Rabid environmentalists use lies and deception. Are the readers of this surprised? This time they got caught out! Read on and stay tuned for part 2.

‘Fractivists’ caught in flood of Colorado lies

http://washingtonexaminer.com/fractivists-caught-in-flood-of-colorado-lies/article/2537929

By RON ARNOLD | OCTOBER 27, 2013 AT 6:45 PM

First of two parts

Massive storms dumped “biblical rainfall amounts” across nearly 2,000 square miles of Colorado last month, according to the National Weather Service.

The raging floods that followed killed at least eight people, damaged or destroyed nearly 2,000 homes, and wrecked more than 200 miles of state highways and 50 state bridges.

The Denver Post ran a front page aerial photo headlined, “Front Range Flooding: Oil spilling into mix,” showing a trashed stream bed with brown stains near a “damaged tank” that “leaks crude.”

Opportunistic flocks of Big Green eco-vultures already embroiled in five local anti-fracking ballot measures pounced on the tragedy as a propaganda vehicle.

Their basic strategy was to pose as "mom-and-pop victims with no money to stop this spilling, but Big Bad Oil is putting zillions into the campaign.”

In fact, the opposite was true. In a Denver Post report, for example, spokesmen for the Washington-based Clean Water Action and Earthworks groups blasted oil and gas drillers for allegedly being responsible for 45,000 gallons of flood-caused oil spills.

Shane Davis, former oil & gas research manager for the Sierra Club's Rocky Mountain chapter, guided CNN, CBS and NPR on media tours in a small plane belonging to EcoFlight, an aerial snooper for great Images of anything resembling environmental damage. The media got horrifying Images of stained water demolishing all in its path.

Davis is something of a fracking-obsessed one-man army: he coined the term “fractivist,” is regional campaign director of Gasland – Josh Fox’s anti-fracking movie crusade – and works closely with Colorado’s local anti-drilling ballot initiatives.

Noted Colorado author Laura Pritchett wrote an impassioned diatribe, “Fracking Fluids in the Flood,” that was featured in OnEarth, an online publication of the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council. That insured the Colorado ballot issues reached a national made-for-mobilization audience.

The Alliance for Sustainable Colorado held a post-flood benefit – for itself – with singer-guitarist Bonnie Raitt. For a donation of just $2,500, you got dinner, concert, and a backstage photo opportunity with Raitt.

Umbrella group Frack Free Colorado boasted members that most never heard of, including Water Defense, Food and Water Watch, Erie Rising, eTown, The Mother's Project, Angel Organic, Fractivist, and Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center.

They “coordinated the delivery of thousands of post cards, e-mails, phone calls and public testimony to the Boulder County commissioners,” but their effort doesn’t show up on campaign finance records.

Get used to that, because this campaign isn’t about the few measly bucks from local moms and pops that get into the record.

Take that obscure group known as Water Defense. It consists of New York C-List actor Mark Ruffalo and a few friends. It's not even recognized by the IRS.

But Water Defense does have a “fiscal sponsor” - IRS jargon for “money funnel” - the New York-based Sustainable Markets Foundation, which also funnels funding for Bill McKibben's anti-fracking 350.org, which also has joint anti-fossil fuel presentations with hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer.

The Sustainable Markets Foundation got $8.5 million from more than 30 Big Green foundations interested in stopping fossil fuel development and uses — i.e. powering your car, heating your home, recharging your laptop — thus giving Water Defense a high-clout network.

Food and Water Watch? That' s another Washington-based Big Green outfit that got $34 million from more than 25 Big Green foundations, including $11 million in 2011. This is beginning to look not very local.

No, the locals don’t get the money, they get the benefits of distant big money for activists to do more than a local little money could ever accomplish.

But something happened this time around. During flood recovery, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment sampled water from eight rivers and found "no evidence of pollutants from oil and gas spills in rivers and streams affected by flooding."

Then why was the water stained brown in those aerial photos CNN and the Denver Post published? Matthew Allen of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said, “The total reported amount of oil spills is small compared to the solid waste.”

