WH Push For Oil, Gas Turning A Red State Purple - Colorado

[XOKCowboy]

Excellent article in today's WaPo about how the intense push to drill for gas on Colorado's Western Slope is turning lifelong Republican landowners and sportsmen's organizations into environmentalists and even... yes... Democrats!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/15/AR2007091500893.html?hpid=topnews

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. -- The Bush administration's aggressive drive to promote oil and gas drilling on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains has sparked growing anger here among traditional Republican constituents who say that the stepped-up push for energy development is sullying some of the country's most majestic landscape.

The emerging backlash from ranchers and sportsmen, which is occurring despite an economic boom driven by drilling, is threatening GOP primacy in at least one corner of what has been a solidly Republican West. Long the most reliably conservative expanse of a state that has gone red in six of the past seven presidential contests, Colorado's western third shows evidence of the "purpling" that has made Colorado look increasingly like a swing state.

snip

At the behest of the White House, which made accelerated oil and gas leasing the top priority of the Bureau of Land Management, the gas industry has in the past five years transformed huge tracts of an iconic Western landscape into something resembling industrial zones. As Coloradoans struggle to adjust to the changes -- a steady flow of heavy rigs on back roads, powerful odors from evaporation ponds and a small army of roughnecks gobbling methamphetamine to work 12-hour shifts -- disquiet grows over federal plans to open the spigot wider yet.

snip

Like most Colorado property owners, Bell and her husband control only "surface rights." They had scant leverage with the firm that drilled four wells behind their house, frightening off the 300 elk who wintered there and accidentally spraying paraffin over five acres of hay. A retired pharmaceutical chemist, Bell said she worries about "the stuff you can't smell, you can't see."