March 24, 2009 05:00 PM UTC

Agreed: Josh Penry Just Makes Stuff Up

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• by: Colorado Pols

Grand Junction Sentinel columnist Bill Grant writes, following up on last week’s lively discussion of Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry’s inventive (charitably put) talking points against Colorado’s forthcoming new oil and gas drilling rules:

As the oil and gas rules come before the state Senate for a vote, we can expect that Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry will continue to oppose them. So far, his only tactic has been to repeat the same Colorado Oil and Gas Association talking points we have heard since his opening day address to the Senate: The rules are driving gas drillers from the state and deepening the recession by costing jobs.

When Penry recently told KKCO Channel 11 that “Colorado is losing significantly more (energy activity) than any other state,” adding, “there’s a strong argument to be made it’s because of these rules,” online journalists at ColoradoPols.com asked him in an email to confirm his facts.

Penry responded “The Piceance Basin has lost 60 percent of its rig count. The next closest is N.M. at about 50 percent … Most other regions are at 30 or 40 percent decline. Some states are significantly less than that.

“The drill rig count is a matter of public record,” he added, referring to the Divestco North American Rig Count Web site. Checking Penry’s source, Colorado Pols found that only North Dakota among states in this region had lost a smaller percentage of their gas drilling rigs than Colorado, according to the Divestco site. “Vitually every number quoted by Penry is, by his own source, bogus,” the story concludes…

Just as Penry seems to have difficulty seeing the Colorado gas downturn in a larger context than his Senate district, he seems equally unable to put the drilling decline into the larger context of a national recession. If he could do that, he would realize, as The New York Times announced last week, “The great American drilling boom is over.” At least for now.

Clifford Krauss of the Times attributed the downturn to “the first globalized natural gas glut in history (which) is driving an even more drastic collapse in the cost of gas that cooks food, heats homes and runs factories in the United States and many other countries.”

…Penry needs to confront facts, not distort them, and he needs to present a rational case for his position, not simply a repeat of discredited talking points. [Pols emphasis]

One small note of clarification–we didn’t actually correspond with Penry on this, as we said last Thursday we were forwarded the email exchange in question, then did our own check of the facts and wrote about it. But as for the rest, yeah, pretty much exactly. Not so good timing for this deconstruction of Penry’s central talking point to appear in Penry’s hometown paper, either–and somebody check the calendar, when do the rules hit the Senate floor again? How inconvenient.

As always, we (grin no longer containable) apologize for the inconvenience.