Hunters, Ranchers & Greens Join Forces To Oppose Valle Verde Drilling (NM)

[hatrack]

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"In New Mexico, an advocacy group called the Coalition for the Valle Vidal has fused Ralph Nader-voting "tree huggers," gun-toting elk hunters, cattlemen and teenagers passionate about saving the scenery beside the largest Boy Scout camp in the world, the adjacent Philmont Scout Ranch. "Someone once said the only way the Israelis and the Palestinians are going to get together is if they were attacked by someone from outer space. Well, that's what's happened out West, where the oil and gas companies have attacked all of us, and so we have formed some unusual alliances," said Treciafaye "Tweeti" Blancett, a former Bush campaign coordinator from Aztec, N.M., who is now a director of a group called Republicans for Environmental Protection.

"It's happening all across the Rocky Mountain West - in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming - we've formed coalitions with people we never would have talked to five years ago," Blancett said. Her husband, Linn, a 60-year-old cowboy and diehard Republican, raised a Greenpeace banner in protest after being driven out of the cattle business by drillers who put more than 200 wells on the federal land his family had been ranching for six generations.

The Coalition for the Valle Vidal is facing some powerful opponents, including the Houston-based El Paso natural gas company and the White House, which has ordered an expedited federal response to the company's request to drill. Administration officials say they have sped up the approval of drilling applications across the West because of soaring energy prices and a rising need for natural gas. Drilling for gas has been subsidized since the Carter administration because burning it produces less air pollution than coal or oil. As more power plants and homes have switched to natural gas over the past two decades, consumption has risen 40 percent.

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Arguments over the environmental impact of drilling are also heating up in Congress. Republican Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, chairman of the environment committee, and others are pushing legislation that exempts from the Safe Drinking Water Act drilling companies that inject liquid nitrogen, sand, diesel fluids and other compounds at high pressure into the earth to crack the rock and release natural gas. Critics say this hydraulic fracturing taints water supplies in a region where water is scarce. But industry advocates say that studies have shown that fracturing is harmless and that excess regulation strangles the nation's economic health. "We are not generally going to be drilling into drinking water supplies, and there is no real evidence that hydraulic fracturing has any effects on ground water," said Jeffrey Eshelman, director of public affairs for the Independent Petroleum Association of America." (emphasis added)

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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.drilling05jun05,1,7574938.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

[Immad2]

1. Thank you for the link and info. Isn't it amazing how people get together

when THEY are in trouble. What happened to these people just before the last election? Oh Well, better late than never, I guess.

[Gman]

2. Politics makes strange bedfellows

many people here at DU aren't aware of this. It doesn't mean you have become lifelong friends. It only means you're allies on an issue. The next issue that comes along you're back at war. That next issue may torpedo you're alliance on the common issue.

[pretzel4gore]

3. somehow i think the environment, global warming, trumps any issue!

there was a great song (by 'spirit'?) long ago that went "It's nature's way of telling you, something's wrong!
It's nature's way of telling you, in a song..." etc....it's astonishing i haven't heard the song on radio (or anywhere) for 30 years, and, i do believe the nazipoos maintain a 'do not play' list which 'It's nature's way' was put on right away asap back in the day, because it somehow threatened the hogs access to their slop!.....while hunters, ranchers and 'tree huggers' might have differences, nature is nature, and too many rivers do stink just so some pig can send his spawn to yale rather then state..... which is more then fine enough for the tree hugger, hunter and ranchers' kids (even then it's too costly for many!)