April 04, 2018 01:20 PM UTC

Cynthia Coffman: Your Safety "Not The Only Consideration"

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Dennis Webb reports, sometimes legal briefs force the uncomfortable facts into unvarnished view. Today’s case in point: a legal brief filed in response to a landmark court ruling on the safety of oil and gas drilling by Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, in which her office is obliged to state for the record something we suspect a majority of Colorado citizens would not want to know:

Coffman and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation are challenging a ruling that the commission is required to protect health, safety and welfare as a condition of allowing oil and gas development…

In this week’s brief, Coffman and her office wrote that while the state Oil and Gas Conservation Act, as amended in 1994, requires consideration of protection of health, safety and welfare, “it was not the only consideration, [Pols emphasis] nor did it supplant the Act’s objective of fostering oil and gas development.”

In an earlier filing asking the Supreme Court to consider the matter, Coffman said that under the appeals court’s view, the COGCC could “disregard the Act’s directive to foster responsible oil and gas development and enact rules that would entirely prohibit oil and gas-related activity unless it can occur with zero direct or cumulative environmental impact.”

The Denver Post’s Bruce Finley puts a finer point on the conflict:

She’s pressing the case that the phrase “in a manner consistent with” in Colorado’s evolving oil and gas law is unambiguous and means balancing industry interests with health and the environment — rather than ensuring protection as a precondition that must be met.

If the state Supreme Court justices agree, they could reverse the existing legal ruling that requires protecting people and the environment before the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission can issue drilling permits.

The oil and gas industry has been in a state of slow-boiling panic over the Xiuhtezcatl Martinez vs. Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission case ever since the appeals court ruling last year, and yesterday the industry-backed Mountain States Legal Foundation fired off a statement of their own titled “Environmental Hysteria Threatens All Oil and Gas Development in Colorado.” Apparently the notion that regulators should make public safety and health a primary consideration instead of “balancing” public health and safety with the “need” to “foster oil and gas development” is extremely bad for the oil and gas industry! Which seems weird given their catchy ads featuring pristine mountain landscapes and smiling healthy children.

For us, this situation is another example of how far removed the oil and gas industry and their mouthpieces are from the interests of ordinary Coloradans. If you ask the average homeowner in bedroom community sitting over oil and gas in Colorado–Erie, perfect example–whether the state should protect public health and safety first and foremost, or make public safety part of a “balance” of considerations that includes the industry’s God-given right and responsibility to drill baby drill, what do you think they’re going to say?

They’d say it’s crazy that access to minerals in the ground are as considered just as important as the health and safety of the people above ground. And outside a shrinking bubble within the fossil fuel political/industrial complex of Colorado politics, it’s hard to imagine anyone who would disagree with them.

If this doesn’t make a powerful, basic kind of sense to you, you need to quit drinking frack fluid.