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Letters to the Editor

Glenwood Springs, CO Colorado

Dear Editor,

Here around Glenwood we can see the impact of the energy boom every day. Sportsmen tend to be a conservative lot, but across this part of the state, hunters and anglers are beyond concerned about the administration’s plans for tens of thousands of new wells and a massive new federal oil shale program.

As it’s done now, energy development is hammering our wildlife, especially mule deer and sage grouse. They’re just the tip of the iceberg. Other species are taking a beating, too.



An energy bill now before Congress would begin to stem the damage. HR 3221 would ensure that oil and gas development takes place in appropriate places, and with responsible safeguards to balance energy development with the protection of our water, wildlife habitat, and the rights of property owners.

This bill won’t even marginally disrupt industry access to natural gas deposits, but it will restore some common sense to public land management. So naturally, oil and gas lobbyists are pulling out all the stops to oppose it.



Clean air, clean water and high-quality wildlife habitat are the capital of our future economy. Right now, these values are being squandered to plump up industry’s bottom line. Eventually, this boom will go bust. What will we have left?

One of the bill’s critical provisions will bring reclamation bonding practices in line with the actual costs of reclamation. Bonding levels have not increased in decades. They don’t come close to guaranteeing that the hundreds of thousands of acres disturbed by energy development will be restored once companies have extracted their profits.

Thanks to representatives Mark Udall and John Salazar, the bill will also protect the top of the Roan Plateau from surface occupancy.

We can’t afford to allow our future to be sacrificed by short-sighted federal bureaucrats.

Urge your congressmen to vote for this bill.

John Seidel

Carbondale

Dear Editor,

Could Richard Doran see the irony of his letter of July 30, lauding business, while the headlines are dominated by the conviction of Joe Nacchio? Perhaps irony is only the province of those dreamy-eyed liberal arts students taught by terrible tenured professors. I wonder how the Qwest stockholders and those receiving pensions feel about the statement that, in business, “Within minutes the (termination) justification is validated and the process is complete.”

Nacchio is the latest in a string of executives in the wonderful “real world” of business, for which Mr. Doran has so much respect, to be found guilty of assorted crimes of false accounting and “crimes of over-arching greed.” This conviction process took five years or so.

Mr. Doran appears to be following the new conservatives’ trend to ignore facts whether they scream from headlines or appear on the pages of science books or intelligence reports.

Barb Coddington

Glenwood Springs


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