Colorado Senator Defends Fracking, Says 'Burning Water' Helped Native Americans
A fracking rig sits in the Piceance Basin of Colorado in 2011. Flickr user ecopoly
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Randy Baumgardner says studies linking hydraulic fracturing and polluting water with methane as "propaganda."
A Colorado state legislator has dismissed concerns about hydraulic fracturing polluting water with methane as "propaganda," saying that it's natural to have methane in water.
In fact, state Sen. Randy Baumgardner said that methane actually helped Native Americans.
"If you go back in history and look at how the Indians traveled, they traveled to the burning waters," Baumgardner said in a video posted by the site Right Wing Watch . "And that was methane in the waters and that was for warmth in the wintertime. So a lot of people, if they just trace back the history, they'll know how a lot of this is propaganda."
The comments were made in an interview for the program "Pray in Jesus Name," which is run by former Navy chaplain and state House candidate Gordon Klingenschmitt at the Western Conservative Summit.
In a follow-up email, Baumgardner said that he was referring to "hot springs," which he said his grandmother called "burning waters." The bacteria in the geothermally heated hot springs can produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas, but the natural phenomenon is different from the potential to have methane from a gas well pollute a water source.
While some methane does occur naturally in groundwater, there have long been concerns that natural-gas production will pollute ground- and drinking-water sources with the gas. A study from Duke University last June found that drinking-water wells near natural-gas sites in Pennsylvania and New York were more likely to show elevated levels of methane.
The documentary Gasland built on those concerns with a famous scene where Colorado residents lit their tap water on fire (critics of the film have said that the methane at those water sources was naturally occurring).
Baumgardner has served in the state Senate since 2012 and served four years in the state House. He led an unsuccessful bid to defeat incumbent Mark Udall, a Democrat, in the U.S. Senate race, but failed to win the Republican nomination over Rep. Cory Gardner. In an interview with The Denver Post, he acknowledged that he was an underdog in the race.
Watch Baumgardner's comments here:
( Image via Flickr user ecopoly )