Climate change ralliers
in Weld tell Congress to back off
Aug 26 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News -
Bill Jackson Greeley Tribune,
Between 750 and 1,000 people let
it be known Tuesday they want nothing to do with climate change legislation
that has been passed by the U.S. House and is headed for the Senate.
The so-called cap and trade
legislation would put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions, but Steve Wells, who
ranches east of
The rally, one of 22 planned
across the country while Congress is in recess, was put together by the
American Petroleum Institute, which opposes the climate bill. The Energy
Citizen rally received opposition from several environmental groups, such as
Greenpeace and the National Resources Defense Council, who charged the
"phony" events were planned and staged by Big Oil concerns.
Oil and gas is a $23 billion
industry in
Weld County Sheriff John Cooke
said the county gets 40 percent of its revenue from oil and gas, which helps to
put deputies on the roads, keeps rural school districts afloat and helps
provide several other county services.
And while the industry had a
large presence at Tuesday's event at the
Ellzey, whose
family milks 200 cows and farms 500 acres near Galeton, said that even the
Environmental Protection Agency has said that if the legislation is passed
"it will have no or little impact on global climate," but, she added,
it will "leave farmers with a reduced source of energy or energy too
expensive to afford."
The Wells family has been in
Steve Wells farms and ranches
near Barnesville in east-central Weld and said he has seen firsthand what new
regulations passed earlier this year have done to the industry on his ranch. He
said he attended four hearings of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission
during the development of those rules and invited the commission to his ranch
to explain what the industry was doing was not harmful to the environment.
"I was under the crazy
assumption I could reason with these people," Wells said, noting the
commission never accepted his invitation and the new rules were put into place.
He likened present legislation to
the doomsday predictions of when he was in high school in the mid 1970s.
"They were saying then we
were headed to the next ice age, and by 2000 we'd all have to be raising new
crops to survive. What happened to that deal?" he asked.
Wells said the proposed climate
legislation makes him feel like he's on the Titanic.
"All of us are up front and
the people in charge of the wheel house are having a party and saying
everything is all right," he said. "I don't want them to vote on
anything. I just want them to stop."
He said Congress needs to follow
rules just like about everything else in life.
"As a country, we have
rules, and it's called the American Constitution," he said.
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