Author Archives: MichaelBowman

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

My grandfather, a depression-era farmer, knew the value of tending to his seedlings.  For him the seed needed a good beginning: fertile soil, nutrients, good soil tilth and cooperation from from Mother Nature. For the inputs he could control, he was indeed a stubborn steward.  He also had two staunch beliefs: there was no other tractor than a John Deere, and his planter of choice was his red, International Harvester wheat drill. With only an eighth-grade education as his foundation he understood, with great clarity, the value of making prudent investments in labor and inputs. His reward would be a full grainary.

Our children are no different than Granddad's tender wheat sprouts.  Without access to pre-natal care, a stable home, living wages, food security and a solid education there is no amount of money society can invest later in a child's life to successfully fill those voids.  As a fifth-generation Coloradan myself who grew up in the small farming and ranching community of Idalia (pop. 100), I got lucky.  "The Village" made sure we had all that we needed to become productive adults.  In those days our region was aptly-represented by rural titans like Bud Moellenberg and Bev Bledsoe – thoughtful men who not only earned the respect of urban legislators, but understood the important role and contributions of rural Colorado to the state's economy.

They represented the best of the human and political spirit.  

Unfortunately, their style of politics have become extinct.

(more…)

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

The US Chamber is out today with their latest schlep for Captain Cory…using the very same math our favorite watermelon farmer used last Spring when the Wray Republican's 'hair on fire' moment resulted in a blatantly false tweet concerning the Wray School District.  As anyone who travels to Wray would know, the wind turbine that stands as a sentinel to Wray's south gate is owned by the local school district. The turbine, the first school-owned, commercial scale installation in the state produces 100% of the school districts energy needs – and as an added bonus their excess production is sold to the City of Wray under a long-term contract.  In total, this community effort has stabilized the electricity rates in Wray – and given the contractual agreement between the city and the school, it would be impossible for the school's energy costs to rise a single penny; the sales of the excess production provide a new revenue stream for the district, a source of pride for the town and a hedge on future price increases of fossil-fuel generated electrons.

All of this because we invested in local, clean energy production. And this model of distributed energy production is the future.

But simple mathematical equations don't seem to slow down, nor interrupt, the (lack of) neuron activity of a devout Fossilonian.

(more…)

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

It's impossible to miss the irony: Lamar, the host community of Colorado's first commercial wind farm. A wind turbine blade exhibited proudly on Main Street, a testament to the coming 'New Energy Economy'.  Colorado Green represented all that was good about an economy in the midst of an energy transition. A revitalized downtown, emerging from the depths of the last agricultural recession.  Welcomed new jobs and tax base.

Today, Lamar faces a stormy and uncertain financial future.  A region drowning in Class 5 wind resources. Rich soils and river water. A community of souls who have endured, and to date prospered from nearly every Biblical plague one could imagine. Now with a $160 million coal -anchor around their neck – just blocks from the old Amtrak station that sports a wind turbine blade.  A city obligation that is a literal noose around the neck of Lamar residents. 

I wish I could share that this is the only challenge facing the residents of the Lower Arkansas River Valley.  It's not.  A short, 95-mile drive to the east will put you in Holcomb, Kansas, home to the proposed, multi-billion dollar coal plant that would be built to predominantly serve Tri-State Generation and Transmission.  A proposal that to date has reportedly cost the member coops of Tri-State in excess of $50 million dollars to date.  A project that has taken approximately 20,000 acres out of agricultural use, its associated water rights destined for the cooling towers of either the Holcomb plant, or the theoretically-still-in-play Holly nuclear plant.  If that wasn't enough, the regions multi-generational farmers and ranchers have been faced with a rogue state bureaucracy that had turned the admirable idea of agricultural conservation easements in to a virtual nightmare. 

