King is a Montrose native who has served as deputy director of the DNR for the past four years and worked for the department since 1999. Before that he served as an assistant attorney general in the natural resources section of the Colorado Attorney General’s Office beginning in 1993.

“From water to wildlife to energy development, the Department of Natural Resources is entrusted with protecting and managing some of Colorado’s most important assets,” King said in a release. “I am deeply grateful to the Governor for his confidence in me, and I am committed to continue working with the myriad groups and individuals who look to DNR for leadership in these critical areas.”

King also worked under DNR executive director Harris Sherman, whom Martin replaced last year. Sherman was another Obama administration call-up, taking over as Undersecretary of Natural Resources and Environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture – a post that oversees the U.S. Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Sherman and King worked hard on the controversial Colorado roadless rule, which petitions the federal government to give Colorado more control in managing 4.2 million acres of mostly roadless public lands in the state. Critics say the rule allows too many road-building exemptions for logging, coal mining and ski area expansion, but proponents say it gives Colorado more control and protects more Colorado acreage than federal rules.

King has a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a law degree from the University of Denver, and a master’s in public administration from CU-Denver.

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Martin formerly headed up the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment before being picked by Ritter to replace Harris Sherman at the DNR. Sherman was selected by the Obama administration as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, in charge of the U.S. Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service.

“Over the past three years, Jim has served the people of Colorado with great distinction as a key member of my administration,” Ritter said in a release. “He is widely respected and trusted by people with diverse and often opposing viewpoints because he is able to work through complex issues and find areas of common ground.”

Some of those issues include the long, winding and often arduous road to a Colorado roadless rule – a controversial petition to the USDA outlining how the state wants to manage 4.2 million acres of roadless public lands in Colorado. Some scientists and environmentalists have blasted the rule for allowing too many road-building exemptions or logging, coal mining and ski-area expansion.

Martin was also instrumental in crafting the recently passed Clean Air Clean Jobs Act, which requires Xcel Energy to close down or retrofit coal-fired power plants in favor of natural gas, and the state’s increased renewable energy standard, which requires 30 percent of the electricity produced by investor-owned utilities to come from renewable sources by the year 2025.

The EPA’s Region VIII office oversees Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. Martin is expected to continue with the state for several more weeks before transitioning to the EPA.

Martin, the former executive director of Western Resource Advocates, director of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado School of Law and director of energy programs for Environmental Defense, also worked for former Colorado U.S. Rep. and Sen. Tim Wirth.

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Beetle kill pines against power lines (U.S. Rep. John Salazar)

The largest power outage in North American history left more than 50 million people in the Midwest and Northeastern United States, as well as parts of Canada, without electricity for up to two days beginning on Aug. 14, 2003. It’s estimated the blackout cost up to $6 billion and at least 11 lives.

And it all started with untrimmed trees coming into contact with a power line in rural Ohio.

Conditions are more than ripe for a repeat in Colorado, where officials say hundreds of miles of major transmission and distribution lines crisscross devastated national forest land on their way to supplying the power needs of Front Range communities.

“Most of the major transmission lines for the Front Range cross the Continental Divide,” said Cal Wettstein, commander of the U.S. Forest Service’s Bark Beetle Incident Management Team. “There are three or four big, main lines and the majority of them go through some kind of beetle kill, so that’s the big concern.”

A fire the size of the 2002 Hayman blaze — the largest in Colorado history at about 138,000 acres — could take out a number of key transmission or distribution lines. Or a beetle-killed tree could easily topple onto a line, causing it to either arc and set fire to the surrounding forest or set off a domino effect that would overload line after line, which is what happened with the Northeast Blackout.

“There are a number of concerns, but the first one is the trees contacting the lines and actually knocking out the grid. Then there’s the fire aspect,” Wettstein said. “And fire going both ways — starting from a power line and then the effects on the power lines of a wildfire that starts somewhere else.”

Heading off disaster

The Forest Service just finished taking public comment on its Emergency Power Line Clearing Project, which would allow up to 15 different utilities and power companies to clear trees from swaths of national forest land surrounding 625 miles of power lines (.pdf) on the White River, Roosevelt and Medicine Bow-Routt national forests.

Wettstein said the Forest Service is allowed to expedite the decision-making process under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, and that utilities are compelled to pay for and undertake clearing of hazard trees under the Energy Policy Act of 2005. That legislation was in direct response to the Northeast Blackout.

The Forest Service hopes to wrap up the National Environmental Policy Act process on the project by January so utilities can start clearing next summer.

But there are some critics of the proposal. Wettstein said the two biggest concerns coming out of the public scoping process were the width of the treatment areas (up to 400 feet for major lines) and the impacts on roadless areas (75 of the 625 miles are in designated roadless areas).

