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It’s Not Easy Being Green

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Bill 2 comments

I chose this title because Kermit and I are kindred spirits. I went through most of my life thinking I must be green or something because things just did not go as well for me as for others. An ADD diagnosis and treatment has made my life easier. Poor Kermit, however, is still green.

I do try to be green in the other sense of the word. I am something of an environmentalist. I give money, feel self-righteous about environmental issues, write about issues, and live a typical American consumer life.

Note: the American consumer life is not very green. Two people, two cars. We are so committed to two cars we are replacing our one car garage (with no room for a car) with a big two car garage with room for two cars, three bicycles, workbench, emergency generator, power lawn mower, and all the tools.

You know the formula for the number of bicycles: n+1. N being the number of bicycles you currently have. That is the American consumer way. Spend to the end. When I was growing up in Fruita, I thought we were pretty well off. Car (even if it was a Nash), travel trailer, two week vacation and several weekend jaunts every year, a good TV, a remodeled kitchen, and all our needs met. The closets were not jammed with clothes, we didn’t get ten catalogs in the mail every week, the furniture and carpets were worn, and the garage had a dirt floor.

The consumer society was in operation in the decades after the war, but it has drastically accelerated in the last thirty years or so. I am sitting in Starbucks with my $4.00 cup of coffee looking at the Mercedes SUV’s parked side by side. The customers are served by well-educated Millennials glad to have a job in the service sector so they can pay their rent.

Most current middle class families are two income families struggling to support lifestyles centered on spending. Cars, computers, smartphones, iPads (I’m writing this on one), Italian granite countertops, 30 cubic foot refrigerators, Viking ranges, 52″ TV’s in several rooms, It goes on and on. This debt-ridden opulence is in contrast with the debt-ridden Millenials in the service sector and the millions trapped in poverty.

There is too much income disparity and entirely too much wasteful consumption. The consumption, fueled by all the demand created by sophisticated marketing, is socially and environmentally harmful. I look around, and I am part of the problem. As the Buddhists say I am trapped on the wheel of desire. The gasoline I burn in my 4×4 comes from Alberta tar sands. The cheap natural gas heating my home is produced by fracking. Most of our food is produced hundreds or thousands of miles away.

We try. We recycle, compost, use drip irrigation, have a small lawn, and a small house by current standards. We just upgraded our attic insulation to R50. We are adding LED light bulbs regularly. We have to avoid fluorescent bulbs as Carol is sensitive to the UV light they emit.

We are buying more organic produce and dairy products. We buy meat from grass fed livestock raised using sustainable methods, and it’s local. We are cooking more at home and when we do go out, we are picky about the restaurants we visit.

Are we green? Not so much. We are working at it, and we may someday be as green as Kermit.

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment, Geology, Memoirs

Kodel’s Canyon

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Kodel’s Canyon

In the late 1950’s, some friends and I liked to go to Kodel’s Canyon. The canyon is in the Colorado National Monument about five miles from Fruita. We would get a ride from a parent and with our .22 rifles, hike on the relatively flat desert area between the Colorado River and the National Monument, laying waste to any number of unsuspecting rocks with our .22’s.

Sometimes we would climb over the Park boundary fence and up into the canyon. It is the first canyon west of Fruita Canyon, where Rim Rock Drive climbs, and the scenery is as spectacular as the rest of the National Monument, but at the time was seldom visited. Carrying firearms into the National Park and firing them was illegal, but we never worried about getting caught. No one went there but the local kids.

The canyon has the sheer sandstone cliffs the Monument is famous for, but the lower end is black Precambrian granite, schist, and gneiss, black and weathered into narrow cracks and rounded humps. A demented miner who gave the canyon its name worked a mine in that rock for many years, never finding any gold. It should have been clear to him there was no gold; there is relatively little quartz in the rock, which is associated with gold, and Kodel’s canyon is far from the Colorado Mineral Belt, which runs from the Golden-Boulder area to Telluride. Most of the state’s minerals, including gold, are in that roughly 20 mile wide belt. The big exception is Cripple Creek, a volcanic neck with a rich gold deposit. Nevertheless, Kodel persisted for years, giving the local Fruita kids a place to risk their lives.

We would poke around in the mine, and its mystery. We didn’t go too far in, as we never had a flashlight. The big attraction was the climbing. In some places the 1.4 billion years old rock is broken and crumbling, but for the most part is so smooth and rounded as to look polished.

