Bureaucrats Use Environmentalism to Choke Off Colorado Resources

by Dave Blount | August 18, 2011 1:46 pm

In Atlas Shrugged, Colorado undergoes a terrific boom that could lift the whole country — until statists crush it into poverty with their demented regulations. Once again the book is proving prophetic, as the federal government tightens a garrote around the state’s throat by listing three weeds as endangered or threatened[1]:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed the Pagosa skyrocket as endangered. The other two flowers, the Parachute beardtongue and the DeBeque phacelia, are listed as threatened. The latter two grow only in northwestern Colorado, which is also home to the 200-square-mile Roan Plateau atop massive reserves of natural gas, as well as oil in the form of oil shale.

Kathleen Sgamma of Western Energy Alliance raises a lonely voice of sanity against the cacophony of moonbattery:

“By 2020 we could produce as much oil and natural gas in the West as we currently import from Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Algeria and Nigeria combined,” she said, but “we’re adding more regulation and slowing the development of American energy, preventing us from reaching our full potential and creating jobs and economic development across the West.”

Sgamma also charges that listings of these flowers are based on bad science provided by an environmental group whose intent is to slow or stop energy development at all costs.

What did anyone expect? The tyrant atop the federal leviathan actually promised before he was elected[2] to use environmental red tape to bankrupt the coal industry that provides us with most of our electricity. The lunatics in the envirobureaucracy have even pushed to list the burgeoning[3] polar bear as “endangered” by mythical anthropogenic global warming, so as to suppress[4] anything that produces carbon emissions, right down to lawn mowers.

Our rulers aren’t pro-nature. They are anti-us.

DeBeque-phacelia.jpg
DeBeque phacelia. Where did I leave the Roundup[5]?

On a tip from Wyatt’s Torch. Cross-posted at Moonbattery[6].

Endnotes:
  1. endangered or threatened: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/17/new-flower-species-protections-pit-energy-industry-against-conservationists-in/
  2. before he was elected: http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2008/11/obama_promises_1.html
  3. burgeoning: http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2007/03/polar_bears_are.html
  4. suppress: http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2008/03/environazis-pus.html
  5. Roundup: http://www.scotts.com/smg/templates/index.jsp?pageUrl=roundupLanding&campaign=rdrudotcom
  6. Moonbattery: http://www.moonbattery.com/

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