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By Root 466 0

member Karen Kennedy runs a pro-methane “grassroots” group in Swartz’ hometown. Her husband, John, is a methane operator who once got mighty close to Fist City with Swartz when he called him a liar during a fact-finding bus tour with the governors of Wyoming and Montana. (“Ed made a smart move when he didn’t knock the little son of a bitch on his can,” said another rancher of the encounter.) Back in Washington, the president is a former oil-field landman. When Dick Cheney was still CEO of Halliburton, its oil-service division was already tapping into the new revenue stream in Wyoming’s methane beds. And secretary of the interior Gale Norton is an alumna of the same Mountain States Legal Foundation founded by Watt.

Ed Swartz, as they say in Midland, is shit outta luck.

When no one at Redstone answered Swartz’ letters and phone calls, and after state environmental regulators assured him the water in his creek was just fine, he hired a lawyer. He’s suing two state regulators and Redstone Resources. His suit presents the dizzying possibility that Griles and Watson will have to appear as witnesses for both Redstone Resources and the Department of the Interior. If the case is argued in winter, they can all ride snowmobiles to the federal courthouse in Cheyenne. Becky Watson was lead attorney for the Montana Snowmobile Association, and Griles is a snowmobile enthusiast.

A month after Swartz filed suit in spring of 2002, he estimated he had spent $45,000. “I’m paying for lawyers on both ends of this lawsuit,” Swartz said. “As a taxpayer, I’m paying the salaries of the lawyers at the state agencies. Now, I’ve got to pay my own lawyers to sue them. I’m getting shit full of it. If I don’t win this lawsuit and get the state of Wyoming to restore my resources, I don’t know what I’ll do.” (While Swartz was paying lawyers, Griles continued to be paid $248,000 a year from his former lobby firm, National Environmental Strategies. Apparently it’s all legal. Griles no longer works for the company. Nor owns any interest in it. But he’s getting four annual payments of $248,000 from his former firm because, the Associated Press reports, “he brought in so many clients while he worked there.”)

SWARTZ WILL NEED more than a win in court to clean up the crick. He points to yellow sections of the Bureau of Land Management map that covers his kitchen table. They represent federal ownership of mineral rights and account for two thirds of the land in the Wildcat Creek drainage basin above the Swartz ranch. Each section is virgin yellow, without a single dot representing a CBM well.

When Swartz filed his lawsuit in the spring of 2002, there were fewer than fifteen thousand CBM wells in the Powder River Basin. All were on land where mineral rights are privately owned. If the Bushies at Interior have their way, in ten years the yellow sections on Swartz’ map will look like a Seurat pointillist landscape.

It’s all in the plan. After the Senate in 2002 blocked Bush and Cheney’s plan to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge in the first ANWR showdown, Norton, Griles, and Watson pushed Interior into every energy reserve in the West. The outlines of the Cheney energy plan are sketched out in “National Energy Policy: Report of the National Energy Group.”* The “CBM play” in Wyoming is the largest natural-gas drilling project ever pursued by the federal government. It might even save us from terrorists. At a Denver coal-bed methane conference in April 2002, Becky Watson said that after the terrorist attacks of September 11, increased national gas production is essential to “our way of life, our economy and our national security.”

If we don’t drill, bin Laden wins.

To do their part to defeat Osama bin, ranchers in the Powder River Basin will have to accept:

• 51,444 new coal-bed methane wells;

• 17,000 miles of new roads (enough to drive from Los Angeles to New York six times);

• 20,000 miles of new pipeline and 5,300 miles of above-ground power lines;

• 278,000 acres of topsoil and vegetation destroyed;

• disposal of 1.4 trillion acre-feet