We had no climbing shoes, just our tennies. We had no helmets, ropes, or the hardware climbers use today. We got good at mostly unaided climbing and went up places that trained climbers attempt only with ropes and hardware. The only climbing aids we used were our .22 rifles, using them to help one another up especially steep pitches or as support. The climbing was somewhere between bouldering and free soloing. Not for those afraid of heights.

Years later, I climbed Long’s Peak with some friends. Lee had a bad knee, and Danny was helping him as we went up the Cable Route, which traverses the top of The Diamond, that sheer northeast face of the mountain with a 2,000 foot high cliff. Years ago the route had a fixed steel cable leading to the top that climbers could hold on to. When we climbed, there was no cable and some of the rock was wet. I just climbed up, doing what I learned in Kodel’s Canyon.

Danny would move up a pitch with the rope and belay Lee as he climbed on that bad knee. Danny remarked to Lee as they crept up with their rope that I was single-handing. It was steep, but I had good shoes and walked up, using one hand to occasionally support myself as I chose each foot placement. Proper safe climbing technique calls for having three support points on the rock, moving one hand or foot at a time. I was not ignoring the rule, I didn’t know it existed.

I only know of one serious injury in Kodel’s Canyon. Jerry badly sprained an ankle on the approach to the canyon and had to have help getting back to the road. He hobbled around for weeks, not getting much sympathy from us. In retrospect, we were serious risk-takers, but we just went where we wanted to without thinking about the danger. Those experiences in the hills and canyons south of Fruita made us all willing to accept challenges with little hesitation. We also gained confidence in our ability to overcome difficulty. We acquired life skills there. In our safety-oriented society, kids may be missing some important lessons. We need to test ourselves in the name of fun, and risk is part of the test. For me, it was a fun thing to do. I think I will go back, a bit more carefully this time.

Posted in Geology, Memoirs, Stories

Desert Surfboarding

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Bill 4 comments

The Grand Valley Canal Near Grand Junction, Mt. Garfield and Grand Mesa in the Background

I am a child of the desert. Fruita, Colorado has no more than eight inches of annual rainfall. Growing up in the late 1950’s, we were surfers before the Beach Boys made surfing famous.

The Grand Valley of Western Colorado is irrigated farm country. Two big canals bring Colorado River water to the valley farms. One of those canals had a place we called Karp’s Hole, after a nearby farm family. The hole was created by a concrete flume, narrower than the rest of the ditch, that created turbulence and eddy currents downstream that excavated a deep hole about 50 feet wide that was perfect for swimming. There was a diving board made from a 2″x12″ plank and an old car spring. That board was as good as any swimming pool diving board and was there for years.

With plenty of parking spaces, it was a popular summer party spot. The water, “too thick to drink and too thin to plow”, was good for tag games. A person could duck under and follow eddy currents to other points in the hole without being seen. The other side was lined with willows tall enough to provide hiding places. I had a scare when swimming in an underwater tunnel that surfaced behind the willows. I got stuck. My shoulders were a bit too wide, and my hands were in front. I wriggled and squirmed for what was probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like a long time to me before I was able to back out.

The road to Karp’s Hole ran alongside the canal for about 1 1/2 miles from the nearest county road. Built when the canal was dug, it was used for maintenance and by the ditch riders who patrolled the canal, adjusting the head gates that sent water to the farm fields.

For surfboarding, we made 4′ x 2′ plywood boards with two ropes with a handle coming back from the front of the board to the rider standing on a piece of carpet tacked to the back of the board. Another rope yoke led from to the bottom of the board to the tow rope which ran about 50′ to a post in the bed of a pickup truck. The driver and a spotter were in the cab and the rest of us rode in the bed. With the tow rope tied to a stake secured in the bed, the surfer shifted his weight from side to side and swung from one side of the canal to the other and back, sometimes bumping into the bank, and throwing a rooster tail of water onto the road.

We went about 20 miles per hour, any faster increasingly dangerous and less fun. The sport was illegal, we were trespassing, making it even more fun, but no one ever got arrested. After my first time at about 16, I came home and told my parents about our new sport. My father laughed, saying he surfboarded in the 1920’s behind Model T Fords. We were just keeping a Grand Valley tradition alive.

