The Rest of the Story

Just as Bob Schaffer did when he read the first half of Mark Udall's resolution to prevent George W. Bush from invading Iraq, Bob Schaffer has been pushing a video on YouTube showing only the first part of his answer to the original question. We bring you the rest of his answer, and it isn't pretty.

Big Oil Bob's Big Oil War Profiteering

While we tend to find the rhetoric of "war profiteering" to be a bit overheated, the fact remains that Bob Schaffer went to Iraq at the height of the war to negotiate contracts with the Kurdistan regional government against the wishes of President Bush, the State Department, and the Iraqi national government.

Liberal activist group Progress Now asks the question: Would you support a candidate who voted for the war and then went to Iraq to profit from it?



We believe that there are lots of companies and people who profit from war, and that is at least a somewhat unavoidable consequence of privatizing our military to corporations like KBR. More important to us as independent, security-conscious voters is the possibility that Bob Schaffer's actions of supporting a regional regime inside of and in opposition to the national regime in Iraq will destabilize the country, prolong the war, and cause needless loss of American soldiers as well as civilians.

Rebutting Bob Schaffer's Sleazy Attack

Vince Carroll of the Rocky Mountain News gets it exactly right.

Carroll begins:

Republican Bob Schaffer has spent the week suggesting that his opponent in the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Mark Udall, is a hypocrite because he sponsored a resolution in 2002 denouncing Saddam Hussein in the strongest terms, stipulating that he possessed a variety of terrible weapons and describing Iraq as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The resolution was even billed as a "preliminary authorization for the use of force against Iraq."

If you fail to look closely, you could easily conclude that the supposedly anti-war Udall was actually on the same page as the congressional majority that ultimately did authorize war - and that Udall's vote against their resolution amounted to splitting hairs.

That's rubbish. Schaffer should cut it out.

Here's where Mark Udall stood on the war in 2002 and where he stands on it today:

DeGrow's Bleating Demonstrates His an Schaffer's Ignorance on Oil Shale

Like a couple of '49ers, Ben DeGrow and Bob Schaffer have jumped on the oil shale bandwagon pointing to Shell Oil's in situ process experiment as "proof" that oil shale development is ready for prime time. Only it isn't proof, and Shell is the first to admit it.

Let's look at the actual facts:

* Shell Oil only proved that the process is possible on about one acre of land. There is no proof that their freezing/heating process is scalable to commercial production levels.

* According to a RAND Corporation study, Shell's process would require 3 barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil. To put that in perspective, it's about a Lake Dillon of water every year for each million barrels of daily oil production.

* The process is also energy-intensive, requiring the ground around a drilling site to be frozen, and the ground within the site to be heated for several years. Several coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants would have to be constructed, each of which would have its own water requirements.

* Infrastructure to transport the needed water and power, refine the extracted oil, and treat the produced wastewater would have to be constructed.

Add to this that Shell is one of the leading opponents to commercial leasing because it will take at least five more years to even make the decision whether their experiments were successful. They, understandably, don't want to be forced into the land speculation business only to find the value of their holdings collapse if the process turns out to be unfeasible.

So ask Western Slope residents where they'll come up with 8-10 Lake Dillons per year of water, and where they'd like to have those coal power plants, railroad tracks, pipelines, refineries, waste processing plants, and high-tension wires placed. Because all of that will have to be figured out if (and only if) Shell can make its process commercially scalable. The only other option is strip mining, which has similar water requirements and produces waste of a larger volume than the shale that's mined.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

The Ben DeGrow spaghetti factory has been running at full tilt, throwing every noodle it manufactures to the wall and finding nothing will stick.

Let's go through the distortions one-by-one:

1. Calling for increased fuel efficiency and an orderly transition to alternative fuels does not raise the price of gasoline, no matter how many times Ben DeGrow says it does.

2. Mark Udall is not opposed to developing domestic petroleum resources, no matter how many times Ben DeGrow and Bob Schaffer says he is. What he is opposed to is raping the most ecologically and economically sensitive land when the oil companies have already leased 68 million acres and aren't drilling.

3. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will never make a noticeable dent in gas prices, no matter how many times Ben DeGrow and Bob Schaffer say it will. Bush's own Energy Information Adminsitration says that best case it will reduce gas prices by a penny in ten years. Even John McCain is opposed to drilling in ANWR.

4. Oil shale is a boondoggle. Always has been, and by all accounts always will be. Ben DeGrow and Bob Schaffer dancing around like a couple of drunken '49ers every time the topic comes up doesn't change that fact.

5. Drilling on the Roan Plateau will not affect gasoline prices at all, because you can't make gasoline out of natural gas, no matter how many times Ben DeGrow suggests that it will.

6. And finally, if Bush had not run up the national debt through wars of choice and giveaways to the oil and pharmaceutical companies, we'd still have a strong dollar. Experts say that if the dollar were as strong against the euro as it was ten years ago, oil would be trading at $80/bbl. What does Ben DeGrow and his Senate candidate have to say about that?