Colorado Legislator Defends Fracking By Saying 'Indians' Benefited From Methane In Water | ThinkProgress

Me thinks Mr. Baumgardner may want to re-think his talking points. First, exactly who's seminars has he been going to? And second,

With all of that as background, we now begin looking at Indian legends in the Yellowstone country by examining the known Indian names for the place. Nabokov and Loendorf, after years of looking at the ethnological, anthropological, archeological, and historical literature and interviewing dozens of tribal members, have concluded that certain Indian tribes did have names for the upper Yellowstone country. Most of those names referred to the park’s hot springs and geysers. The Crow Indians called Yellowstone “land of the burning ground” or “land of vapors” while the Blackfeet called it “many smoke.” The Flatheads called it “smoke from the ground.” The Kiowas called it “the place of hot water.” Only the Bannocks had a name that did not call to mind the park’s thermal regions: “buffalo country.” Additionally, the Crows specifically called the Yellowstone geysers “Bide-Mahpe,” meaning “sacred or powerful water.” ( www.georgewright.org)

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In an interview with former Navy chaplain turned conservative activist Gordon “Dr. Chaps” Klingenschmitt, Colorado state senator Randy Baumgardner (R) dismissed concerns over methane from fracking operations posing a risk to water supplies by saying it’s a natural occurrence.

“I’ve been to a lot of the fracking seminars,” Baumgardner said.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that also happens to be highly flammable. But, according to the state senator, methane in water supplies actually served to benefit Native American tribes. “They talk about methane in the water and this, that, and the other,” Baumgardner told Klingenschmitt, “but if you go back in history and look at how the Indians traveled, they traveled to the burning waters. 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.”

While methane occurs naturally in groundwater in multiple places across the U.S., scientists and watchdogs have recently warned that fracking operations may pose a greater threat to drinking water supplies than previously thought.

Baumgardner repeated a common industry talking point in his recent interview, saying, “since the 1940s when they first started fracking, there’s never been one recorded incident” of fracking contaminating drinking water. A new study released Tuesday by Stanford University scientists, however, found that oil and gas companies are actually exploring at shallower depths than commonly assumed, “sometimes through underground sources of drinking water,” the LA Times reported.

Colorado Legislator Defends Fracking By Saying 'Indians' Benefited From Methane In Water | ThinkProgress