I have a confession to make: I
like natural gas. Every morning at five minutes before 6:00, I wake
up to the gentle whumph of the gas stove kicking
on in the family room. I then get out of bed, tap on my son’s
door and call, “Time to get up,” and plant myself in front of the
miraculous dancing flames that never consume the glowing fake logs.
The warmth allows me to imagine that I never crawled out
from under the covers. Gas is also nice and clean. There’s no
sooty mess like you get with a woodstove or with coal-fired beasts
like the one I fed every day in the basement of our last house.
But my enjoyment of natural gas brings up a conundrum
that many an oil company executive has eagerly pointed out: How can
someone who uses natural gas be anything less than a hypocrite for
opposing drilling in the West? Don’t we have an obligation to
produce as much energy as we can here at home?
Hypocrisy
is a dogged companion in this world, where the simple act of buying
shoes brings up a moral dilemma of international dimensions. Anyone
who maintains a strict don’t-drill-in-my-backyard stance
while warming their bottom, or firing up their vehicle, with the
dregs of the Carboniferous period — or, for that matter,
while complaining about this country’s political dealings in
the Middle East — keeps good company with hypocrisy.
But to be opposed to drilling in the West’s few
remaining pristine landscapes does not make one a hypocrite. Nor
does insisting that the industry tread as lightly on the land as
possible. As numerous reports have highlighted, the vast majority
of the West’s oil and natural gas reserves are available to
industry, whether on private or public lands. Some 90 percent of
the 270 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management is
open to oil and gas leasing. And new technologies, such as
directional drilling, make it feasible to tap these resources
without having to build destructive networks of roads and well pads
everywhere.
The real dishonesty about this energy rush
can be found in the assertion by some that our nation’s
political stability and energy supply will be jeopardized if the
industry hasn’t unfettered access to every last fume under
the West.
Here in western Colorado, this hyperbolic line
of reasoning is playing out in the battle over gas drilling on the
Roan Plateau, a beautiful chunk of unroaded mountain that is a
paradise for people who hunt and fish. Local governments and
thousands of conservationists of all political stripes have told
the Bureau Of Land Management that, while they don’t oppose
sensible gas drilling on the lands below the plateau, they
don’t want to see development on the top.
Yet,
based on its record around the West, and its management plan, I
wouldn’t bet on the agency preventing drilling on the mesa
top. Similar stories are unfolding at Otero Mesa in New Mexico and
Wyoming’s Red Desert, where the federal government seems
determined to develop coalbed methane, despite widespread public
opposition.
The truth is that our country will not have
long-term energy security even if we allow the drillers into every
last untouched environment in the country. The Bush administration
knows this, but lacks the vision and political will to deviate from
the myopic views of its industry friends. While giving lip-service
to alternative energy sources and conservation, it’s energy
plan — now being debated by Congress — focuses largely
on providing more subsidies for fossil fuels and opening up
wildlands to drillers.
Reasonable people in industry,
federal agencies and the environmental community understand that
this country must start aggressively investing now in
non-carbon-based alternatives, such as wind, hydrogen, geothermal
and solar. They understand that our ongoing responsibility to the
land outweighs any boom. Just as buffalo hunters, timbermen, cattle
barons, and gold miners have come and gone in the West, so too will
the gas drillers. And when they go, we will be left with the land
in whatever condition we have allowed them to leave it in.
So, all you conservation-minded folks out there: Go ahead
and light that burner without guilt even as you promote sensible
oil and gas development in your backyards and, where possible,
invest in alternative energy. Let’s hope that the designers
of heaters figure out how to replicate the clean, comforting flames
of natural gas — without the environmental costs.
Paul Larmer is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado, where is executive director and publisher of the
nonprofit paper (plarmer@hcn.org).
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