“We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit,” Santorum told an audience at the Colorado School of Mines where he was a guest speaker Monday at the Colorado Energy Summit.

“We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through the course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create,” Santorum said to applause from the conservative crowd.

The former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania argued that science has been hijacked by politicians on the left, and that climate change is “an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion, saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life,” Santorum said.

Rick Santorum speaking in Golden. (Photo by Troy Hooper)

Gingrich, speaking an hour before Santorum at the Colorado Energy Summit, said he regretted a TV commercial he shot with Democrat Nancy Pelosi that addressed climate change. He called it “the dumbest single thing I’ve done in five or six years. … It was stupid.” He said part of his Pelosi hangover is tied to his diminishing confidence in climate science. Asked by a man in the audience whether he believes human activities can cause climate change, Gingrich pleaded ignorance.

“I believe we don’t know. I am an amateur paleontologist. The planet has changed its temperature a number of times,” Gingrich rambled. “… If you look at the Antarctic today, you’ll figure it [must've been] a lot warmer when the dinosaurs were there. So what I’ve said in the past is I’m happy to take prudent measures that aren’t very expensive. So if we can find relatively inexpensive, safe nuclear power, I’m for it. The fact that Iowa produces 20 percent of its electricity from wind is fine. There’s a lot of things you can do with the margin. What I would not do is I would not turn the power over to bureaucracy to run the entire country. I have always opposed cap and trade …”

Newt Gingrich at the Colorado School of Mines on Monday. (Photo by Troy Hooper)

Oil and gas, he said, is “so central” to the nation’s future energy portfolio.

“Environmentalists,” Gingrich added, “have been infiltrated over the last 40 years by people on the left who are against business and against local control and they use the environment as an excuse.”

Santorum, meanwhile, claimed “there is a war on fossil fuels in this country by [the Obama] administration.” Like Gingrich, the native Pennsylvanian vowed to open up more public lands to oil and gas drilling. Don’t worry, he promised, Yellowstone would be left alone. But there is a lot of Bureau of Land Management and other federal land that Santorum said would be better served by the oil and gas industry, ranching or other human uses. He cringed every time he mentioned the Endangered Species Act and blamed it for hurting business. Santorum told the story of how the Endangered Species Act is preventing the harvesting of a forest with profitable wood in his home state.

“We have the Endangered Species Act, which has prevented us from timbering all sorts of acreage there,” he said. “It’s bankrupted the school district and the like because of the government’s inability to allow for us to care for our resources. A forest in my opinion is like a garden and you’ve got to care for it. If you don’t care for it, you leave it to nature and nature will do what it does: boom and bust.”

Stressing the importance for the country to provide cheap energy to its citizens, Santorum blamed the recession not on sub-prime mortgages or the derivatives market but on spiking fuel prices.

“We went into a recession in 2008. People forget why. They thought it was a housing bubble. The housing bubble was caused because of a dramatic spike in energy prices that caused the housing bubble to burst,” Santorum told the audience. “People had to pay so much money to air condition and heat their homes or pay for gasoline that they couldn’t pay their mortgage.”

The nation’s energy policy is a key talking point this election season.

“This is the most anti-American energy administration we have ever had,” Gingrich said. “… You have the highest cost of gasoline in American history. And I think that if you’re an editorial writer at the New York Times and you live in a high-rise in Manhattan and you ride the subway to work, it may not occur to you that for most Americans a high price of gasoline is a real problem.”

Gingrich called Obama’s “all-of-the-above” energy plan “very dangerous and very destructive.” He claimed the need for the Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act underscores the EPA’s overreach.

GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney was also in Colorado on Monday, giving speeches in Grand Junction and Centennial. He is scheduled to speak in Loveland on Tuesday morning. Romney, also a proponent of the Keystone XL pipeline, looks primed for a big win in Colorado. He leads Republican voters in the state with 40 percent to 26 percent for Rick Santorum, 18 percent for Newt Gingrich, and 12 percent for Ron Paul, according to Public Policy Polling. Paul was in Colorado last week.

Check out this video shot at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden on Monday of Rick Santorum discussing his views on public lands, domestic energy and his problems with public education:

Here, Newt Gingrich discusses U.S. energy policy in Golden where he says, “If you want to measure what our goal is, it is to ensure that no American president ever again bows to a Saudi king …”

The BLM’s proposal is a thorough overhaul of the Bush-era leasing inventory: it slashes shale from 1.9 million acres to 462,000 and sands from 431,000 acres to 91,000.

