Sims, also behind an Astroturf group called Americans for American Energy that questioned the patriotism of environmentalists for seeking greater restrictions on the “drill, baby, drill” crowd, blasts the latest legislative efforts by seven Western governors and four Canadian provincial premiers.

Sims appears to have toned down the rhetoric a bit, now that he’s taking on Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and others who want to cut regional greenhouse gas emissions by about 15 percent in the next 12 years.

Instead of arguing that the Governator and his Western Climate Initiative aids and abets known terrorists, as he did with Americans for American Energy, Sims and his Western Business Roundtable argue traditional energy sector jobs will be lost in droves.

Thing is, with the economy tanking and natural gas and oil prices plummeting anyway, the industry already is losing jobs en masse.

View of Garfield Creek northwest of New Castle, Colo. (Photo/David Evenson, Flickr)

Rifle Mayor Keith Lambert sees the more than $10 million that oil and gas companies have pumped into fighting Amendment 58, which eliminates a tax credit the industry has enjoyed since the 1970s, as a huge waste of money.

“It’s money that I could see being utilized better in other locations,” Lambert said. “In the city of Rifle or the town of Parachute there’re street projects that go wanting right now because there’s not a flow of capital to address them.”

The $10.5 million spent so far on a flood of anti-58 advertising came from a whopping $11.1 million war chest compiled in $1 million chunks from companies like BP, Exxon/Mobil, Chevron and Conoco.

To put that in perspective, Rifle’s entire general fund budget is about $10 million for the Western Slope town of just over 8,000 that sits squarely in the crosshairs of Colorado’s current natural-gas boom.

Lambert personally supports 58, although the town council opted to remain neutral on the statutory initiative that, if approved, would generate an estimated $321 million a year in additional oil and gas severance taxes for the state. Right now Colorado collects about $140 million a year, the lowest amount among energy-producing states nationwide.

Frank Breslin, mayor of New Castle, a town of about 3,500 14 miles east of Rifle on Interstate 70, says he opposes 58, but not because it gets rid of a nearly 90-percent property tax credit and increases the number of oil and gas wells subject to the tax, but because he doesn’t like how the resulting windfall is divvied up.

“I would like to see a restructuring of that tax credit,” Breslin said. “We can see that it’s hurting our economy by those guys not paying their fair share of a valuable resource and using up our roadways, which need to be treated as a utility. But I would like to see a ballot initiative that would make the ad valorem tax credit disappear and then distribute it in a fair way to the impacted communities.”

As written, 58 would put 60 percent of the $321 million toward college and university scholarships statewide, 15 percent toward infrastructure improvements for impacted communities, 10 percent toward renewable energy projects, 10 percent toward wildlife habitat protection and 5 percent toward small community water projects.

Even Rifle’s Lambert, a retired teacher, agrees 58 misses the mark on providing funds to impacted communities and perhaps puts too much emphasis on higher education. “The opportunity is still there, but it’s been handled in a way that didn’t meet the need that I saw,” he said. “That’s really the only difference of opinion that I would have with it.”

Breslin, who owns a woodworking shop, says West Slope residents have become savvy about the crush of negative advertising from both camps on 58 (it is reportedly the most expensive ballot initiative in Colorado history) and can make up their own minds about how best to fund the infrastructure demands of the energy boom.

“People are good at seeing the money trails,” said Breslin, whose annual municipal budget is $3 million but he says could be cut in half by the economic downturn. “I think voters for the most part dismiss a lot of the claims that are made and see through a lot of the hype.”

Because of fluctuating energy prices and therefore tax revenues, Lambert says it’s difficult to budget based on the severance tax. One year Rifle might get $400,000 (including federal mineral leasing money), and the next year that amount might top $1.6 million.

Now Lambert says the uncertainty over 58, as well the competing Amendment 52, which keeps the severance tax at its current level but devotes the money to improving Interstate 70, complicates the budgeting process even further. The Rifle city council opposes 52, a constitutional amendment, because it redirects funds away from water projects.

