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than CO2 - into the atmosphere without controls.   It will require bulldozing in the Hunter Canyon proposed wilderness.  And it will degrade important habitat for deer and elk.

The project will likely also bring another unwelcome impact to Colorado's West Slope: smog (AKA ozone).  If you couldn't figure that out by reading the BLM's 1,000+ page environmental impact statement, there's a reason for that:  BLM didn't analyze the mine's ozone impacts.