Oil shale is found in northwestern Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah and it contains an organic precursor to oil called kerogen. Despite decades of attempts, oil shale has never proven commercially viable. Squeezing fuel from the rock requires copious quantities of water and heating the shale underground to something above 700 degrees over a period of several years. Everything that must go into oil shale production is considered far more environmentally harmful than the production of conventional oil.

“While I have long felt there is potential for oil shale development, it is critical that a number of unanswered questions be resolved before commercial-scale leasing takes place,” Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, said in a prepared statement. “Fully understanding the demands of oil shale development on Colorado’s water and local communities is essential to ensuring responsible development.”

Last year, the BLM announced it would reconsider the Bush-era land leasing plan as part of a settlement of a lawsuit by environmental groups in 2009 that challenged the 2008 action.

“For the sportsmen, farmers, ranchers and communities on the Western Slope that depend on clean air and clean water, making sure development is done right the first time is vital to their way of life,” said Udall, noting that the BLM will be accepting public comment on its plan for the next 90 days.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado, issued a statement reminding residents of “Black Sunday,” May 2, 1982, when Exxon’s massive Colony oil shale project went bust on the state’s Western Slope.

Udall and Bennet

Rep. Lamborn

“Oil shale is one of the most promising new sources of American-made energy and the United States is fortunate to have an abundance of oil shale resources, including in Colorado,” Lamborn said.

Environmentalists and others immediately panned Lamborn’s bill.

“We already face a water shortage in the West that threatens farmers and ranchers,” said Bill Midcap of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. “We simply cannot gamble away our water on oil shale speculation at the risk of losing our farming and ranching economy that we depend upon for our food and fiber. … We should use existing research and development projects to determine how much water will be needed before we consider commercial leasing of oil shale.”

The candidates’ responses were published today in a special report (pdf) sent to members of participating groups, which include Audubon Colorado, Colorado Wildlife Federation, Colorado Trout Unlimited, Colorado Coalition of Land Trusts and Environment Colorado Research and Policy Center . Together these organizations have a combined mailing list of about 40,000.

“I do not subscribe to the belief that clean energy costs more; in fact, I believe that clean energy costs less in the long run,” said Tancredo. “Developing a sustainable energy policy means addressing the needs of today while developing a plan for tomorrow that is sustainable and that will meet the needs of a growing state without putting additional stress on our environment. We cannot sacrifice our natural health and welfare for short-term energy development.”

Hickenlooper’s own comments on renewable energy were actually somewhat similar: “Support for renewable energy, balanced with responsible development of natural gas can make for a more predictable and sustainable energy market. Focusing on the economic and health benefits of clean energy makes enormous sense, because the negative impacts of dirty emissions are not only harmful to public health, they are costly.”

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A lot of old people in Georgia and Florida and all out throughout the southeast and the southwest are dependent on air conditioning just to live. And if their electricity bills go sky high, as the energy tax is gonna make it happen, if that ever passes there are a lot of people that can’t afford to run their air conditioning any more and a lot of people are gonna have a hard time with hyperthermia is what I call it – what we call it in medicine as a medical doctor – which means that their body temperature’s gonna go up, they’re gonna have dehydration, and people are gonna have a lot of problems. And it’s gonna have a greater impact on our health care system and people are gonna die because of that. But it’s gonna kill jobs too.

Update: This is the same Paul Broun, by the way, who is now trying to blame the 2008 financial industry bailout on Democrats– or at least on Republican Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who in Broun’s imagination was really a Democrat.

“I wanted to put some perspective on 2008, too. That’s when the President’s chief economic adviser — I guess the Treasury Secretary — told him that the sky was falling and that we needed to pass the Toxic Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which many Republicans voted against. I didn’t buy the Democratic Treasury Secretary under a Republican President because that’s exactly what Hank Paulson is.”

Hank Paulson a Democrat? In doctor-speak, this is what’s called bull shit.

As Steve Benen points out, the idea that Bush and Cheney would choose a Democratic Treasury Secretary is beyond absurd– in fact so absurd it’s brilliantly revealing in what it says about the bipartisan bowed and scraping approach to the finance industry.

Benen recalls the reality of the bailout nation:

The [TARP] bailout enjoyed support from the administration (Bush and Cheney), the House Republican leadership (Boehner, Cantor, and Blunt), the Senate Republican leadership (McConnell and Kyl), the Republican presidential ticket (McCain and Palin), and assorted, high-profile conservative voices (Mitt Romney and Glenn Beck).

Hat tip on the Broun video to Gawker.