Both Breslin and Lambert unsuccessfully opposed opening up the public lands atop the nearby Roan Plateau to natural-gas drilling, signing a letter with seven other Western Slope mayors last December that blasted the nonprofit industry front group Americans for American Energy for its questionable lobbying tactics.

“We object in the strongest terms possible your repeated attempts to equate any questioning of your industry’s agenda to abetting terrorists,” the letter read. “This is a scurrilous and irresponsible effort to muddy the waters and avoid discussion of the real issues and real values at stake.”

Americans for American Energy president and CEO Greg Schnacke says their opposition was hypocritical.

“They all had their hands up for oil and gas severance tax dollars, and they all were interested in benefiting from the economic benefits that they get from that,” Schnacke said. “And of particular chagrin to everybody was the Aspen mayor who presides over the town that has the monster homes and everything and erected that giant fire pit in the middle of town that’s gas-fired.”

Aspen Mayor Mick Ireland didn’t return a call and an e-mail requesting comment.

Utah's Dirty Devil Canyon is among 11 million acres of public land that could be made available to oil and gas drilling if BLM plans are approved. (Photo/Dr.DeNo)

Even as Republican Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman declared his state “open for business” to the oil-shale industry Monday in Golden, Democratic congressman Mark Udall of Colorado vowed to fight the Bush administration’s fast-tracking of commercial leasing in the West.

“We will go back to work and make sure that the interests of Colorado are protected when it comes to oil-shale development,” Udall told the Colorado Independent. “If we’re going to have a few months here where the Bush administration wants to try and pull another fast one like they’ve done on so many other ways, let them, but in January I believe that Republicans and Democrats will join together to make sure that the oil-shale development is done right.”

Udall, who’s running against former oil and gas executive and Republican congressman Bob Schaffer for Colorado’s open U.S. Senate seat, helped impose a one-year ban on commercial leasing that expired last month. Now Huntsman and other Bush allies want to see royalty regulations written and leases issued by the Bureau of Land Management before a new president and Congress come into power.

Speaking at an oil shale symposium at Colorado School of Mines in Golden Monday, Huntsmen lamented the regulatory gridlock on developing the resource, which is trapped in the form of kerogen in rocks and sand spread over parts of Utah, Wyoming and northwestern Colorado.

Mining that rock and extracting and refining oil from it is a process that takes intense temperatures and a great deal of electricity and water. Experts agree that much research and development is needed to make the process commercially viable in the coming decades.

Opponents argue the environmental damage to the landscape, in addition to associated air and water pollution, make large-scale oil-shale production a worst-case scenario for reducing foreign oil dependence, particularly given the amount of time it will take to perfect the process.

“The water, the energy, the landscape degradation that occurs, the [lack of] existing technology,” Udall said. “You have to level [hillsides] like a pool table. We’re going to make all of Northwest Colorado look like one big pool table for hundreds of square miles? I don’t think so.”

Udall has an ally in Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat who wants to slow down the leasing process so the technology can be perfected and the regulations can be more carefully considered. Most of the shale deposits, estimated at 800 billion barrels, are on federal lands.

“If you look at where the oil shale is, that’s not really the heart or thrust of our tourism,” said Utah state Rep. Aaron Tilton, a Republican who’s the vice chairman of a Golden-based, industry-backed nonprofit front organization (Astroturf group) called Americans for American Energy.

“It’s just pretty much desolate lands, so to speak, that can be effectively mined and then reclaimed on a basis that would be consistent environmentally with what the federal government has set and what the state sets and what we value in our resources,” Tilton added.

But environmentalists argue Congress needs to reinstitute the leasing ban next session in order for research and development to catch up and so that better deals can be struck with oil and gas companies. Shale advocates say companies won’t pump money into infrastructure and research until the rules are in place and leases are issued.

