Story/photos by Allen Best
This was published in the April 8, 2020, issue of Big Pivots. If you want to be put on the e-mailing list, send your email to [email protected].
I took it as a compliment. Two aging baby boomers, out for a Sunday afternoon drive on the periphery of the Niobrara, Codell and other shale plays of northeastern Colorado, were seen as dangerous. I guess dangerous beats doddering.
On that day in early February when the long-predicted pandemic seemed so distant, so hard to imagine, our vague ambition was Pawnee Buttes. Mostly we wanted to get out of the city, to walk someplace beyond concrete and asphalt. It felt like April, maybe May. I was vaguely curious about the hydraulic infrastructure of the South Platte River Valley. This bucolic land of what Stephen Long called the Great American Desert is the domain of bovines. What we soon saw was something else. Crossing the river, I saw a hand-painted sign: “Please no Jake brakes next 2 miles.”
Rounding a corner as we passed the Riverside Reservoir, a drilling operation came into view. Queued up were trucks pulling flat-bed trailers loaded with giant boxes of sand. In drilling that uses hydraulic fracturing, as almost all do, sand serves as a proppant, holding apart the tiny gaps in the subterranean created after the rock has been fractured with blasts of water laced with various, mostly innocuous chemicals. I took photographs of the sand boxes because, well, that’s what I do when I’m roaming in the countryside.
Then something caught my eye, solar panels, triggering a thought. Somebody from an electrical cooperative that delivers electricity to large portions of the Wattenberg Field had told me that renewable energy was being used increasingly in oil and gas extraction. I thought to take photos, because I then had a market for such stories. (So much has changed in the last two months).
I wheeled into the entrance to the cleared-off space and snapped a few photographs of the big solar panels. Almost immediately a black pickup rolled up behind me. The driver was a large-framed man, probably in his 40s, his hair cropped close, his face rugged and stern. I was on private property, he informed me, and what was I doing there anyway? I was about a car’s length off the road. I told him that I wrote for an energy publication (not this one) and—well, exactly what I had said here. He said we could not be there because of liability reasons, and asked us to leave. I apologized, and we left.
Down the road, though, was a turnoff, and I was curious where it would take us. Cathy, my companion, usually abides, even welcomes, my curiosity, her own curiosity matching mine and exceeding it at times. It was a county road, but she soon murmured dissent. “We shouldn’t go down this road,” she said. A black pickup was following us, she thought.
I can be a trifle stubborn. What was I doing wrong? Besides, I saw even better photos of solar panels amid these tangled pipes and tanks of hydrocarbon extraction.
A black pickup was indeed following us, though. Ominously, another black pickup appeared ahead. I had turned around, pausing again to take more photos, when they pounced. One big black pickup was immediately behind my almost tiny, blue-green Honda Civic Hybrid, and another to my side. I had two options: vamoose or respond to the square-jawed guy. This time he was agitated. He wanted to know my name and the solar company for which I worked as he jotted down my license plate.
No, I told him, I did not work for a solar company. I wrote for an energy publication. I gave him the name. He seemed to write it down.
By then I was annoyed. “This falls under the heading of harassment,” I said, as I got out of my car.
“I see how you might view it that way,” he said. “We’ve had people stealing copper.”
If I were going to steal copper, would I do it while driving a Honda Civic Hybrid in broad daylight, I asked.
You could be casing it out with plans to return after dark, he replied.
Then he laid out the real reason. His industry—meaning oil and gas extraction—had been under a lot of scrutiny.
We went a few rounds. He didn’t believe I could possibly be interested in solar panels. “We’ve been doing this for 30 years,” he said. “Yes, but the prices of 30 years ago are not what they are today,” I replied, referring to the solar panels.
As time went on, I cooled, even making jokes. But I refused to give my name. He was not deputized. He had the name of the publication. With just a little bit of Googling, he could pair my face with my name.
What disturbed me more were his comments that even if this was a public road, his company had paid to maintain it. I didn’t challenge him on that statement. Instead, I asked him about whether this was part of the Greasewood patch.
That’s the irony that I did not share. I actually own mineral estate nearby, small to begin with and now split three or four generations later among something like 64 or 128 heirs. What I will do with this, I don’t know. It probably doesn’t matter. Minority owners don’t have power of veto, and even today few people believe we must just leave fossil fuels in the ground.
