Dear Editor,

The Environmental Protection Agency’s mission is to protect our environment. Now It is being led by a former coal lobbyist, and has become a mouthpiece for polluters, despite large percentages of the US population believing that climate change is real and is affecting us today. The fires this summer are a harbinger. Global warming is here and will get worse. This election is an inflection point. 

History, in retrospect, seems so inevitable. But what if Bobby Kennedy had not been shot after winning the California primary? Would we have ended the VietNam War years sooner and saved scores of lives? Instead, Nixon won the election, we got six years more of war, massive bombing for leverage, and about half the 58,000 US deaths happened during his tenure.  

Or Jimmy Carter who put solar panels on the roof of the White House and supported tax incentives for installing solar panels. Reagan dropped the incentives and tore the solar panels off the roof. A burgeoning industry was squashed.  Where might we be if Reagan had seen the wisdom in a “both – and” approach? Today’s rolling blackouts in California might have been abated by a cooler planet with thousands of rooftop solar arrays churning out power.  

 Another example would be Bush v. Gore in 2000. The US was waking up to the idea that climate change is real, and Al Gore, Clinton’s Vice President, had just come out with his film, An Inconvenient Truth. Instead George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney won, both oil men, and then there were the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. Within two years we were embroiled in two wars, one probably for oil, the consequences of which are still being played out, but our national treasury is at least three trillion more in debt. We helped create the conditions for ISIS to emerge, massive damage in Iraq and Syria, millions of refugees living in camps, and we are still in Afghanistan 19 years later and trying desperately to leave.   

Now we are on the verge of another historic inflection point. We have experienced 3 and a half years of the Trump presidency and are deciding whether he should continue. My bias toward protecting our wondrous planet screams that Trump is a disaster.  He has disparaged science and refuses to learn. He has taken the US out of the Paris Climate Accord where we were leading a worldwide movement to begin to grapple with the inevitability of climate change. There are over 100 regulations that the EPA under Trump has tried to deconstruct. Here are some examples from the New York Times. This administration has reduced the hard-won miles per gallon quotas that Obama had negotiated. It has rescinded water pollution rules for fracking on Federal and Indian lands, scrapped a proposed rule that required mines to prove they could pay to clean up future pollution, withdrew the legal justification for an Obama rule that limited mercury emissions from coal power plants, replaced the Obama Clean Power Plan which would have set strict limits on carbon emission from coal and gas-fired power plants, instead letting states set their own rules, cancelled a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions, and partially repealed an Obama rule limiting methane emissions on public lands, including intentional venting and flaring from drilling operations. Trump has also taken steps to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act, which empowers local communities to protect themselves and their environment from dangerous, rushed or poorly planned federal projects. 

A few years back, a contractor hired by the EPA accidentally let out millions of gallons of toxic, orange wastewater from the Gold King Mine in SW Colorado, and polluted many miles downstream. My conservative, older brother claimed that this was an example of why we don’t need the EPA, an example of big government run amok. I countered that there are 25 mines in that area just like the Gold King that are remnants of that era of extraction industries. Instead of dumping the EPA, we need to increase it. Those old mines are still there, like ticking time bombs. Now we have a new array of time bombs, i.e. the 53,000 active oil and gas wells in Colorado, and the 350 orphan wells that the state is forced to adopt and attempt to remediate (and growing as bankruptcies increase). The N Y Times article (7/13/2020) titled “Fracking Firms Fail, Rewarding Executives and Raising Climate Fears,” by Hiroko Tabuchi chronicles the rush of oil companies to file bankruptcies, abandon unprofitable wells, and grant golden parachutes to their executives in the multi-millions. One example of many in the article tells of MDC Energy in Texas, a state with 115 bankruptcies since 2015 according to HAYNES AND BOONE, LLP OIL PATCH BANKRUPTCY MONITOR July 31, 2020.  (Colorado had 12 bankruptcies.) MDC energy filed for bankruptcy eight months ago, while “a tank at one of its wells was furiously leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.”  By mid-July, it was still spewing methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas, up to 80 times more harmful than CO2, albeit with a 20-year life span instead of 90 years for CO2.  The article states, “Oil and gas companies in the United States are hurtling toward bankruptcy at a pace not seen in years, driven under by a global price war and a pandemic that has slashed demand. And in the wake of this economic carnage is a potential environmental disaster – unprofitable wells that will be abandoned or left untended, even as they continue leaking planet-warming pollutants, and a costly bill for taxpayers to clean up.” The surface owner is stuck in the middle with little say. We remember what happened in Firestone when that home blew up due to an abandoned flow line. Colorado, under Hickenlooper, passed tougher methane capture regulations. That was prescient on his part. But we are one planet and Texas, or Oklahoma methane doesn’t honor political boundaries. The EPA policies under Trump are short sighted and dangerous, and a clear give away to an industry that lives on speculation and doesn’t want to clean up after itself. Do we bail them out at the expense of our planet? We must vote for science and sensible and protective environmental regulations and vote these fools out. 

 Bill Thibedeau
Gilpin County