(more…)

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Dear Chairman Call,

I'm not your typical terrorist:  a fifth-generation Coloradan, a Yuma County native and graduate of a small rural K-12 school, Idalia High School.  Upon return from college I settled in Wray where I raised my three children.  I was active in local activities – a founding member of a team of community activists that reshaped our small town of 2,000 in the toughest of times: the agricultural recession of the 80's.  Through those times our small group of leaders built a multi-million dollar community center, a new school, hospital, community-owned daycare center, refurbished airport and extended living facility.  We were chosen as one of ten 'All-American City'  award recipients in 1993, the smallest city at the time to receive the award.  We were chosen as one of ten rural communities in the United State to participate in an intense, two-year leadership program funded by Pioneer Hi-Bred International, "The Search for Solutions".

We accomplished all of this through the toughest of times; we were successful because we created a vision for the community.  It's not that we didn't have our detractors, we did.  But their arguments against 'change' were no match for a solid road map that redefined our community.  In short, we knew we had to embrace change – or wither on the vine. 

We consciously made the choice to thrive, not just survive.

Yuma County has been blessed with an abundance of natural resources: our water resources from the Ogallala are second to none.  Fertile soil and significant natural gas reserves turned this vast prairie into one of the richest breadbaskets in the Great Plains.   At one time Yuma County was the largest corn producing county in the nation.  Today, the corn production feeds one of the largest feedlots in the world, originally built by the Monfort family and is now owned by Brazilian interests.  Our vast open space served as an ideal location for the explosion of pork production facilities.  Today, the majority of those facilities are owned by the Chinese Pork Giant Shuanghu.

It's unfathomable for me to imagine that some 20 years hence from these enormous achievements that Wray would be ground-zero for the secession movement.  I attribute the shift in mindset almost exclusively to how the party leadership has morphed over the last two decades.  Long gone are the rural titans once revered in the legislature: Bud Moellenberg, Bev Bledsoe and Fred Anderson.  Absent is a voice that reminds us that we aren't independent but interdependent with our urban counterparts.

We've come a long way from my 4-H and FFA days where I earned my State Farmer Degree with a modest 50-sow operation three decades ago. My parents and grandparents were Republicans.  The old kind.  Conservationists. The kind that understood math, that coveted local governance, that understand the importance of infrastructure investment and supporting the 'common good'.  The kind that encouraged personal initiative.  The kind that understood the value of the most socialist of organizations: the local farmers cooperative, the local telephone company, our community hospital and our rural electric association.

(more…)

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Earlier this month the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) held its annual conference in Nashville. Jo Ann Emerson, former Missouri Congresswoman-turned-CEO of her top political donor, started the conference with an attack on the Obama administrations' environmental record.  She was followed by the alternative speaker Haley Barbour (who replaced Chuck Todd of NBC who was stuck in D.C. by the ice storm), the former governor of Mississippi.  Mr. Barbour spent half an hour attacking everyone but conservative Republicans.  Everyone in the room seemed concerned that the speaker had gone too far: the numerous, African-Americans, Democrats, unaffiliated voters and environmentalists felt unwelcome and uncomfortable with the harangue and showed it with very limited applause. 

It's hard to miss the irony that such a partisan witch hunt would be waged by an organization that exists only because of the vision of FDR and the New Deal – and today feasts at the trough of almost unlimited dollars doled out at treasury rates.

It didn't go over well; Ms. Emerson has been deluged by letters from the membership, prompting this response: 

(more…)

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

There is a coming war on the western economy.  Not the fake war promoted by our federally-subsidized rural electric system but a real one, waged by a formidable opponent: Mother Nature.

If there was ever an argument for a transition to a 21st-century energy infrastructure, look no further than our current challenges with the economies that have been built on the backs of the Colorado River. 

Glen Canyon Dam, a component of the Colorado River Storage Project, requires a minimum lake elevation of 3,450 ft to provide enough hydraulic head to maintain its generation capacity.  Today, that level rests at approximately 3,550 feet msl (mean sea level); it is projected to fall below the required minimum of 3,450 feet in 2015 and to remain below the operational levels beyond 2020. 