Our surfboarding parties were usually fueled by Coors 3.2 beer. There was no other beer for us. Given the muddy road, the beer, and adolescent hormones, accidents were rare. One time, the ditch company had mowed the willows lining the canal. Alan hit the bank with the bottom of his board a little too hard, and flew face down onto the willows. Bright red stripes.

The worst surfboarding accident was when a girl riding for the first time hit the bank and sort of flopped. She broke one of the bony processes on a spinal vertebra. No nerve damage, but she sure was sore for a while. The worst injury is when Don, my neighbor across the street dived into the shallow sand bar while drunk. He broke his neck. He was in a big cast from his chest to his chin and the back of his head. To drive, he put the top down of his 1955 Chevy convertible (the envy of every guy in town), parked his butt on the seat back, leaned forward, and drove. The cops never said a word.

More than 50 years later I can remember the sensation of speed, of spray in my face, the movement of the board under my feet as I dug one corner in to make a turn, zooming across the canal and digging in the other corner as the bottom of the board bounced on the bank. Spray flew 20 or more feet as I sped to the other bank and turned to make another run to douse the road. It was best when I could spray another car meeting us on the ditch road. It was usually some friends coming for their rides on the surfboard.

Water sports were big, but we had a mechanized winter sport as well. Two brothers had what we called a toboggan that had been around for years. It had steel runners at each corner and a deck that could hold four or five people. After a snow we would haul it out to the desert north of the farm area and tow it behind a pickup truck, preferably four wheel drive.

No going on the road or in a straight line, the driver’s goal was to turn sharp enough to throw everyone off. Speeds were a bit higher, close to 30 miles per hour. At night. There was lots of screaming and laughing as we rolled through the snow and mud.

I don’t remember anyone ever getting hurt, but we would get home tired, cold, wet, and muddy. Parents would just shake their heads. After all, they had done it themselves.

Posted in Memoirs, Stories

Sandstone Solitude

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

I like to do solo trips in the Southeastern Utah canyon country. I began going there in the 1950’s with my parents, then with friends, and by myself. I go there for the scenery and for the solitude.

The tourism centered around Moab has made finding solitude more challenging, but the crowds of four wheelers, dirt bikers, mountain bikers, and other rabble tend to go to the same places, leaving vast areas empty. Even in well-traveled areas all I need to do is walk about 1/4 mile and I am alone.

Bare rock, deep canyons, intense light, vertical spires, and the starkness leads me into myself. My mind empties of the clutter of civilization. I return refreshed and at peace. My trips there are pilgrimages.

There also is the danger. All the Park Service literature emphasizes safety. Traveling with others, taking the proper equipment, having communications, carrying water, and leaving an itinerary are all good advice. I carry water and the 10 essentials along with nylon cord, a trowel, and a poncho or space blanket. Sometimes I travel with others.

Newspaper Rock

I go into slot canyons, climb over the ridge to the next canyon where the cattle could not go, follow winding canyons to the pourover that stops me, scramble up to the rim, and ramble in the slickrock. I look for ruins of the people who lived, hunted, and farmed here. They left pictographs on those stone walls that tell of the hunt, of the gods. Life must have been hard, but they were surrounded by beauty, and they had time for art.

The Needles District

I especially like the slickrock. Entrada sandstone, ancient sand dunes turned to stone, it has a sensual feel. There are rounded humps, steep drops, curves and hollows, and those inviting bowls. The bowls are the best. In the couple of weeks after a rain they hold enough water to support life. Tadpoles, water striders, and other insects have a brief time in the sun until the water dries up and they go dormant. I like to drink from them when the water is fresh.

The bowls range in size from a few inches to hundreds of feet in diameter. The larger ones have a sandy bottom, sometimes with desert vegetation. Other bowls have an outlet, a crack or joint in the rock that is wide enough for an exit. Many are true bowls, no outlet, with steep, smooth sides.

What is it about boys and holes in the ground? We just want to go into them. I do, often without a thought about how I am going to get out. More than once I have found myself in trouble.

5162011-Devils-Kitchen-Canyonlands-Campsite

Devils Kitchen Campsite

One time I was in the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. There is a challenging four wheel drive over Elephant Hill; a misnomer because the hill is solid rock. I camped at Devil’s Kitchen, an area where each campsite is under a sandstone overhang. The view is across a park to the pinnacles surrounding Chesler Park, a magical place.