It was human feces, “20 million gallons, just so we're clear, of raw sewage,” said Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper. In fact, the statewide 45,000 gallons of spilled oil would just wet the bottom of an Olympic-size swimming pool's 660,000 gallons.

The Denver Post was outraged. Editorial page editor Vincent Carroll wrote, “the shameless use of Colorado's floods to attack drilling,” a long piece ripping the unethical tactics of the fracktivists.

But who paid for all that unethical fractivism? Find out tomorrow in this same space in part two.

RON ARNOLD, a Washington Examiner columnist, is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

"Obama's EPA... destroying the world's cleanest, most controlled coal industry with fatal regulations. ...on Native American lands."

Native Americans are among chief victims of Big Green's war on coal

By RON ARNOLD | OCTOBER 18, 2013 AT 9:44 AM

http://washingtonexaminer.com/native-americans-are-among-chief-victims-of-big-greens-war-on-coal/article/2537397

 

Global government policies to reduce carbon emissions will not prevent a hydrocarbon world. That’s what the World Energy Congress heard this week from energy research experts Wood Mackenzie.

The firm's president of global markets, William Durbin, said that coal will surpass oil as the dominant fuel later this decade because of aggressive economic expansion in China and India using the cheapest and most plentiful energy resource.

As King Coal rises in Asia - with little or no emissions control - President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency is creating a fool's paradise by destroying the world's cleanest, most controlled coal industry with fatal regulations.

That does not play well on America's Indian reservations where the “Great White Father in Washington” virtually prohibits development of its vast coal reserves, much of it the cleaner, low-sulfur anthracite.

“Indian reservations contain almost 30 percent of the nation's coal reserves west of the Mississippi, as well as significant deposits of oil, natural gas and uranium,” wrote Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan in the Wall Street Journal last week.

“The Council of Energy Resource Tribes, a tribal energy consortium, estimates the value of these resources at nearly $1.5 trillion,” Anderson and Regan wrote.

I spoke to Anderson by phone – he’s president of the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), holds a PhD in economics, is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford University), has authored 37 books, and has more experience promoting Native American property rights than most anybody outside of tribal lawyers.

Shawn Regan is a PERC research fellow who holds a master’s degree in applied economics.

Anderson’s take on Obama’s coal war: “It’s locking Native Americans in a poverty trap. Indian incomes are about a third of those for all U.S. citizens, and unemployment rates are four times the national average.”

I asked Anderson about his quote from Crow tribal chairman Darrin Old Coyote: "The war on coal is a war on our families and our children."

Wasn’t that considerably more blunt than usual, especially since he said it to Washington state's Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell?

In answer, Anderson sent me an oil drilling map of areas surrounding the Crow and the Fort Berthold Reservations. Each map was full of dots representing drill sites, except inside reservation boundaries where they were scant, yet the oil field invisibly extended inside. Why?

Anderson said “The Bureau of Indian Affairs severely restricts Indians' right to control their own land and, as a result, has left energy resources on reservations virtually moribund. Indians are being made to starve in the midst of their own plenty.”

They’re getting fed up. Ron Crossguns of the Blackfeet tribe's oil and gas department said in an interview, "It's our right. We say yes or no. I don't think the outside world should come out here and dictate to us what we should do with our properties."

You can feel the smoldering anger, but Crossguns also has a wicked sense of humor: A greenie reporter badgered him on and on about oil drilling south of Chief Mountain (Nínaiistáko in Blackfeet) because it’s considered a sacred place, site of ceremonies for centuries.

Crossguns replied to her, “I took a medicine man, a holy man, with me to scout the place and when we got there I asked if it had religious significance to our tribe, our culture. He looked at me and said, ‘What’s sacred is between you and God.’ Then he pointed to the mountain and said, ‘It’s a rock. A big rock.’”

The story is true, but Crossguns relishes telling about the flustered greenie.

The Indians want their land back. They want the right to develop it if they so choose. And it looks like they’re planning to do something about it.

Did I sense a revolution brewing? Anderson said, “Maybe not a revolution. But a change? Yes, definitely.”

Well, a little rebellion now and then is a good thing. I have that on good authority.

RON ARNOLD, a Washington Examiner columnist, is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.