Colorados Tenacious Anti-Fracking Movement Explores Last-Ditch OptionsBy Dierdre Fulton The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in early May that state rules promoting oil and gas development trump local attempts to restrict or ban drilling near homes and schools. As such, residents who live near proposed drilling sites said they see few options for stopping new projects, thePost reported. But tenacious Coloradanswho came out en masse earlier this month for Break Free protests against fossil fuelsarent giving up the fight. In and around Parachute and Greeley, where proposed projects could put 53 new wells within municipal limits and a fracking waste facility on the banks of the Colorado River, residents are looking to the states new urban mitigation ruleunder which extraction must minimize impact using higher sound walls, quiet rigs, and pipeline instead of trucks to move oil and gas out to marketsfor possible relief. In Colorado, you cant stop the drilling, said Carl Erickson, chairman of the citizen group Weld Air and Water. This is a last-ditch effort. Meanwhile, Boulder County last week responded to the state Supreme Courts ruling by ending its own years-long moratorium on accepting applications for new oil and gas operations in the countyone that would have been in place until June 2018but immediately replaced it with a new and shorter six-month-long moratorium. In their statement, Boulder County commissioners made clear that their move came under duress: We strongly believe that local governments should have sufficient regulatory authority to address local impacts of oil and gas development, and we continue to be disappointed by judicial, legislative, and regulatory decisions that do not adequately protect our residents from industrial activities like fracking. Coloradans best chance for curtailing oil and gas drilling, however, may come at the ballot box in November. Community groups are currently gathering signatures for three ballot initiatives aimed at establishing 2,500-foot buffers and boosting local power to regulate oil and gas activity near people. These, too, were described to The Intercept as a last-ditch effort by Tricia Olson, director of Coloradans Resisting Extreme Energy Development, or CREED, which is pushingto get two of the measures on the ballot. The only recourse we ordinary citizens have is to collect signatures on petitions for statewide ballot amendments to the Colorado Constitution, which, if voted in, supersede existing legislative law, wrote Longmont resident Judith Blackburn in a letter to the editor published in the Times-Call over the weekend. Unfortunatelyif not surprisinglythese citizen-led initiatives face well-funded opposition, asThe Intercept reported Saturday. And oil and gas industry backers have launched their own initiatives, Boulder Weekly reported last week, including one which would make it nearly impossible for Colorado citizens to ever use direct democracy to amend the constitution in the future. A close examination exposes the Raise the Bar initiative as just another effort that will prop up the oil and gas industry while further stripping the rights of Colorado citizens in order to insure the industrys ability to continue to drill at will with ineffective state oversight, Boulder Weekly charged. And of course, [Democratic] Governor [John] Hickenlooper supports the effort along with his Republican allies. In fact, the newspaper warned, if Raise the Bar passes, both conservatives and progressives will lose their ability to have a say in Colorados political system which is increasingly controlled by only a handful of wealthy individuals and the oil industry. Image: Break Free protesters at a fracking site in Colorado on May 14. (Photo: Christian ORourke/Survival Media Agency) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Dierdre Fulton writes for CommonDreams.org, where this article first appeared. An armed and well regulated militia would have a stronger voice. No, not a bunch of yahoos. But a number of citizens organized to demonstrate to the state government the people have the means and will to secure the land and keep government accountable. I know its hard for some people to hear; I myself didnt realize the following for 99.9% of my life. We only think we need the state because pretty much every one of us went through 12 years of state mandated propaganda prison. Sure we learned a little math and science. We also took in a lot of revised history that positioned the state as the ultimate good, the only impartial, altruistic arbiter of societys disputes. Certainly we never had a class called Critical Thinking. Anyway, if any of those opposing this in Colorado are reading this; know that you dont need to turn to the state and their priests (politicians) for a solution. Stop it on your own, as just plain old concerned people that live there. The state will always side with monied interests unless the costs outweigh the bribes they get. TLDR; Since the government isnt giving many signs that it cares what the people there want, bypass them. Make it cost more than it is worth. 