Everyone goes to Chesler Park, so the area around the campsites is little-traveled. I climbed around for a while, seeking the high points to look west across the Colorado River to the spires and cliffs of the Maze District. It’s a panorama of varying shades of red rock, tilted and broken into fins and spires that should exist only in the imagination, but there they are.

Hiking a bit farther east, I came across one of those bowls, a big one. I climbed down to the sandy bottom, admiring the grasses that manage to survive in that dry place. Rain runs off the rock and waters the edges of the sandy bottom promoting more growth there. I looked around and thought, “I wonder if I can get out of here?”

My standard strategy is to walk up the sides of the bowl using the friction of my shoes. Too steep. I tried a running start. Failed. I went as high as I could standing, then scrambled on all fours, feet slipping and using my knees as well. By that time I was worried. No cell phone service there, so I was on my own. It took several tries, losing some skin and good blue denim, but there is no skeleton in that bowl. I will go back, but plan to stay out of the bowls.

Posted in Memoirs, Stories

Teek’s Hot Rod

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

It’s 1958, and fast cars are what we wanted. Teek, my classmate with a funny nickname, found a Ford Model A roadster body and frame, but needed everything else and had little money. He heard about a wrecked 1954 Oldsmobile with a good engine at the bottom of a canyon.

We’re in Fruita, Colorado, a town of 1800 people a long way from most anywhere. South of town is the Colorado National Monument, an area of striking sandstone canyons traversed by roads bordering the canyon rims.

Someone had decided to get rid of his car by rolling it over the canyon rim just outside the Park boundary. Teek heard about it and decided to salvage the engine in the wreck at the bottom of a 200 foot high cliff. That called for creativity and a lot of help. He and some of his gearhead friends climbed into the canyon and disassembled the engine as much as they could.

They packed the smaller parts up out of the canyon with only Jerry smashing a finger falling while carrying a cylinder head. Next, how to get that big cast iron engine block out of the canyon. One Saturday, about ten of us assembled at the canyon rim. Teek had taken the rubber tire off a wheelbarrow wheel and bolted the wheel to a long 4″x4″ piece of lumber. We poked it over the sheer rim, weighted the back end with some big rocks, and ran a 1/4″ hemp rope through the pulley and into the canyon.

Thankfully, I was not involved in wrestling that big block from where the car had rolled to under the rim. With the rope tied to the engine block, all we had to do was pull. That block probably weighed 400 pounds. We pulled. And pulled. And complained. And pulled. The little rope slowly unwound as we pulled, and we worried it would break. It sure looked skinny.

It took most of an hour with hands and muscles complaining, but we got it to the rim and dragged it to level ground. Teek had a motor for his roadster!

A few months later we showed up at his house out in the farm country north of town. The car was running, sort of. The motor was in, transmission and running gear installed, and it was loud. No exhaust system, no gas pedal, just a wire coming back from the carburetor, and no starter. The cooling system was two hoses jammed together and filled with irrigation water. Oh, no seat, just a board laid on the frame rails for seating and to hold the battery. No fenders, of course.

Teek and another guy sat on the board, he had one hand on the wheel, the other on the throttle wire. Three of us laid on the trunk lid of the roadster body with our feet on the bumper of the pickup truck start vehicle behind us, and the pickup driver started us moving. The Olds engine fired up, and off we went.

I have had fast cars, motorcycles, and flown, but never had such a sensation of pure speed as roaring down those country roads lying on the back of a roadster trying to keep from being bounced off. We would go until the engine got hot (no radiator, remember?), stop, pull the hoses apart and fill it with ditch water, push start again, and fly!

Never again have terror, joy, excitement, and sheer speed come together like that day.

High school graduation came and I moved on. Teek finished his car and drove it for years, but I never got a ride in the finished model. We talked about those days at our 50th reunion, and the memory is still fresh as the day we broke lots of laws riding on Teek’s hot rod.

The pictures are not of Teek’s hot rod or of the canyon the motor came out of, but are good representations.

Posted in Memoirs, Stories

More on Fracking and Clean Coal

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Some good news and bad news in the energy business.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper promulgated new regulations that should go a long ways toward ending pollution from oil and gas wells. Each well will have monitoring equipment that can detect any emissions from the well Here is a link.