Dave Alberswerth, senior energy policy advisor for the Wilderness Society, says Shell Oil is currently sitting on 32,000 acres of formerly public land sold to the company by the BLM under an 1871 mining law. He also said the government has issued five R&D leases in Colorado that so far have failed to produce large-scale, commercially viable technology for extracting oil from shale.

“This resource that [Shell has] has tens of billions of barrels of shale oil equivalent in it. Why haven’t they commercially developed it if this stuff is so great and so ready for production?” Alberswerth said. “Same is true of Exxon/Mobil, they have tens of thousands of acres oil shale resources, and a number of other companies do as well. So there’s no lack of opportunity out there for private industry to develop oil shale on land that it already owns.”

Coloradans may be a bit more gun-shy than their neighbors in Utah because of a massive oil-shale boom in the early 1980s that never produced the promised economic windfall before busting virtually overnight and leaving several Western Slope counties dotted with virtual ghost towns.

“Those resources belong to us,” Udall said, “and that’s the reason we want to make sure a royalty structure returns a fair return to us and this isn’t another opportunity for oil and gas interests to have record profits.”

GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin sproting a polar bear pin. (Image/MSNBC.com)

Many conservationists and scientists have presented a compelling case that global climate change caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions is rapidly melting the polar ice cap and degrading prime polar-bear habitat. Palin isn’t as convinced about the causes of global warming.

“I’m not one to attribute every man — activity of man — to the changes in the climate,” Palin said during her vice presidential debate with Sen. Joe Biden earlier this month. “There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.”

Biden quickly jumped on that statement.

“Well, I think it is man-made. I think it’s clearly man-made,” he said. “If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is man-made. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar ice cap is melting.”

In an Oct. 3 Colorado Independent story, the president of a Golden-based Astroturf group (an industry-backed nonprofit claiming grass-roots support) called Americans for American Energy admitted to doing some work in Alaska on energy issues and polar-bear “education.”

“We’ve been involved with polar bears and other types of issues that have been taken into the netherworld of politics as opposed to science, and so we’ve commented on those issues, and we’ve discussed what’s available in terms of possible energy reserves that are supported by the state of Alaska,” AAE president and CEO Greg Schnacke said.

(Photo/Due de Hale, Flickr)

With energy prices plummeting right along with the rest of the stock market the past two weeks, Republicans may have lost one of their best weapons for attacking Democrats in the energy battleground state of Colorado.

“What we were watching unfold until the Wall Street issue hit was that energy was quickly becoming and perhaps had become a defining issue in this year’s election,” said Greg Schnacke, a former senior staffer for Kansas Sen. Bob Dole who now heads up Golden, Colo.-based Americans for American Energy.

On Friday, amid concerns that fuel consumption will decline dramatically with a prolonged recession, the price of a barrel of oil dropped under $80 for the first time in a year, and gasoline prices in Colorado have dropped below $3.50 for the first time since last spring.

“[Domestic energy production] certainly had built up as an issue with consumers over the last several months and had replaced the war in Iraq as the issue that was on everyone’s mind, and then this Wall Street issue … I don’t know if it’s taken it off the front page, but it’s certainly shared the front page with the energy issue,” said Schnacke, who headed up the Colorado Oil & Gas Association for 13 years before joining the nonprofit astroturf group AAE.

Congressman Mark Udall, a Democrat from Eldorado Springs who’s engaged in a nasty and costly U.S. Senate battle with Republican and former oil-and-gas executive Bob Schaffer, said recently that the idea that the GOP was gaining because of spiking gas prices and the pressure for more drilling and oil-shale production in Colorado was bogus all along.

“The Republican Party’s narrative that they were gaining because of the high price of gasoline will be found to be somewhat questionable when this campaign concludes,” Udall said. “They had done a good job of spinning the issue, but those of us who had all along said a comprehensive energy policy is the way forward — in other words, there’s no silver bullet, but there’s silver buckshot — were actually being heard by the voters who are making up their minds.”