If it’s not economically viable to remove downed timber, power companies can simply masticate (cut up into small amounts) trees and spread them across the forest floor so they’re no longer a threat to the lines and present less of a fire hazard.

Such an approach wastes a valuable forest product, some experts say, and fails to recognize the potentially harmful carbon-dioxide emissions from rotting trees, as well as the CO2 potential form forest fires.

A green approach

Phil Kastelic, CEO of Colorado Forest and Energy, a company that distributes portable bio-energy machines that produce virtually carbon neutral power and heat by gasifying chipped wood, says Littleton-based Community Power Corporation’s BioMax systems should be part of the plan.

“Our BioMax technology could be installed in local communities close to power line clearing efforts or installed along the transmission and distribution lines plugging in parallel directly into the grid,” Kastelic wrote in a comment letter to the Forest Service. “This transforms a dangerous and expensive problem into a leading renewable story, highlighting Colorado technology.”

Kastelic suggests certain incentives be included in the plan to discourage utilities from leaving too much slash and too many fallen trees along the miles and miles of power lines. Renewable energy credits could be offered for the power that’s produced, and utilities could set up community drop zones so wood could be collected, chipped and consumed in bio-power generators.

Large-scale, multi-megawatt biomass power plants are common in Europe where forest products are cultivated to provide a consistent fuel load, and similar facilities are operating in the United States or have been proposed in Colorado. But portable 50- and 100-kilowatt systems about the size of tractor trailers have yet to catch on commercially in Colorado despite the beetle-kill epidemic.

Recognizing a renewable energy

Democratic State Rep. Christine Scanlan of Dillon, whose legislative district includes beetle devastated Summit and Eagle counties, said she’s talked to biomass companies, pellet producers for wood stoves and other forest product companies about getting a seat at the table. She said U.S. Sen. Mark Udall’s proposed National Forest Insect and Disease Emergency Act of 2009 would recognize beetle-killed forest products as a renewable energy source that fits within the parameters of the Clean Air Act.

“I’ve talked to those folks [biomass proponents] a little bit, and I do think they need to be part of the equation, and if Udall gets through what he’s proposing, then that opens the door. That could potentially incentivize new business opportunities, so that’s why we need all of those voices to help us come up with a plan. Frankly, we need the forest products folks there, because this problem’s too big for even the feds to handle in a really holistic way.”

Scanlan said she’s spoken about the problem with former Colorado Department of Natural Resources director Harris Sherman, who last month was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, which oversees the Forest Service. She plans to meet with him again in Washington in the coming weeks to push for a more comprehensive approach.

“The power lines are a huge issue, of course, with the grid, but there is another way to look at this,” Scanlan said. “You can just clear that right of way 150 feet or you can apply fire science to it so that in some places it can be narrower and in some places it can be wider.

“I’m glad they’re doing something, but doing a lawnmower strip maybe isn’t the smartest thing we could do,” she added. “The right-of-way clearing idea was based on flat-land transmission lines, so they don’t really take into account dealing with the elevations and grades that we have in the mountains, so I think it calls for a different strategy.”

But Wettstein said the proposal goes for maximum clearance (200 feet on either side of major transmission lines) in case that’s what’s needed in serious hazard areas. He doesn’t really expect to see that much area cleared by the power companies.

“They will vary that width to what their local needs are, because the bottom line is it’s going to be very expensive to do and they’re not going to clear any more than they absolutely have to to get those lines protected,” Wettstein said.

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“Martin’s leadership on the state air commission was essential to cutting mercury pollution 90 percent from coal-fired power plants in 2007,” Environment Colorado advocate Matt Garrington said in a statement. “As head of the Colorado Department of Health and Environment, Martin was key to protecting our drinking water and making sure oil and gas development is done right.”

Martin got his undergrad degree in biology from Knox College in Illinois and his law degree from Northwestern School of Law, Lewis and Clark College, in Oregon. But Sherman, the man Martin replaces at DNR (confirmed earlier this month by the Senate as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment), is a 1964 graduate of Colorado College.

The Colorado College connection is becoming a noteworthy one in the Obama administration, with a half dozen CC grads assuming significant roles. Last week, Marcia Kemper McNutt (Class of ’74) was confirmed by the Senate as the first female director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and Sherman was confirmed the week before.

McNutt will also serve as a special science advisor to CC grad and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar (Class of ’77), who, interestingly, is also a former head of the Colorado DNR.

Other CC grads in key roles include Jane Lubchenco (Class of ’69), administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Lori Garver (Class of ’83), deputy administrator of NASA; and Aaron Gutierrez (Class of ’08), intern in the office of legislative affairs at the White House. Gutierrez, of Pueblo, is a brain cancer survivor.

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Sherman earlier this month was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, with oversight of the U.S. Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Some conservation groups were critical of Sherman’s selection to oversee the Forest Service given his support for a Colorado roadless rule they feel provides far too many road-building exceptions on national forest land for energy extraction, logging and ski-area expansion.