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“A welcome-back party for Big Oil” is how the Wall Street Journal today sums up the Iraqi government plan to open up its oil fields to the highest bidders after three decades of tight control under Saddam Hussein. Starting next week, the Iraqi government will begin auctioning off contracts to foreign countries, opening up a market with 115 billion barrels in “proven reserves.” “If all goes according to plan in the first round, foreign oil companies will move in to help Iraq revive production at six developed fields that have suffered from years of war and neglect,” the newspaper writes.

According to Reuters, Iraq has the third-largest oil reserves in the world and pumps out of the ground about 2.4 million barrels per day, well below the volumes seen before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. “Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani is betting the contracts awarded on June 29-30, and a second round of tenders at year’s end, will provide the cash and expertise needed to reverse the damage done to Iraq’s oil infrastructure by decades of isolation, underinvestment and war,” Reuters writes.

There are 32 companies angling for the contracts. They include Exxon Mobil (XOM), Royal Dutch Shell, Total, and BP, Reuters and the WSJ write.

Observers of this debate might recall that Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), both ardent environmentalists, have already diluted their bill considerably in order to win the support of House Democrats from states with powerful gas, coal and auto industries. In the latest episode, it was the Democrats representing the farm states who threw the fuss, threatening to kill the American Clean Energy and Security Act if two key provisions weren’t changed.

The first involved a program allowing polluting farmers and agricultural companies to offset their emissions by planting trees or investing in green technologies. The Waxman-Markey bill proposed that the Environmental Protection Agency would oversee the program, arguing that the agency would be the most reliable monitor of an initiative designed to protect the environment.

But farm-state Democrats, rallying behind Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, insisted that the U.S. Department of Agriculture be given that responsibility — a scenario opposed by environmentalists, who fear the USDA will prioritize farm industry concerns above the effectiveness of the offset program.

Indeed, The New York Times reports today of USDA’s shoddy record when it comes to overseeing environmental programs under its jurisdiction.

In particular, the department’s conservation agency “routinely ignored” compliance standards when giving out wetlands and wildlife grants, an investigator for the House Agriculture Committee found. The Government Accountability Office said there is potential for duplicative payments with the conservation programs, allowing the agency to release billions of dollars in payments to landowners who do not deserve them.

Another assessment from the USDA inspector general found shoddy accounting at the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The agency was unable to provide sufficient information on transactions and account balances.

No matter. The result of the Waxman-Peterson negotiations was to give USDA the job.

The second sticking point revolved around a controversial EPA initiative — mandated by Congress — designed to ensure that the country’s shift to biofuels like ethanol doesn’t lead to a spike in greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere around the globe. This happened in Indonesia, for example, where there was a widespread clearing of rain forest a few years ago to make way for palm plantations to feed Europe’s emerging biofuels market. The EPA proposed to take such global events into account as it pertains to the U.S. shift to food-based fuels.

For Peterson and the other agriculture-friendly Democrats, the so-called indirect land-use plan was a non-starter. The result? Under the compromise, EPA won’t be allowed to account for indirect land-use when calculating ethanol-production emissions until the USDA has signed off of the methodology.

“We have reached an agreement that works for agriculture and contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States,” Peterson said in a statement last night.

The House is planning to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill Friday.

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Rio Blanco County, Colo. (Illustration/Google Maps)

“Three extremely conservative Rio Blanco County commissioners unanimously passed very substantial impact fees, and as a result they have the money to fix the roads, they have the money to hire deputy county sheriffs, they have the money to do these things that we don’t,” said Rifle attorney and former Garfield County judge Steve Carver, who lost to Republican high school administrator Mike Samson last year.

The three-member board of county commissioners in Rio Blanco, to the north of gas-rich Garfield County, is comprised of Republicans who saw the need for additional fees to pay for the increasing pressure put on roads, bridges, law enforcement and other county services and facilities by the booming natural-gas industry.

“The handwriting was on the wall: How do we deal with the impacts of something like this?” Ken Parsons, chairman of the Rio Blanco Board of County Commissioners, told the Associated Press in May 2008.

Democrat Stephen Bershenyi, a Rifle blacksmith and artist who unsuccessfully ran against Republican John Martin last year, said the oil and gas industry spared no expense — or dirty tactic — in turning back the Democrats because they feared the same type of impact fee in Garfield County.

“One of the things that scared them the most was what happened in Rio Blanco County,” Bershenyi said. “The county commission, which is a Republican board, decided to charge the energy industry impact fees for each well permit issued. By August of last year [Rio Blanco] County had already brought in more than $6 million in impact fees from the energy industry from wells that they were drilling.”