Udall has long been an advocate of alternative sources of energy and has pushed for greater environmental regulation of the oil-and-gas industry. His “silver buckshot” approach includes limited and careful domestic drilling but with a much greater emphasis on wind, solar and hydro. He also has opened up to pursuing nuclear and clean-coal technology.

“Voters are smarter than some of the pundits, some of the consultants, some of the media people give them credit for,” Udall said. “They understand that yes, we have to do some more drilling, but that isn’t the answer in the long run.”

Schaffer, who last spring barely mentioned rising energy costs when he accepted his party’s nomination to run for retiring Republican Wayne Allard’s seat, began stumping last summer with an old-fashioned gas pump that he said reflected the Udall price of increased energy taxes and bans on domestic drilling. That was when gas prices had surged above $4 a gallon.

“In [Udall’s] mind and the minds of many others who have that sort of Boulder mentality, gasoline was too cheap, and in order for us to change the way we behave as Americans we had to experience pain,” Schaffer said on the stump in August.

Udall accuses Schaffer of being a Johnny-come-lately on alternative fuels and says that as a congressman, he (Udall) has never sought to outright block oil-and-gas drilling the state, just make sure it’s done right — the same approach he advocates for the entire nation.

“The drilling we do has to be responsible. The drilling we do has to be done with the consent of the people affected,” Udall said. “If people in Florida want to do some drilling off their shores and they have a say in it, I think that’s acceptable. But it’s the same way that those of us here in Colorado want to have a big say in whether oil shale’s developed. That’s why I’ve been fighting so hard to make sure we’re not run over by outside interests.”

Schnacke said Democrats now giving concessions to oil-and-gas drilling, allowing offshore-drilling and oil-shale moratoriums to expire, are doing so out of political expediency.

“Some of what was done in the last month was a tactical retreat in order to help some of the politicians standing for election look pro-energy and be able to get past this election, but I think they’ll be right back at it come January because the basic anti-energy bent of the current Senate and House leadership has not abated,” Schnacke said.

Udall acknowledges that, if elected, he’ll likely pursue another moratorium on commercial oil-shale leases, primarily because the technology is not proven and the potential for environmental devastation is too great.

“Those [oil shale] resources belong to us and that’s the reason we want to make sure a royalty structure returns a fair return to us and this isn’t another opportunity for oil-and-gas interests to have record profits,” Udall said.

Tran-Alaska oil pipeline near the Brooks Range and the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo/madpai, Flickr)

Even as Sarah Palin “keeps pushing” Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), environmentalists have formed a 527 group to fight the Alaska governor and her oil-and-gas industry allies and keep McCain from caving on the issue during his presidential campaign.

“We see that drilling has kind of gone from being a congressional issue to a presidential campaign issue,” said Emilie Surrusco, spokeswoman for the Alaska Wilderness Political Fund, a 527 political organization formed in the last month by the Alaska Wilderness League, a Washington, D.C., 501( c)3 nonprofit.

“We wanted to be able to comment on [drilling] in the context of the presidential campaign, because the main goal of both organizations is protecting Alaska’s wilderness, and a big part of that is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and also the Arctic Ocean, where there’s movement for offshore drilling.”

A great deal of that movement is coming from Palin, McCain’s vice presidential running mate, who “agrees to disagree” with the senator on ANWR drilling. She said during last week’s only vice presidential debate with Democrat Joe Biden that she will keep pushing McCain on the issue.

While ANWR didn’t come up specifically in Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama continued to sound the alarm that the United States has only 3 percent of the world’s petroleum reserves but consumes 25 percent of the supply, and therefore cannot drill its way out of the current energy crisis.

Republican Sen. John McCain fired back that domestic drilling, including off-shore production, must be stepped up to “bridge the gap” until a wider range of alternative energy sources are available. Obama argued that approach doesn’t adequately address the immediate impacts burning fossil fuels has on global climate change.

