Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [71]
Swartz had gone to court years earlier to defend his water rights and prevailed—winning on appeal in the Wyoming Supreme Court. “I thought I’d cut a fat hog on the ass when we won that lawsuit,” he said. And he probably had. That was before the CBM boom. The fight he’s in now reminds us of another porcine metaphor. When Jim Hightower was Texas agriculture commissioner he was fond of saying, “Before you can clean up the water, you’ve got to get the hogs out of the creek.” Hightower wasn’t referring to the four-legged variety. He is an outspoken critic of two-legged corporate hogs who place short-term financial gain ahead of public interest. (As a fellow Texan, he joined us in trying to get the word out about Enron back when they spent $525,000 to buy an equity position in a Texas governor by the name of George W. Bush.) The corporate porkers Hightower worried about are essential to the ecosystem of every market economy. But—as we have learned from Enron, Global Crossing, etc.—they work only when regulatory agencies serve as swineherds. The creek that waters Ed Swartz’ ranch is full of hogs. What’s missing is a government agency looking out for Ed’s, and the public’s, interest.
“We get no help from the state of Wyoming,” Swartz said. “They love the money too much.” The limited CBM program that started while Bill Clinton was president, mostly on land where mineral rights were in private hands, helped turn a $700 million state deficit into a small surplus, and everyone from the governor to the county commissioners in Gillette is promoting its unrestricted development. “We love gas,” Governor Jim Geringer gushed on one occasion in 2001. The local county commissioners are such avid CBM boosters that they rejected the report of an industry Ph.D. they hired to look at the effects of development. It contained “too many negative comments,” one commissioner said.
Wyoming ranchers banded together under the banner of the Powder River Basin Resource Council and looked to Washington, hoping the EPA would at least require some environmental safeguards.
At the Bush-Cheney Interior Department, Swartz had to plead his case before a man who had worked as a lobbyist for the very company Swartz claims is destroying grazing along Wildcat Creek. Redstone Resources was one of Steve Griles’ clients. In addition to Redstone, Griles lobbied for five other big companies drilling coal-bed methane wells in northern Wyoming. He organized the Coal Bed Methane Ad Hoc Committee, an industry group working to sweep away restrictions to CBM production. On Capitol Hill he lobbied for Western Gas Resources, which describes itself as the largest acreage holder, gatherer, transporter, and producer of CBM gas in the Powder River Basin.
“Hell, he’s one of them,” Swartz said.
At the Bush-Cheney Interior Department, they’re all “one of them.” If Deputy Secretary Griles steps aside because of his conflicts of interest (which he has yet to do), Swartz will be kicked along to Rebecca Watson, the Montana lawyer Bush appointed as assistant Interior secretary for land and minerals management. Watson has a CBM history of her own. She was legal counsel for Fidelity Energy, another big methane operator working in Wyoming, and was also a staff attorney for the Mountain States Legal Foundation. The Denver-based nonprofit law firm, founded by James Watt in 1976, is the most notorious anti-environmental operation in the west. Watt laid out Mountain States’ agenda in brief when he said: “We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber.”
The whole CBM bunch is so inbred it might have walked right out of a Faulkner novel. Mountain States Legal Foundation board