The once-mighty Colorado: a treasured, western resource that serves the water demands for the majority of Colorado's 5 million residents.  Glen Canyon Dam, located in the Upper Basin of the Colorado, supplies the electrical needs to 5.8 million people including a significant number of Coloradans.  Two of the top five, long-term energy purchasers of Glen Canyon hydro-power are Tri-State Generation & Transmission and the Platte River Power Authority.  System wide, four million people rely on the Colorado River Storage Project.  Irrigators from Wyoming to Mexico tap the resource for crop production.  The combined metropolitan areas served by the project would be the 12th largest economy in the world with $1.7 trillion in Gross Metropolitan Product. 

(more…)

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

"We cannot solve problems with the same thinking

we used when we created them"

~Einstein

I spent Father's Day of this year reflecting on the the challenges of Colorado's 4th Congressional District, a landscape of both abundance and scarcity.  A land where federal programs have provided an abundance for some; for others, only the prospect of increasing scarcity.  A land so rich in natural resources that it's hard to comprehend that any of its residents are challenged in the way they are today.

As we witness the growing chasm between the abundance for some and scarcity for others – it's mind-numbing for anyone paying attention.

Then in September the US House of Representatives, aided by the leadership of Cory Gardner, voted to systemically dismantle the safety nets for our country's most challenged residents; a $40 billion cut in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance  Program that will not only further decimate existing safety nets – but eliminate 55,000 Coloradans from being eligible.  Just prior to the final House vote in September, Congressman Gardner had this to say:

“I’m anxious about it,” said Gardner, a few hours before the vote. “I’m glad we’re moving forward on a path that should complete the farm bill but the road has not been easy. I don’t want to be overconfident at any point.”

Next stop?  The 2013 Government shutdown: a brave act of leadership that cost the US economy just over half of the total amount of the House proposed cuts to the food nutrition program. 

It falls in to the category, "I wish I was making this up."

When Congress returns to finish this session on December 9, it will be the last opportunity to pass a Farm Bill, an effort almost ignored by the Press yet perhaps the most apt symbol of a dysfunctional Washington.

(more…)

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Talk's not cheap. Not if House Republicans led by Congressman Doug Lamborn get their wish.

Make no mistake, the sole purpose of the Federal Lands Jobs and Energy Security Act, introduced by Congressman Lamborn, is to make it easier for oil and gas companies to drill on public land. In fact, so easy that a permit would be automatically approved if the Department of Interior failed to act in 60 days.  All this while recent polling reflects a much different mood in the West:  only 35 percent said that more public lands should be opened to “responsible energy development.”

It's what money buys today on Capitol Hill. 

The kicker?  If you want to file a protest, you'll have to pony up $5,000.00

But the Congressman didn't stop there: his bill also directs the Department of Interior to commence commercial leasing of oil shale – a practice banned since the days of Herbert Hoover – and not to be confused with the more common shale oil. 

Oh, how the Congressman longs for the days of Hoover.  It was just so much easier then for white men, hell-bent on burning that black gold formed millions of years ago to exert their dominion over the Earth. They poisoned an unsuspecting public the old-fashioned way then: with lead paint, PBB, PCB and dioxins, unencumbered by a skeptical and informed public or concerns over rapidly-depleting natural resources – or a collapsing climate. 

As our departed friend Randy Udall often said about the resource:

“there is three times more energy in a ton of Captain Crunch than there is in a ton of oil shale."

Political fortunes built on the back of oil titans and snake-oil schemes. Have we learned nothing in the last 30 years?

(more…)

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Only Nixon could go to China.

Only oil-man George W. Bush could deliver a national Renewable Fuels Standard and create the world's largest wind-energy market.

Perhaps only my Congressman can catalyze a very different conversation on Capitol Hill about the role of renewable fuels in our nation's future. 