Surrusco said the Alaska Wilderness Political Fund 527 group (named for the IRS tax code that covers such political advocacy organizations) was formed to refute several myths Palin has been perpetuating since getting the vice presidential candidacy nod in late August.

“ANWR, of course, is a 2,000-acre swath of land in the middle of about a 20-million-acre swath of land,” Palin said in a Sept. 11 interview on ABC. “Two-thousand acres that we’re asking the feds to unlock so that there can be exploration and development.”

“The U.S. [Geological Survey] has shown that the oil speculated to be there is actually in small pockets spread across the whole coastal plain,” Surrusco said. “In fact, 800 wells would have to be drilled to access the oil and those wells would have to be connected by a series of roads and pipelines, and then they’d have to create gravel pits and airstrips, and all kinds of infrastructure would have to be built that would be spread across the entire coastal plain.”

Surrusco also said Palin overplays Alaska’s role as a domestic energy producer, even feeding the line to McCain, who, during an MSNBC interview on Sept. 15, called Palin the “governor of a state that 20 percent of America’s energy supply comes from.” In fact, Surrusco said, that figure is closer to 3 percent, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

During last week’s debate, Palin also touted her role in pushing for $500 million in state seed money to entice TransCanada to build a $40 billion pipeline from Alaska’s North Slope through Canada.

Palin and the state legislature also have been funding an organization called Arctic Power, a lobbying group that’s been pushing for ANWR drilling and increased production statewide since 1992 and made headlines in April for bringing in conservative radio talk show host and convicted Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy to promote ANWR drilling.

The state in recent years has contracted various out-of-state PR and lobbying firms, as well as nonprofit oil-and-gas industry front groups such as Americans for American Energy (based in Golden, Colo.), to spread the word nationally and work on getting votes from key lawmakers in other states.

Greg Schnacke, president and CEO of Americans for American Energy, acknowledged a prior subcontract with the state and said his group is still working on the issue of ANWR drilling in a broader sense.

“From a practical standpoint the state of Alaska was the one that authorized the money and appropriated it and went out and picked their lead contractor and then that flowed from there,” Schnacke said of a 2006 deal with Pac/West Communications in Oregon. “We’ve supported a couple of pieces of legislation that were introduced in Congress this year and one of them included ANWR and we support the development of oil there.”

Surrusco said attempts on Capitol Hill to slip ANWR drilling into various pieces of legislation are never-ending: “[Republican congressman John] Shadegg [of Arizona] brought it back up as a standalone bill that would have used speculative revenues from the Arctic Refuge to fund the Wall Street bailout, or at least part of it, so they’re always looking for ways to sneak it in there.”

There is widespread support for increased oil-and-gas production among Alaska residents, polls show, but some say the national spotlight from Palin’s VP run is exposing the fallacy of the “drill, baby, drill” argument.

“Some people think she is a good pick because she’s an outsider, but most see her as unprepared and far from qualified,” David Kenney, a high school social studies teacher in Nome, said in an e-mail interview. “Increasingly, people think she’s making Alaska look bad, although her debate performance was well-received here.

“Personally, I thought she was an adept governor and would have considered voting for her in re-election. Now I think she is not only bringing down McCain’s campaign, but is possibly ruining her political future.”

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin meets with Arctic Power, described by the Anchorage Daily News as a controversial energy-backed astroturf group also funded with tax dollars like Americans for American Energy, and others on July 17, 2008 about opening ANWR to oil and gas drilling. (Photo/State of Alaska)

Environmentalists and conservation-minded politicians who have been compared to terrorists by Americans for American Energy, a Golden-based pro-domestic-energy front group, can in part thank Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, fresh off her night winking and talking about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for launching the group in Colorado.

In May 2007, Alaska Gov. Palin apparently became squeamish about a $3 million no-bid contract that state’s Legislature had just voted to extend and expand for a conservative, Oregon-based public relations firm called Pac/West Communications.