Martin is the former executive director of Western Resource Advocates, director of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado School of Law, and a senior attorney and director of the energy program for Environmental Defense. Also, from 1986 to 1992 he worked for former U.S. Rep. and Sen. Tim Wirth.

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Towing a 16-foot-long wall covered with snapshots of supporters of a more protective national roadless rule that would preempt Colorado’s rule – which they argue makes far too many road-building exceptions for water and power infrastructure, energy development, logging and ski-area expansion – organizers have dubbed their push “Don’t Sell Colorado Short.”

Thursday’s rally comes close to the Saturday, Oct. 3, deadline for submitting comments on the revamped Colorado roadless rule. Also on Thursday, Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., are expected to introduce bipartisan legislation to codify the 2001 Clinton roadless rule that was later thrown out by the Bush administration.

In other roadless news, the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee will begin confirmation hearings today for Colorado Department of Natural Resources director Harris Sherman as the Obama administration’s pick to oversee the U.S. Forest Service as the Department of Agriculture’s Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment. Sherman’s spearheading of the Colorado roadless rule makes him somewhat of a controversial selection for that post.

And Pew responded Wednesday to comments made Monday in Denver by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to the Colorado Independent indicating some willingness to at least take some of the Colorado roadless rule’s exception for logging roads into consideration, given the ongoing pine bark beetle epidemic and looming fire threat.

According to Pew’s Rob Vandermark:

“The argument that the roadless rule was developed before the pine beetle epidemic, and therefore Colorado needs to come up with a new program, doesn’t wash. The 2001 roadless rule builds in considerable exemptions for road building and tree cutting to address fire risk.

“Logging 1.5 miles away from at-risk communities, as the state rule would allow, would do little to reduce the risk of fire to those communities, especially if little or no action had been taken to reduce the risk of fire in the area immediately surrounding each community.”

State water officials, in conjunction with the Western States Water Council, are trying to sort out conflicts between growing residential development, agriculture, recreation and the thirsty industrial sectors such as energy production, the Herald reported Tuesday.

Gov. Bill Ritter was scheduled to speak Tuesday, but Colorado Department of Natural Resources director Harris Sherman, who prompted the water confab, was unable to attend because he’s prepping for his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing for an undersecretary of agriculture post that would have him overseeing the U.S. Forest Service for the Obama administration.

“He’s the one who kind of got us – how do I put this nicely? He kicked us in the butt and told us to get these conversations going,” Jennifer Gimbel, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, told the Herald.
Conspicuously absent Monday, however, were representatives of the residential development and planning sectors, the paper noted.

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Sherman, who also serves on the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission board that spearheaded tougher, more environmentally stringent drilling regulations, has been lauded for helping to give more weight to air and water quality and wildlife habitat issues during the state’s recent natural-gas boom.

“Over the past two years, Sherman showed bold leadership in protecting our land, water, and wildlife resources from the impacts of oil and gas development,” Environment Colorado advocate Matt Garrington said in a release. “Sherman’s leadership was key in passing strong protections of our natural resources in the face of unbalanced energy development.”

Pending U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee and full Senate approval, Sherman would oversee the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the U.S. Forest Service – the agency in charge of millions of acres of federal lands in Colorado where a great deal of oil and gas development has occurred over the past decade.

Others in the environmental community felt Sherman’s direction of the Department of Natural Resources during the state’s push for its own roadless rule would hurt his chances. The Colorado Roadless Rule, crafted by the state to manage more than 4 million acres of the state’s largely undeveloped public lands, has been moved steadily forward by Gov. Bill Ritter’s administration despite conservationist’s concerns that it allows far too many road-building exceptions for power and water infrastructure, logging, ski area expansion and oil and gas development.

In fact, a group of Colorado environmental groups is launching the “Don’t Sell Colorado Short” Roadless Road Show at the Alliance Center in lower downtown Denver Friday, heading to Durango for a formal launch before moving around the state to document and call attention to Coloradan’s support for a more restrictive roadless rule like the one the Clinton administration put in place in 2001. That rule was quickly tossed aside by the Bush administration, but conservationists, for the most part, seek reinstatement of a nationwide rule similar to the Clinton rule.

“We would like to congratulate Mr. Sherman and ask that he promote the long-term conservation of our backcountry hunting and fishing traditions,” said Joel Webster, associate director of campaigns for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s Center for Western Lands, “including upholding and defending the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which safeguards our nation’s roadless areas, should he be confirmed as undersecretary.”

Ritter also issued a statement of support for Sherman, which in part reads:

“Having twice served as Colorado’s director of natural resources, first in the [Gov. Dick] Lamm administration and again since 2007, I know he will do an outstanding job as undersecretary. President Obama’s nomination of yet another talented Colorado leader speaks volumes about our place on the national stage.”

