Floyd Ciruli’s take on the latest anti-fracking campaign targeting Denver is the closest thing to an obituary we’ve seen since Mark Udall’s Senate campaign.
Those out-of-state agitators plus a few Boulderites have zero clout and no one with any sense is backing their latest New York-style campaign to block energy production.
Ciruli’s recent post suggests anti-frackers have made a fatal error this time:
The anti-frackers believe they have a brilliant political strategy – use Denver’s city election as a vehicle to revive their mostly moribund movement.
The anti-frackers were tossed off the ballot last fall and have been trying to find a new platform for their anti-hydrocarbon campaign. Governor Hickenlooper’s task force is insufficient for their ambitions. They assume that the Denver City election is an easy channel for publicity, motivation and fundraising. But, the Denver mayor and the councilman from the airport area with the only fracking offered no support. And the business community has stayed organized from last fall’s campaign and is ready to fight.
If the anti-frackers lose in Denver, their credibility takes another blow and they will reinforce the perception that they are not a serious political force in Colorado.
It’s hard to take these professional, for-pay activists seriously, especially when their crusade to end fracking hits rock bottom in Denver with cries of racism.
Bloomberg News reports these fractivists led by Sam Schabacker “are importing New York tactics to the West after attempts to curtail fracking in Colorado failed in the state legislature, the courts and at the ballot box.”
Like their New York counterparts, the coalition plans to use the potential for drilling near Denver’s watershed and a 103-page compendium of health studies to mobilize the region’s 1.3 million residents against oil and gas development.
It’s tough to mobilize 1.3 million people when your mode of transportation is limited to pedal power and skate boards, but we digress …
“The science is strong enough that the state of New York decided to ban fracking,” said Sam Schabacker, Mountain West region organizer for Food & Water Watch. “We think it’s imperative that the city and county of Denver put a moratorium on fracking.”
Slow down there Shammy Sam, those health studies you fractivists like to lean on are seriously flawed and downright inaccurate. So while New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has banned fracking, his own health department readily admitted they had no evidence that fracking was the root of any health issue.
One of those studies was the since-disavowed report from workers at Colorado’s health department. From Energy In Depth:
What DOH doesn’t explain is that the researchers were actually disavowed by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), which provided the state birth records used for the paper. It was so poorly researched, and its findings were so alarmist, that the CDPHE demanded the inclusion of a disclaimer in the paper itself:
“CDPHE specifically disclaims responsibility for any analyses, interpretations, or conclusions.”
Energy In Depth cited a whole host of problems with the frightening studies that fractivists fed up to the highly emotional New Yorkers in order to ban fracking.
For an administration that promised to rely on “the science” of fracking, Cuomo’s team instead chose to kowtow to Yoko Ono, Mark Ruffalo, and all of the environmental pressure groups in New York.
That dog might put on a fine show at Westminster, but it won’t hunt in Colorado.