Pac/West was hired by the Alaska Legislature in 2006 to put together a national lobbying campaign to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling, and in turn Pac/West subcontracted Americans for American Energy, a 501(c)4 nonprofit now based in Golden, Colo.

Pac/West, with the help of AAE, reportedly spent about $1.3 million of Alaskan taxpayer money to unsuccessfully convince residents in four other states to support drill-here, drill-now candidates who would help turn the tide on ANWR in Washington.

When questions were raised about the sole-source, no-bid nature of the Pac/West, AAE contract, Palin, according to the Anchorage Daily News, reluctantly pulled the plug.

The Alaska newspaper reported Palin first supported the Legislature’s vote to re-up and broaden Pac/West’s efforts beyond ANWR, which seemed dead in the water with a Democratic Congress, but then had a change of heart.

According to a Palin spokeswoman quoted by the ADN, Palin’s problem “was not with the campaign itself but with the hurried $3 million contract, which ‘was not part of an open and transparent process.’”

A little less than a year later, Palin had no such qualms about a similar no-bid deal, albeit for a much more modest $50,000, that she doled out to a Massachusetts public relations company called MCB Communications — this time to make a national case for a $500 million state subsidy to a firm trying to build a $40 billion pipeline from the state’s oil-rich North Slope through Canada.

Palin proudly mentioned that pipeline during Thursday night’s debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and also echoed many of the themes of Americans for American Energy, insisting on more drilling for the sake of national security and questioning the causes of global warming. And she reiterated he support for drilling in ANWR despite Sen. John McCain’s opposition.

“A team of mavericks, of course we’re not going to agree on 100 percent of everything,” she said with a wink. “As we discuss ANWR there, at least we can agree to disagree on that one. I will keep pushing him on ANWR.”

Regardless of her motivations, the effect of Palin shutting down the Pac/West and AAE deal for ongoing “education” on the benefits of developing more energy sources in Alaska was to send AAE south to begin lobbying hard to open up Colorado’s Roan Plateau to natural-gas drilling, as well as lift a moratorium on commercial oil-shale leasing in the state — a ban that expired Wednesday.

“When I got involved,” said current Americans for American Energy chairman of the board Bill Vasey, a Wyoming state senator, “I looked at some Web pages and of course there were some that were stridently against (AAE), and one of them was this ANWR connection.

Vasey, a Democrat, said he asked AAE President and CEO Greg Schnacke and the organization’s Policy Communications President and CEO Jim Sims to explain. “They said they’d started that way [in Alaska] and things just went sour, so they decided they’d come down [to Colorado] and go a little different direction,” Vasey said.

Sims, whose Golden-based firm “provides guidance to state legislators who run Americans for American Energy,” is the former communications director for Vice President Dick Cheney’s controversial energy task force.

Sims did not return calls and e-mails, but Schnacke, former executive vice president for 13 years of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, said in a phone interview Wednesday that, while the ANWR project was before his time at AAE, it remains on their radar.

“The state of Alaska funded through a vote of the Legislature a fund to promote the development of ANWR, and they did hire Pac/West, who in turn hired other subcontractors, including Americans for American Energy, to help with that effort,” said Schnacke, who added he did not know the details surrounding the contract’s termination.

He did say, though, that the group remains very active on the Alaska front.

“We’ve been involved with polar bears and other types of issues that have been taken into the netherworld of politics as opposed to science, and so we’ve commented on those issues, and we’ve discussed what’s available in terms of possible energy reserves that are supported by the state of Alaska,” Schnacke said.

“There’s a lot of support for energy development up there. We support ANWR. We’ve supported a couple of pieces of legislation that were introduced in Congress this year, and one of them included ANWR, and we support the development of oil there.”

Mainstream environmental groups say AAE’s “Strike back at terrorists” and “Stop the war on the poor campaigns” are both thinly veiled attempts to pad the already enormous profits of oil and gas companies by pandering to base-level fears and blaming runaway energy prices on conservationists and politicians instead of the industry itself.