The bad news, Duke Energy has a lot of coal ash ponds in the southeast, and one collapsed into the river. Duke is a powerful lobbyist, and has successfully avoided any strict regulation or penalties up to this point. This event may change that.

i am struck by the corporate attitude to these harmful and costly events. Lobbyists are paid, campaigns are funded, lots of false rhetoric is expended fighting regulatory oversight of mining, drilling, and processing operations. “Regulations and government intrusion kills jobs.” So little regulation goes into place until a hugely expensive disaster occurs, with cleanup costs far exceeding the costs to do the job right.

i think fighting regulation is due to the constant corporate pressure to have a good quarterly profit. Expenses that cut into short-term profit are avoided by managers who avoid or never see reports from the field warning of potential environmental problems.

In my experience, weak managers who lack foresight and the ability to sell needed projects to the higher-ups tend to focus on cost cutting. Tanks leak, ash retention ponds fail, and faulty blowout preventers fail, all in the name of quarterly profits.

Last quarter’s numbers look good, but the overall profit picture is not so good for Freedom Industries, Duke Energy, or BP Petroleum.

My favorite case in point is when Freon was banned due to ozone layer damage. The refrigeration industry fought the change until they realized that they were the ones to do the work replacing Freon.

Rather than killing jobs, environmental regulation created jobs and benefited everyone, and the consumer paid the cost, fair enough for having a cool house and car.

Coal Ash Spill

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment

Elegy for Tedd Brumbaugh

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Bill 2 comments

My old friend Tedd died a couple of years ago. I wrote this after his death.

We went back a ways. I used to visit him on my tricycle. We would eat mulberries in the tree behind Jimmy’s house. We would fight on the way home for lunch and make up on the way back to school. His mother served both whole wheat and white bread at meals. My family didn’t have bread on the table for meals.

In high school, Tedd wanted only to District Attorney for a day. All the county elected jobs were available, and I didn’t care which job I got, I just wanted to go, so I ran for every job and lost. The last office to be chosen was District Attorney. I won, Tedd didn’t go.

I was best man at his wedding, traveling to McPherson, Kansas for the ceremony. I painted Help Me on the soles of his shoes. A woman gasped when they knelt at the altar.

Our class Valedictorian, Tedd, and I went to a Quaker youth camp in Palmer Lake between our junior and senior years. That week changed our lives. Liberals! They didn’t exist in Fruita. I went with Tedd and his family to my first classical music concert ever. We went with our high school science teacher to Paradox Valley and the Hanging Flume.

Tedd’s last couple of years have been pretty rough. He was having some health problems then was diagnosed with brain cancer. The oncologists killed the cancer, but he began having mini-strokes. The last few months, he hasn’t been around much. Now, he’s gone.

Tedd was pretty much unresponsive for a time before he died. After watching this more times than I like, I think the dying person is doing some work in our world before moving on. I don’t know what the work is and they aren’t saying. I am not entirely sure about this, but in watching, I can see that something is going on at some level. It is more subtle than a dog’s twitches while dreaming, but it is there.

Life is a mystery, filled with joy, sorrow, and all those other times. I like to think about the mystery, but don’t ask me for any answers. I do know I felt joy riding my tricycle over to Tedd’s house.

Posted in Memoirs

Clean Coal

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

After WWII, a lot of research was done examining propaganda techniques. The impetus was how Nazi propaganda was used to control the German people. A major technique is The Big Lie: take an obvious falsehood, such as the international Jewish Conspiracy, and repeat it so often that the citizens start believing in it.

A current Big Lie here is Clean Coal. Take a look at a coal train, coal mine, or coal fired power plant and you can see that coal is not clean. Yes, coal is somewhat cleaner than in past years, but the evidence is overwhelming that coal is our dirtiest energy source.

I am from Western Colorado, and my father liked to tell stories about the coal smoke cloud over Grand Junction in the days when coal was used to heat most houses and businesses.

