It has taken some time — about 20 years — for the efforts of Christiaan van Woudenberg and the Erie Protectors (see erieprotectors.com) to finally gain some traction in the mainstream media; but that landed with authority in this recent article in The Guardian, an established international newspaper with an historic reputation for hard hitting investigative journalism:

There are thousands of dirty old drill sites in Colorado. The state gave oil firms a $1bn pass

I invite you to read the article for its informed recounting of an under-reported issue: the cost of cleaning up the huge backlog of abandoned or low producing O&G wells in Colorado. This has been a known issue among the activist community for years, but has been overshadowed by other political events (to say the least). Nonetheless, it points to the obvious: there is growing political awareness of the need to get the O&G to pay its fair share of the environmental costs to all of us; and to pull back the curtain of darkness over the regulatory agencies that have been covering this up and blocking much needed action.

I first met Christiaan several years back, after I had moved to Fort Collins; but I could relate to deep seated frustration and anger over how his dream house neighborhood had been turned into a nightmare by nearby fracking activity. I lived in nearby Lafayette, about 10 miles south, from 2004 to 2018, and knew that the town of Erie had a split personality: half of it is in Boulder County and half in Weld County. The two counties, as most locals know, are diametrically opposite in their local political leadership over O&G development — and fracking. Unfortunately for Christiaan, his house is in the Weld County side, but which misfortune he had no idea of when he and his family moved there in 2007.

So it was with deep understanding and sympathy that accompanied my learning of Christiaan’s story; and I have deeply admired his commitment and skills and tenacity that he has brought to this struggle. He has not given up, and has provided additional encouragement to the dozens of other committed activists who are fighting an uneven battle against the O&G industry in Colorado in the years since.

What the above article documents is how the state agency that regulates O&G — the ECMC, or Energy Carbon and Management Commission — is deeply corrupt, and continues to coddle and protect this industry that has outlived its economic purpose, but which tenaciously clings to its economic life through deceit, subterfuge and outright lying to the public.

How long will the people of Colorado put up with this? How can they allow such blatant shunting of costs from those who are causing the pollution onto public taxpayers? This is what this report reveals, in all its lurid detail, how the ECMC, knowingly and with full awareness of what they were doing, failed to collect over $1 billion in fines from the O&G industry, which was rightfully owed.

To put that in perspective, the entire state budget for Colorado is around $40-42 billion. If the ECMC had been doing its job, this past year’s budget cuts that had to be made, around $850 million to $1 billion, would have been greatly alleviated if they had forced the O&G to cough up what it should paid — after, of course, the industry has paid for the remediation of the thousands on under-producing O&G wells have been properly plugged and cleaned up.

How long with the good people of Colorado allow themselves to be deceived by the ECMC? We should be demanding that our state legislators hold the O&G industry to account, and make them pay for the cost of abandoned O&G wells. As well as paying for better monitoring programs that should be in place for telling us how badly we are being poisoned.