If you’re wondering how implementation of the chimerical “Green New Deal” might play out at the local and state level, Colorado might be offering a hint.
The current legislative session, the first since the Democratic Party’s electoral sweep in the state last November, hit the halfway point last Monday, and it was marked by the most ostentatious sign of liberal hegemony in a session already wracked by several. Senate Bill 181, introduced late the previous Friday evening, is a tendentious and, shall we say, assertive piece of legislation aimed squarely at Colorado’s most valuable industry: oil and gas.
The dynamics are interesting. The state’s new governor, former Rep. Jared Polis, has never made much of a secret of his disdain for the petroleum industry (that which gives us fuel, heat, and electricity) and has made a commitment to sentencing Colorado to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035 his central theme. This is why a few eyebrows were raised during the election when he refused to lend his support to a ballot measure, Proposition 112, advanced by a cohort of fanatical environmentalist groups to establish setbacks for the citing of oil and gas wells and related equipment that would have eliminated virtually every square foot of the state from consideration for energy development.
Well, it turned out to be a wise political move. While Democrats won seats all over the state that night, Coloradans rather decisively rejected the anti-oil and gas measure. It seems that whatever direction their politics may be taking, Coloradans still like being employed and warm.
So a few months later, the state Democrats are busy tossing every progressive idea they ever had, all killed in previous years by a Republican-led State Senate, into the legislative mill. They finally got around to the dismantlement of oil and gas development. What the voters, in their bourgeoise unreliability, failed to deliver Democrats would just do themselves.
The bill is every bit as bad as one might expect, having been written without the benefit of input or perspective of anyone who knows anything about how energy is produced, or from the communities from where it is generated. One suspects that the same brain trusts who helped patch together Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan to replace airplanes with high-speed rail may have been consulted.
A lot of mischief is built into the bill, but among the more egregious provisions is one which specifies that the state shall stop issuing drilling permits until all the rules required in any new bills this year have been promulgated and become effective. Since this is all at the discretion of the director of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, someone hand-picked by the governor to oversee the disassembling of the states oil and gas industry, that pretty much brings development to a halt for as long as the most zealous Luddite may wish.
At least the folks who orchestrated the ill-fated Prop 112 seem to think so. One of the key figures in the organization running the measure stated last weekend that the bill “would immediately halt state-wide oil and gas permitting and allow local governments to ban drilling and development.” I’m prepared to take their word for it.
It goes further. One major thorn in the Luddite’s side has always been the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. These were established back in the early days of the oil industry when our nation first discovered that something very valuable could be produced from punching holes in the ground. Unfortunately, they hadn’t concurrently discovered the principles of petrophysics, and the tendency was to drill in a haphazard manner which depressurized fields prematurely and left vast amounts of oil and gas resources in the ground, which could have been recovered with a little more planning. Recognizing how important energy was to the nation, commissions were set up to reduce this waste.
But in an era where the concept of “leaving it in the ground” is viewed as a suitable replacement for an energy policy, it should not surprise that this bill redefines the purpose of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from fostering energy production for the benefit of the nation to “protecting” us all from it.
It’s a little difficult to say what all else may be included, The bill is being fast-tracked through the legislative paces at a rate seen only when, to use Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s characterization, you must pass a bill to find out what’s in it. In fact, one of the Prop 112 attorneys, Dan Leftwich, said as much when he praised the bill’s “stealth qualities” that will only become known “once this is passed.”
The Left’s blind hatred of all types of reliable energy may be economically illogical, but you cannot argue that it is without form. We’ll see how Colorado’s experience turns out, but in any case it may be an adumbration of what we can expect if the “Green New Dealers” ever get their hands on the reigns of federal power.
Kelly Sloan (@KVSloan25) is a Denver-based public affairs consultant, columnist, and the Energy and Environmental Policy Fellow at the Centennial Institute.