In Colorado, most power plants have converted from coal to cleaner natural gas. In other areas of the country, however, natural gas supplies are tighter and gas costs more than coal. Things have not slowed down much in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin coal mines. I live close to the rail lines that pass through Denver. At any time of the day, there are several coal trains stopped waiting in line to go over the grade that is Monument Hill. Those trains are headed to Texas and other southern states

On February 10, I see a news story that the CEO of the company that spilled that coal-washing chemical in West Virginia ducked a hearing on the spill, this after they filed bankruptcy to avoid responsibility for the mess. In West Virginia, coal is king, regardless of the consequences. Hundreds of thousands had their drinking water made unusable for weeks.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, there has been an ongoing battle between corporate profit-driven industries and their actions; and those who are harmed by those actions. People harmed have turned to government for help, and the political response has made news since the first runaway horse and wagon killed someone. Many businesses are responsible, and try their best to do no harm while making a profit. Many other businesses, however, see profit as the goal that overrides any other concern.

Here in Colorado, the Ludlow Massacre, the most violent labor dispute in U. S. History grew out of the conditions workers were forced to endure in the Southern Colorado coal fields. Poor pay, long hours, constant danger, and poor living conditions prevailed throughout the industry and led to a series of violent strikes in all the coal-bearing regions of the state that climaxed in Ludlow in 1914. The governor called out the state militia to support the company owners against the strikers. The militia attacked the makeshift tent camp the miners had built, burned it, and killed about 115 women and children. The violence did not end.

Violence was done to the people by a combination of government and mine owners in Southern Colorado, and violence is being done to the people of West Virginia by a chemical company, part of the coal industry; and weak government regulation. The real violence is being done to us all from the pollutants going into the air and water.

In the short run, natural gas is less damaging than coal, but the real need is to make the switch to renewable energy. President Carter proposed a move to renewables early in his administration, even putting solar panels on the roof of the White House. President Reagan removed the panels, cut the National Renewal Energy Laboratory by 90 percent, and the country moved backwards, accelerating the rise in global temperature and presenting us with the crisis we now face.

The U.S. Foot dragging in energy policy combined with the rapidly growing fossil energy consumption in China and India, is generating a global crisis that will only get worse before it gets better. For us, the task is to get away from coal, then all hydrocarbons.

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment

Fracking

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Bill 2 comments

The United States is experiencing an energy boom. Oil and gas production is steadily growing, mostly due to new technology in use in older oil fields that were once regarded as exhausted, and development of new areas like the Williston Basin in North Dakota and the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania. Here in Colorado, the boom-bust economy of the Western Slope experienced a major boom. In the Denver Basin, mostly in Weld county, drilling has increased dramatically.

Why this oil and gas boom when just a few years ago, oil and gas production had been declining for years. Fracking, where a well is driven down into petroleum-bearing strata once regarded as unproductive because the rock was not porous enough to allow the petroleum to flow into the well, can now become productive when the rock is hydraulic fractured by pumping water under tremendous pressure into the rock layers. The rock breaks, and the sand and chemicals hold the fractures open enough to allow the oil and gas to migrate into the drill hole.

Fracking is not new. I am from Western Colorado, and in the 1950’s the region experienced a double boom. The government needed uranium to build bombs, and oil and gas were in great demand. My paper route doubled with all the new people moving in for good-paying jobs. Fracking was in use then, but had limitations as the amount of rock broken around a vertical drill hole was limited. Today, however, that has changed because of horizontal drilling, where a well is drilled into the desired rock layer then the drill makes a 90-degree turn and drills horizontally, increasing the amount of rock in that layer that can be fractured.

The result of this technology is that the U.S. is moving toward energy independence. Our dependence on the Middle East for oil is almost gone. New jobs are being created, oil prices have stabilized, and a new energy era has dawned.

All good, right? No. There is always a cost. Fracking requires water. Millions of gallons of water are injected into the earth. Some comes back up, but it is dirty stuff that sometimes is cleaned up, sometimes not. Here in Colorado water is a scarce resource, and most of the water used in fracking is lost.

The oil rigs need roads and solid pads for the equipment. Well-developed oil fields are a maze of roads and pads that have no other use. I became aware of the damage flying over the overthrust belt in southern Wyoming. The land in that arid region will be scarred, and wildlife habitat reduced, for centuries.

The cost most people are concerned about is the pollution around the wells. Lighting the gas coming out of the water tap in the kitchen sink is the most publicized problem. Odors, toxic fluids coming out of the wells, air pollution, and an increase of respiratory illness near the wells are all of concern. The result is there is a great deal of opposition to fracking. In northern Colorado, several cities have banned fracking, with the oil and gas industry engaged in a major political battle.