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Rulison blast (JudylCrook, Flickr)

GLENWOOD SPRINGS — Marion Wells lives about 10 miles from “ground zero” in Garfield County, the Project Rulison blast site where a 43-kiloton nuclear device was exploded nearly 8,500 feet underground in 1969 in an effort to free up commercially viable natural gas.

“We became your guinea pigs in that year; I am still your guinea pig; and I don’t like being your guinea pig,” Wells told U.S. Department of Energy officials at a meeting of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) Wednesday. “There is an 800-pound gorilla sitting in this county; it’s called Project Rulison. You are playing roulette with my life and the lives of my neighbors.”

The DOE laboriously explained all morning why modeling conducted at numerous underground atomic blast sites in Nevada shows there is little risk of radioactive contamination 40 years after the Rulison explosion, therefore making natural gas exploration closer and closer to the blast site feasible.

Part of Project Plowshares in the 1960s and 70s, aimed at finding peaceful, industrial uses for atomic weapons, Project Rulison was largely deemed a failure because the natural gas produced was too radioactive for commercial use and had to be flared off.

Now the DOE has presented a “path forward” that would allow private oil and gas companies to drill right up to a half-mile radius established by the state (the closest wells currently are 3,800 feet from the blast site) and then within that boundary and right up to a 40-acre area around ground zero imposed by the feds.

That doesn’t sit well with most area residents and even some Garfield County officials who want a half-mile ban kept in place and mineral rights owners compensated for their losses. Wells took it a step further, accusing the feds of knowingly endangering local residents and contributing to higher cancer rates.

“My parents were given no notice that you were flaring contaminated gas, and yet both my parents died of cancer,” she said. “Cancer is prevalent in this area, and yet no one has studied those causes and effects.”

Dr. Geoffrey Thyne, a geologist and consultant for the county, said the most prudent course of action is to drill a test well near ground zero and be certain that the levels of radioactive tritium and krypton are within an acceptable range in order to keep drilling closer and closer to the blast site.

“For real certainty we need real data,” Thyne said in response to DOE modeling. Thyne added that the county commissioners – one of whom, Trési Houpt, sits on the COGCC state regulatory board as well – support the concept of pressuring the DOE to drill a test well near the blast site.

But industry representatives contend they have already gathered plenty of real data from dozens of wells within a mile of the blast site and that the sampling of gas, water, soil and air that they conduct costs an extra $30,000 per well already and has so far turned up no signs of radioactive contamination.

Drilling a test well close to the blast site, which Noble Energy priced at about $2 million, would be rash, according to industry officials, one of whom said, “We think it is a lot more prudent to approach it slowly, because if you were to hit the radiation [with a test well], it would create a contamination problem.”

Noble officials said they have no plans to apply for well permits within the state’s half-mile perimeter in the next year, although they acknowledged plans can change based on the price of natural gas. When they do apply for a permit inside the half-mile radius, the COGCC would have to hold another hearing on the application.

That was good enough for at least one member of the COGCC. Mark Cutright said most of the other alternatives to the DOE’s “path forward” presented at Wednesday’s meeting are outside the state’s jurisdiction.

Besides drilling a test well, those alternatives include setting up an independent scientific panel to continue to study the situation, recognizing that some areas simply won’t be drilled, and swapping the lost mineral rights of local landowners for other federal leaseholds so the DOE wouldn’t have to directly pay compensation. A fourth option is maintaining the status quo.

“Our path forward is we’ve got a great plan in place, probably no plan like this in the nation in terms of monitoring wells, and it’s working,” Cutright said, suggesting the state’s attorney general needs to work with the feds on financial settlements because that’s outside the jurisdiction of the COGCC.

Harris Sherman, head of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and chairman of the COGCC, concluded the meeting by saying the majority of the commission members needed time to digest the nearly seven hours of testimony before reaching any conclusions.

“I suggest we reconsider this issue at a later point in time — hopefully sooner rather than later,” he said, alluding to the DOE’s plans to move ahead with their “path forward” by August. “I do agree that the role and jurisdiction of this commission is limited, so we need to keep that in mind.”

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But environmental groups are already casting doubt on the possible pick, questioning Sherman’s role in moving Colorado’s controversial roadless rule forward.

One of only two states to petition for its own roadless rule after the Bush administration set aside the overarching Clinton administration roadless rule in 2001, Colorado’s plan for managing 4.4 million acres of federal roadless lands is viewed by some environmentalists as containing too many road-building exceptions for oil and gas production and logging.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack late last month issued a memorandum suspending all road building on more than 58 million acres of roadless federal lands around the country, meaning any exceptions would have to be approved by the USDA and whoever lands the undersecretary post.

Sherman is in the running because Mississippi state conservationist Homer Lee Wilkes pulled his name from consideration for family reasons.