“I’ve seen some of the scurrilous stuff that (AAE’s) put out,” said Dave Alberswerth of the Wilderness Society. “I assume that they’re funded by oil and gas industry interests, but beyond that don’t know too much about them and quite frankly don’t pay too much attention to them. I’ve seen their name-calling, and they really sound like crackpots to me.”

(Photo/Leslie Robinson)

A Bush administration push to fast-track oil-shale leasing regulations got a big boost Wednesday when a moratorium on those leases was allowed to expire by Congress despite the lack of technology needed to make large-scale oil production from shale commercially viable.

The spending limitation on commercial oil-shale leasing originally proposed by Sen. Ken Salazar and imposed a year ago in an appropriations bill ended Wednesday, but even advocates for the industry admit the move will have no immediate impact on gas prices.

“I don’t see oil shale reducing gas prices tomorrow, but I do think there’s some potential, and it runs into Wyoming and Utah and Colorado,” said Democratic Wyoming state Sen. Bill Vasey, who pushed for an end to the moratorium as the chairman of the board of Americans for American Energy. “I don’t know that we need to lock up any potential energy.”

Vasey remembers the Colorado oil-shale boom and bust of the early 1980s when whole towns sprang up and seemingly disappeared overnight. He said he worked for a coal-mining company in Wyoming at the time that had heavy equipment loaded onto trains and headed for Colorado when the entire oil-shale industry fell through.

But he said times have changed with rising energy prices, the technology is better and the lifting of the moratorium will allow companies to spend more on research and development knowing federal lands will one day be available. He said oil-shale development can be balanced with environmental concerns.

“That’s what bothers me and certainly puts me at odds with two congressmen that I admire, Salazar and [Mark] Udall both. I’m a Democrat and they’re champions,” Vasey said. “But I just think when you say ‘no,’ then there’s no chance to use the technology. We have quite a bit of environmental rules in place, and I’d hope that [oil-shale production] would be done responsibly and following the rules we have.”

Environmentalists have their doubts. Despite reserves estimated at 800 billion barrels of oil in the Green River Basin of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, no oil company has been able to safely and efficiently squeeze kerogen from the sedimentary rock on a massive scale, then heat the kerogen at extremely high temperatures to extract oil. Also missing is the enormous refining and transportation infrastructure needed to get the oil to market.

“The problem is it’s a land grab,” said Dave Alberswerth, senior energy policy advisor for the Wilderness Society. “For any number of different reasons, it’s imprudent to embark upon a commercial oil-shale leasing program right now.”

Alberswerth said the spending limitation did not in any way block five current Bureau of Land Management research and development projects already leased in Colorado, and that the oil companies themselves own thousands of acres of private lands with billions of barrels of oil trapped in the shale, but still have not figured out how to make the process work financially.

The Bush leasing regulations, Alberswerth said, would establish royalty rates for setting up production at ridiculously low levels and offer little in the way of environmental protections for what is a potentially extremely harmful process if carried out full-scale on public lands. The degradation of water supplies and air quality could be enormous, he said.

“They’re basically 20-year leases for very low payment rates, so it’s a big taxpayer rip-off,” Alberswerth added. “You can also ask the question of whether this is really a good idea at all. Shouldn’t we be embarking upon a major effort in this country to develop clean and renewable resources of energy, not embark upon a big program of figuring out a way to continue to rely on fossil fuel resources?”

Greg Schnacke, president and CEO of Americans for American Energy, said it’s quite possible Wednesday’s move was a “bait and switch” designed to make Democrats look like they’re been proactive on the energy front ahead of the Nov. 4 election only to have a new Congress call for new bans next year.

“My sense is there’s going to be enormous pressure by the national environmental groups for bans, and we’ll see action out of Sen. Salazar and out of Senate and House leadership to deal with these issues again,” Schnacke said, “and whether or not they’re successful depends on the public, which of course sees not developing American energy supplies as a mistake.”

