November 23, 2009 07:29 PM UTC

Oil Shale Shills-Probably Not Evil but Certainly Wrong

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• by: ClubTwitty

Today’s Denver Post has an op-ed titled ‘Oil Shale Opponents Aren’t Evil Just Wrong’ which appears primarily to be a poorly disguised pitch for the authors’ global warming denial movie.

That is my conclusion, as they fail to even mention, let alone address, any of the many legitimate concerns that are part of the public record, have been repeatedly raised, yet have gone unanswered about turning thousands of square miles into an industrial zone, dewatering the already depleted Colorado River Basin, destroying habitat for America’s largest migratory deer herd, or dumping untold amounts of toxins into our shared air from several new power plants, denuded landscapes, and vastly increased traffic.

The authors make the claim that the only thing holding back the development of this resource are the likes of Secretary Salazar and political impediments.  They fail to even note that oil and gas companies already control nearly 100,000 acres of some of the region’s richest (public and private) oil shale lands but have yet to produce a commercially viable product.  

The only argument they address are concerns about global warming, which is a huge issue with oil shale on both sides of the tail pipe (in production and in burning the product), by making a snide comment about SUVs and pointing out that the climate has fluctuated in the past.  (Has any climate scientist ever disputed this anywhere at anytime?).  Thus they set up a strawman, and ignore real arguments, to conclude that they–as Europeans–have found greater wisdom than the rubes in the U.S. that want to proceed cautiously.

As Europeans, we can’t understand such contempt. This country is blessed with an abundance of natural resources that produce cheap energy and foster economic progress. Forsaking those natural resources in reaction to the kind of global warming hysteria we expose in our documentary “Not Evil Just Wrong” jeopardizes the American dream for millions of people.

We know because we have seen the consequences of alarmism in Europe.

They urge us not to repeat the mistakes made in Europe.  So let’s consider those.

Europe was once a vast natural landscape, with wolves, brown bears and teeming wildlife.

Whatever natural areas remain were spared generally as royal lands–where the King and Prince and Czar went to hunt–and not as public lands, an American legacy, which is one of our nation’s greatest ideas.

We are blessed here in the west to be surrounded by natural landscapes–in Europe people queue up to go ‘visit nature’ in little postage stamp sized parcels of lands that remain as part of the royal legacy.  

I am sure that companies like Royal Dutch Shell do not make the protection of our national public lands their top priority, with their profits safely ensconced in The Hague, nor–I assume–are the millions of people who depend on the Colorado River’s continued flow their greatest concern.  But Secretary Salazar does not work for European royalty or the energy companies.  He works for us, the American people, and we want the impacts of this industry studied, understood, and mitigated BEFORE more public land, water and treasure is handed over to Big Oil.

To do otherwise may not be evil, but it would certainly be wrong.