Rio Blanco charges just under $18,000 per well, with the vast majority of that money going toward road construction and maintenance. An impact fee support study conducted in 2007 estimated the county would have collected $22.7 million had the fee been in place during the heart of the boom (from 2000 to 2006).

Over the next 15 years, when Rio Blanco expects to see another 16,500 wells drilled — with some studies suggesting the next natural gas boom will shift there from Garfield — the county expects to generate $292 million. Still, that won’t cover its estimated $343 million infrastructure tab if its population triples, as predicted.

“[Implementing impact fees] was one of the things that I was advocating that Garfield County do immediately, because we should have done it from the very beginning,” Bershenyi said.

Parsons and Rio Blanco County Administrator Pat Hooker didn’t return calls requesting comment on the impact fees Tuesday, but the groundbreaking step — the first such fee imposed in Colorado — definitely raised eyebrows not only in the rest of the state but throughout the gas-producing Rocky Mountain West. According to the AP’s May 2008 report:

Bob Gallagher, head of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, a trade group, said there are no similar fees in his state. “But if our Birkenstock-wearing friends in Colorado have a chance to pass it in Colorado, there’s a chance it will come across the border,” Gallagher said. “It’s a little bizarre that people want to continue to bite the hand that feeds them.”

Bershenyi, without divulging his choice of footwear, said the 4,000 active wells in Garfield County could have provided about $60 million for sorely needed infrastructure if a more conservative $15,000-per-well impact fee — Garfield’s wells aren’t quite as deep as Rio Blanco’s — had been charged.

“When you throw the economic downturn in, [Garfield] County is strapped, and they thought they had a rainy day fund that was really going to put them in good shape, and what they found out was it was woefully short of the goals they needed to carry forward with the services that are being requested of them,” said Bershenyi, who in April was elected to the Glenwood Springs City Council.

Martin, the longtime Republican commissioner, told the Colorado Independent in April that Garfield County had set aside $80 million to weather the recession and slowdown in drilling stemming from plunging commodity prices.

“Hopefully we’ve done enough to survive the downturn because that downturn is going to last for many years,” Martin said at the time.

“What it is is there’s $80 million coming into the county, but $80 million has been spent,” Carter said when asked about the county’s reserves. “He doesn’t have a rainy day fund. That’s totally bogus.”

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2008 Democratic Garfield County commission candidate Steve Carter. (Photo/www.SteveCarter.us)

It’s been nearly eight months since former Garfield County Judge Steve Carter says he was ambushed by oil and gas money in his unsuccessful bid for county commissioner, but the Democrat is clearly still seething about what he considers a “stolen election.”

“If somebody parks in your parking place, you can call the police department and they’ll come and investigate it and give the guy a ticket. But if someone steals an election, the way it’s set up right now, neither the attorney general, the secretary of state, the local [district attorney] or the local police department have the power to investigate it, and I think that should be changed,” Carter said in an interview.

Formal complaints about illegal electioneering by so-called 527 political committees or nonprofits are typically left up to the losing candidate — who may or may not have the resources to pursue a complaint — and usually are filed after the fact.

“A crime is committed when somebody does those things and fails to disclose where they’re getting their money — the kind of political things that [Republican operative] Scott Shires’ group did,” Carter said. “However, unless somebody like Colorado Ethics Watch spends the time, money and effort to file a formal complaint, nobody will do anything.”

A judge in April fined Shires and his Aurora-based Colorado League of Taxpayers $7,150 for failing to file an electioneering communications report for money it spent to influence the race, which pitted two Democrats seeking more control over natural gas drilling against Republicans running on pro-drilling platforms. Garfield County is a hot-bed of natural gas production, with more than 5,000 active wells at one point last year.

At least five other groups, both 527s — named for a section of the federal tax code and not bound by traditional fund-raising limits that govern other political groups — and 501(c)4 nonprofits, spent heavily on that 2008 race. Carter and fellow Democrat Stephen Bershenyi said they were the subject of last-minute lies and personal attacks about past business dealings and political positions.

It was an unprecedented flurry of outside spending for a local race — including some money from liberal environmental groups — and some observers are worried it set a new standard for election spending on the Western Slope.

“Industry decided they had a candidate that they already owned that they were going to protect at any cost and they wanted to make sure stayed in place, and they spared basically no expense to get that done,” said Bershenyi, referring to incumbent Republican John Martin. “I’ve been told by reliable sources who shall remain anonymous that industry spent well over $100,000 making sure that happened.”