(Image, Americans for American Energy.org)

Fresh off declaring a “total win” in the wake of the U.S. House allowing offshore drilling and oil-shale leasing bans to lapse, the conservative pro-domestic-energy group Americans for American Energy wasted no time pouncing on two prominent environmental groups.

Last week AAE, a nonprofit social welfare organization based in Golden, crowed that its efforts over the past year-and-a-half led to the House moving to drop the nearly three-decade-old ban on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and lift the commercial oil-shale leasing ban in Colorado and the interior West.

“It is a total win,” AAE President and CEO Greg Schnacke said in a press release. “Congress had to feel the heat to see the light. They listened to the public and to voters on this one.”

The same day the group, which is not required to disclose its donors but which critics say is funded by the oil and gas industry, issued another press release demanding a congressional investigation of what it alleges were improper contacts between environmental groups and U.S. Interior Department officials.

AAE’s allegations, stemming from an inspector general’s probe of the matter, comes just weeks after a report detailing inappropriate contact between Interior Department officials and oil and gas industry workers in Colorado two years ago that involved parties with sex and drugs.

A spokesman for the Wilderness Society, one of the groups fingered by AAE last week for too closely coordinating legislative actions with the National Landscape Conservation System [no mention of hookers and blow], called everything AAE does “political theatrics.”

“Americans for American Energy is an industry-funded disinformation clearinghouse pretty much bent on painting anyone pushing commonsense environmental policy as radicals, when the reality is we’re trying to keep oil and gas development from ruining the wild open spaces, public health, quality of life and well-being,” said Bobby Magill, communications manager for the BLM action center of the Wilderness Society.

Particularly galling to some in Colorado, including 10 small-town mayors who fired off a letter to AAE late last year during the BLM’s approval process for drilling on the Roan Plateau, is the group’s ongoing insistence that if you’re not with them on the “drill, baby, drill” bandwagon, you’re chumming up to Osama Bin Laden and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“We object in the strongest terms possible your repeated attempts to equate any questioning of your industry’s agenda to abetting terrorists,” the group of mountain mayors wrote. “This is a scurrilous and irresponsible effort to muddy the waters and avoid discussion of the real issues and real values at stake.”

AAE’s vice chairman, Republican Utah state Rep. Aaron Tilton, contradicted Schnacke’s “total win” on the House energy bill Monday, calling it “a complete political farce” that didn’t have “any chance of passing” in the Senate. But he did stand by AAE’s blasting of environmental groups for being in bed with terrorists.

“Your intentions may be good, but the net effect is the support of those organizations indirectly,” Tilton said, “the reason being that if you cut off production here and our economic security, and we end up shipping these resources overseas — $700 billion a year annually — a lot of that money ends up in these organization’s hands.”

Having helped to open up the Roan to drilling, AAE is now focused on clearing regulatory hurdles to ramping up oil shale production in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, despite what critics argue is a lack of existing technology and water needed for production, as well as the necessary infrastructure to refine and transport any crude that’s produced.

“We need to wait until we find out if the technology is viable and we’re not there yet,” the Wilderness Society’s Magill said. “We shouldn’t lease until the technology is proven and until they can prove that they can do this in an environmentally sound manner.”

Tilton counters there are workable oil-shale technologies close to coming online or already online in other countries and that not nearly as much water is needed as when the oil-shale industry boomed then just as rapidly busted on Colorado’s Western Slope in the early 80s.

Tilton cites an independent Rand Corporation study that estimates there are about 800 billion barrels of oil trapped in the shale rock of what’s known as the Green River Formation in the three-state region — or roughly three times the known reserves of Saudi Arabia.

But the same report goes on to detail the technological uncertainties associated with extracting the oil and the potentially huge financial and environmental costs, including massive disturbance of the landscape, air and water-quality degradation and at least a 20-year timeframe before as much as 1 million barrels a day could be produced.