All this opposition is the oil companies’ fault. There is a huge amount of money to be made from the oil and gas produced by fracking, and the drillers are working as fast as they can to make that money. In the process, they cheat. There are proven means to prevent any unwanted gasses and fluids from migrating to the surface around a well. Good well casing practices, assuring there is an impervious layer of rock above the fracture zone, and well-placed concrete between the well casing and the surrounding rock. All this casing and concrete is expensive, and in a mile-deep hole in the ground. So, cheat. Use rotten casing, less cement, and loose strata above the production layer; all lead to environmental damage at the surface when the well leaks. The damage does not have to happen.

Just as fracking technology is well-developed, the means of protecting the area around the wellhead are available. The key is requiring the drillers to use those means. It is not enough to pass laws saying don’t do it. It takes monitoring with enough inspectors on site to assure proper practices are followed. The monitoring can be funded by a tax on production. (The producers cheat at production figures as well). The result can be more jobs and safe oil and gas production.

Here in Colorado, with a Governor familiar with the oil and gas industry and a good political climate, solid regulation can happen. In Texas, however, the oil industry has controlled the state government for many years. Lots of folks stand to get sick there, and massive amounts of greenhouse gas are entering the atmosphere. With widespread public outcry about the environmental damage, the political climate may change enough to allow good governmental regulation.

The real solution to our global warming and climate change problem is to end the use of hydrocarbons we dig out of the earth. Coal, oil, and natural gas have to go. This is not going to happen soon. We can, however reduce the impact by moving from coal to natural gas as fuel in power plants. This has happened in Colorado, but huge amounts of coal still go to power plants in the south and east. More natural gas production can reduce coal consumption. The plants will still pollute, but at a lower amount. Fracking is the means. The next step is to accelerate our transition to renewal energy sources.

Fracking, if done properly with a good regulatory structure, can reduce our dependence on the Middle East for oil, and can reduce domestic coal use. There will be less environmental damage, and the economy will benefit. All we need is less hysteria and good regulation.

Here is a letter to the editor from The Denver Post 2-21-14 on fracking.

Posted in Environment, Geology

Miscellany for February 17, 2014

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Carol and I watched Amazing Grace last night. It is one of the best movies I have seen in some time. It is about William Wilberforce, who campaigned against slavery in the English Parliament for many years in the late 18th century. A fine period piece, something the Brits do well.

I have trouble with a lot of Hollywood movies these days. They seem to aim at a mass audience with little respect for the intelligence of the viewer. The result can be a fun two hours, but I tend to forget them in about two days.

We do watch television, but not the usual fare with the exception of Downton Abbey, which is now popular here. We watch both Sherlock Holmes series; Sherlock, from the Brits, and Elementary, set in New York. Both are fun to watch, and have different takes on the original.

There are two mystery series we enjoy, also from the UK, and set in Oxford. Inspector Morse, set in the early 1990s, and Inspector Lewis, set in the present. Both are engaging, with fine views of medieval Oxford University. Both shows depict Oxford academia as somewhat medieval as well.

Morse is an intellectual policeman who did not quite graduate from Oxford, while Lewis is a working class Geordie from Newcastle. The contrast makes for good character development. In the older series, Lewis is Chief Inspector Morse’s sergeant in the Morse series. In the Lewis series, Lewis is the Inspector with intellectual Sergeant Hathaway (Cambridge) as his assistant.

What is so good about the two shows is the connection to Oxford cultural life, green England, rain, interesting characters, and good stories. A strange quirk is that with Morse, almost all the murderers are women. What is that about?

Some books to mention are the Chet and Bernie mysteries by Spencer Quinn. Bernie is the detective; Chet is the dog, who tells the stories from his perspective. Good mysteries and Chet is quite the dog. Chet is funny, and you will find yourself laughing out loud and often. The same jokes tend to run from one book to the others, and I laugh every time.

Another book I recommend is Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides, a biography of Kit Carson. It is a well-done book about one of the most interesting Americans of the nineteenth century west. John Carson, a ranger at Bent’s Old Fort and Kit’s great-grandson, does not like the book, so it is probably pretty accurate. Kit did everything, went everywhere, and was something of a ruthless killer. Sides tells the bad of old Kit with the good.

Posted in Books, Movies and TV

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