Martin fairly firmly denounced the attack ads, fake newspapers and other tactics targeting the Democrats, saying he didn’t need the help, didn’t appreciate the outside influence — by either the industry or environmentalists — and preferred to run on his record and the issues.

But in an April interview, he also predicted such tactics are here to stay, and that groups on both sides of the energy debate will spend heavily in the 2010 election.

“All of that is going to come to light, and you’ll have many, many arguments, and should we say accusations, as well as explanations in the political arena from the governor to the locals in two years,” Martin said.

Bershenyi, a blacksmith and artist who grew up in Glenwood Springs, ran unopposed and won an at-large city council seat in his hometown in April. He said he learned a lot from his run against Martin and now has a much thicker political skin, but he wants to focus on city government before considering running for commissioner again in 2012.

“What you saw in that race was probably something unprecedented in terms of it never having been seen in a local race like this,” Bershenyi said. “County commissioner races in Garfield County have traditionally been races about issues, races about voting records and direction, and not about personality, and this was a radical departure from that.”

Carter, a Rifle attorney, said he won’t run again in 2012, hoping instead a younger candidate steps into the fray. He doesn’t blame his 2008 Republican opponent, Rifle High School Dean of Students Mike Samson, for the industry tactics, but feels bad for the oil and gas workers who were lured to the polls by false promises on Election Day.

“The workers were all told that if these two guys get elected you’ll be laid off tomorrow, and as a result, not just in my election but also in Bershenyi’s, it was a complete turnaround,” Carter said, referring to early returns and absentee ballots that had both Democrats leading. “So they voted the way they were told and they got laid off anyway.”

A slowdown in natural gas drilling, brought on by the recession and declining commodity prices, has led the laying off of hundreds of contract workers across the Western Slope since the 2008 election.

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Two traditional-energy incumbents held onto their seats on the board of the Yampa Valley Electric Association over the weekend, turning back challenges from a pair of renewable energy and efficiency advocates.

At the REA’s annual meeting in Hayden Saturday, the Steamboat Pilot reported that Scott McGill defeated Susan Holland, 1,493 votes to 1,089 and Charles Perry turned back Megan Moore-Kemp 1,404 to 1,162.

Moore-Kemp and Holland were running on a combined platform of pursuing more forms of renewable energy as well as offering rebates for energy-efficiency measures.

“I do not believe the association should get into the rebate business,” Perry told the paper, and apparently the majority of co-op members — at least the ones who took the time to vote — agreed with him.

It’s a sentiment that echoes the position of incumbents on the board of the state’s largest REA, Intermountain Rural Electric Association on the Front Range, which saw three incumbents defeat progressive candidates earlier this spring.

Other recent REA board elections have seen green candidates meet with some success, including Holy Cross Energy (Aspen and Vail), San Miguel Power Association (Telluride) and Poudre Valley Rural Electric Association.

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Environment Colorado issued a release saying the American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009 “does little or nothing to spur renewable energy in this country. The proposal risks sensitive coastal ecosystems [in Florida] to pollution and spills from off-shore drilling, while worsening global warming by opening the door to high-carbon fuels such as liquid coal, tar sands and oil shale.”

The Denver-based group urged Colorado’s Democratic Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet to introduce an amendment to require more renewable energy while supporting efforts by Congressman Bill Nelson, D-Fla., in his efforts to strip coastal drilling provisions that would allow production as close as 10 miles from shore.

The bill does contain a federal renewable electricity standard (RES) requiring utilities to produce 15 percent of their electricity from solar, wind, biomass, or hydropower by 2021, but Environment Colorado wants to see a 25 percent by 2025 standard.

Udall did submit four amendments, but none of them dealt specifically with raising the RES. Three of the four sought to promote energy efficiency in residential buildings and certain types of appliances, and a fourth would establish a Bureau of Land Management office in Colorado to facilitate renewable energy development on public lands.

But Udall admits the bill comes up short on the renewable standard, and he promised to try and strengthen it when debate begins on the full Senate floor as early as this fall.

“In particular, I’m going to continue to encourage my colleagues to support a stronger RES,” Udall said in a release. “Here in Colorado, we have demonstrated the benefits – since 2004, when our state RES [of 10 percent] was first approved by voters, more than 3,000 jobs have been created in the wind and solar energy fields alone, and the legislature has since increased the standard [to 20 percent by 2020].

“I believe that we cannot – and will not – meet our nation’s joint goals of leadership in the renewable energy industry and energy independence if we don’t follow Colorado’s lead.”