With increasing regularity, political attacks masked as journalism have replaced a national press corps that once served as a legitimate arbiter of fact.  As it turns out, the AP article was devoid of a laundry list of facts.  Yet another in a series of well-funded efforts by Big Oil to undermine our march to an economy less-dependent on fossil fuel while building our national economic, security and energy resilience.  (In June of this year, the US Supreme Court ruled against the American Petroleum Institute, etal. on their challenge to E-15.) 

If there is any one thing the renewable fuels industry can count on – this won't be the last time they'll be up against the Big Oil legal team. 

Interests with that kind of money don't like to be told 'no".

If one took the AP story and inserted 'Bakken Field' or 'fracking" for every reference to ethanol, you'd get a more complete picture of the assault on our environment by those industries.  Funny enough, no one on Capitol Hill is calling for an end to the extraction activities of those precious, finite resources.

It isn't that hard to do the math.

There is more-often-than-not substantial costs, both seen and unseen, to "walls" – they can manifest themselves in many ways: physical walls intended to separate the free from the oppressed;  political walls that prevent an engaged public from participatory democracy.  Regulatory walls that maintain monopolistic powers in a theoretical free-markets.  Economic walls that perpetuate poverty and concentrate wealth.

From an energy perspective the United States is the East German-equivalent side of the Berlin Wall.  An economy controlled by Big Oil – an industry long-addicted to public subsidy, parading as a free-market provider of cheap energy.  A government literally occupied by the monied interests of the industry [they have spent in excess of $105 million in lobbyist this year alone]; a society under siege by a hostile climate created by the industries emissions.  A society longing for a different form of energy governance.

Our energy future lies on the west side of the wall.

(more…)

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

When I think of Abraham Lincoln, my first thought is emancipation:  the process of setting one free from legal, social, or political restrictions. In his day it meant ending the scourge of human enslavement.  And although Lincoln's primary challenge during his Presidency was preserving the Union, it's not often someone also thinks of the Lincoln Presidency as one that transformed American agriculture.  His background made him uniquely suited for the vision: he was well-versed in pioneer farming and rural life; he understood and participated in small town democracy.

Lincoln understood the power in educating his fellow man: in July of 1862 he wrote in to law the Morrill Land Grant Act, establishing our nation's land grant university system.  He understood the transformational nature of technology: from hand labor to horse-drawn power; from there to steam power.  He understood the need to unleash the full production capacity of American soil.  He understood that the best use of labor was for the opportunity for those laborers to become landowners, no longer the "mud sill" laborers, or slaves, that defined the current agricultural paradigm.  Thus, the Homestead Act of 1862.  Lincoln's Pacific Railroad Act opened up the western United States to trade and the delivery of goods.  It also provided for a telegraph line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean.  He identified the need for a permanent government agency to further the research and development of crops and livestock, so in that same year he established the United States Department of Agriculture and gave it Cabinet status.  He called it, "the peoples department". 

Lincoln thought BIG.

At some risk of being taken out-of-context, it would be hard to argue that Lincoln's vision of an emancipated, educated citizenry has yet to come to full fruition.  Our struggles as a nation continue. Today, there are more African-Americans on probation, parole or in prison than there were slaves in 1850.  We are faced with a stagnant job market and woeful under-investment in educating our next generation.  A crumbling infrastructure and a climate in collapse.  A national economy addicted to petroleum – not unlike our addiction to slave labor in the days of Lincoln.  And a wealthy few who would fight to the bitter end, even war,  to preserve a business-as-usual scenario. 

Our challenges remain.  Today we're bombarded with a multi-million dollar ad campaign attempting to convince the American public that our national energy security will be found in a pipeline from Canada, the KeystoneXL.  The business-as-usual crowd is spending millions to keep our addiction to the illusion of cheap oil firmly intact.  That same crowd seemingly has no angst at the pillage of our nation's most precious resources to create immense wealth for a few.  And a growing belief by some that our bests days are behind us.

(more…)