Climate scientists have another view. Some of them had been saying we have a carbon budget that will be exhausted within a decade. We can continue as we have, then quit cold turkey, if we want to avoid poking the beast of climate change too flagrantly. Or we can slacken the pace of extraction now, producing a softer landing.
Yes, I was burning fossil fuels on my Sunday leisure. I understand the ironies, some would say hypocrisies. There are no easy answers here.
A truck arrived, perhaps to get a load of water, blocked in that mission by the black pickup of my suspicious, distrustful inquisitor. It had to be moved, and so I quickly got in my car and continued down the road.
I felt a wee-bit sorry for my would-be intimidator, just as I do for cops. Being constantly suspicious must eat at you. Now, being suspicious has begun to wear at me, less than a month into this time of pandemic. The mail delivered must be delivered to its own quarantine, the New Yorker unread for at least a day after its arrival. And on and on it goes.
Thievery occurs in the oil and gas patches, but those in the black pickups obviously were suspicious of something else. He mentioned scrutiny of his industry twice. I am guessing he feared ecoterrorism or what Ed Abbey, in one of his novels, called “monkeywrenching.”
I once had a bumper sticker that said “Hayduke Lives,” but I never seriously entertained anything of the sort. Now, I see such activities as self-indulgent and counter-productive. Even if you see combustion of fossil fuels as a grave threat, monkey-wrenching is just an ego-filling feel-good act. The hard work, the productive work, is done elsewhere.
The story here, rather, is an industry that for a long time had no supervision. In Colorado, the regulatory vise has been tightening since 2007, with more to come. Ruin was proclaimed by even those early, very limited actions. Instead, the oil and gas sector has expanded. The particular company whose security I tripped with my camera and curiosity brags on its website of drilling more than 300 horizontal wells since 2011 and hundreds of vertical wells before that, all in the Wattenberg Field.
But even in Weld County, where they all but own the public roads, they feel threatened. They see the coal plants closing, they hear the remonstrations out of Boulder County and elsewhere, they see legislators passing bills and, very likely, they get sucked into the national cultural divide. Again like the coal miners, they see their way of life, their big pickups, their relatively good livings, threatened. As well they probably should.
The employee’s ultimate bosses, then ensconced in offices on the 14th floor of building along 17th Street in Denver, might have questioned the employee’s judgment in this particular case. But I suspect they share the same general attitudes of entitlement and threat.
All this said, I should not paint with strokes too broad, though. I think the oil and gas industry also has some players who have been very good in every respect.
Where this goes in Colorado I am not sure. The drilling continued for weeks into the pandemic but then slackened. The economy has toppled, plus Saudi Arabia and Russia have engaged in a pumping war. Down the suburban street from me I saw unleaded regular at $1.38. But drilling will return again, and so will the arguments, the tensions: An industry that believes it is doing the hard work of giving us cheap energy that produces prosperity and happiness. And those who worry about the much greater costs of that prosperity.
But the climate crisis will not go away either. It’s a far more immense challenge than the pandemic. With the pandemic we’ve had denial to the point of absurdity, gross incompetence at the highest level, and then the rapid conception of conspiracies that seem to take hold of otherwise reasonable people.
Why indeed would the Chinese government kill many, many thousands of its own people just so that it could use that as a cover to plant the virus in the United States? Italy, in this weird concoction of fear and blame, is incidental damage.
Never mind all the books that have been written in the last decade alone about the probability—not potential but probable—pandemic. Nor the evidence that the last great world-wide virus, one that killed upward of 20 million in 1918-1920 around the world, originated in the nation’s heartland of southwest Kansas, less than an hour from the Colorado border.
That day in February, we continued down the road, a lone black pickup following us for several miles as we continued on our way, ultimately arriving at Pawnee Buttes, too late for any real hiking but just right to watch the sun set behind Longs Peak. With my 400mm lens, I was able to see the keyhole (to right of summit) and features of the climbing route that I had used one fine September day in 1987 Back then, I could sort of imagine one day having whitened hair, but I couldn’t really imagine a pandemic nor climate change.
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Thanks Allen, this was an excellent read. Your understanding and knowledge of the big picture is so solid and your writing is so honest and balanced.
Those are such sweet words you’d think I had paid you to say them, Norma! Hope you’re sheltering in a wonderful place, a place (West Vail I presume) that allows you to be attentive to the shift in the annual cycle.