by Angus M. Thuermer Jr., WyoFile
JACKSON – U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman on Tuesday praised Republican efforts to thwart campaigns to reduce fossil fuel use by proposing to strip Boulder, Colorado, of its hydrocarbon infrastructure as part of a pilot program to test renewable energy.
Hageman made her comments at a town hall meeting in Jackson, where she dutifully showed up as promised when she ran for office. She praised Republicans’ fight against the Biden administration, praised her first successful bill – expanding victims’ rights – and railed against bureaucrats she had fought for decades as a water and land-use advocate.
In her deep support for Wyoming’s coal, oil and gas industries, she proposed a pilot project to strip Boulder, Colorado, a progressive enclave, of its fossil fuel infrastructure and replace it with windmills and solar arrays on the city’s open spaces.
“The pilot project is to take away all their gas stations,” she told about 70 people at the Teton County Library. “We’re taking away all their internal combustion cars. We’re taking away all their highways and roads, because they’re all fueled by oil and gas.”
She received applause and laughter.
“Wonderful!” exclaimed a spectator.
“They have been a city without growth for decades,” Hageman said, “so there is a lot of open space around them.”
“We are filling vacant spaces with wind turbines and solar panels and will see whether we can actually supply a city with 100,000 inhabitants without fossil fuels.”
“We’ll see if I can get this done,” Hageman said.
Boulder kickback
Although Hageman received giggles and applause from her largely partisan group in Jackson, her proposal angered Boulder City Councilman Mark Wallach.
“One of the reasons people are so suspicious of politics and politicians is because of such ridiculous proposals,” he said in a telephone interview with WyoFile.
“No one on the Boulder Council has claimed that we can eliminate all fossil fuels right now,” he said. “We are striving to do better – we recognize that climate change is real and we are doing what we can do to combat it.”
“If she doesn’t understand the truly serious nature of the threat posed by climate change, I fear she will be living in a very warm state for the next decade.”
As serious evidence, he pointed to the Marshall Fire, which broke out in the winter of 2021 and destroyed 1,000 homes in Boulder. In addition, firefighters have just finished battling four different wildfires in the Boulder area.
“If someone wants to shed light on it, that’s their business,” he said. “I operate in the real world, not in their fantasy world.”
Wallach did not want to forgive Hageman for his use of exaggerations, hyperbole and attempts at humor.
“She’s trying to score points at the expense of a community that’s doing what it can,” he said, calling Hageman’s proposal “bizarre and grotesque.” But he offered her a peace offering.
“She is invited to visit the site of the Marshall Fire whenever she would like,” Wallach said.
Hageman may not have to travel to Colorado to see the effects of a wildfire.
“As you may know, my family has suffered some losses in the last week,” she told the audience in Jackson. “There was a pretty big fire on our ranch.”
“We didn’t lose any cattle,” she said. “We didn’t lose any horses. No one was hurt. They were able to keep most of the fire in the mountains instead of taking it to the prairie, so they were able to get it under control,” Hageman said.
“There are so many people across the country who have been through the exact same thing and are suffering as well,” she said. “You just realize what people are going through and how difficult it can be.”
She promotes the GOP budget
Hageman highlighted five of the 12 budget bills recently passed by the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, one of which would remove the grizzly bear from the list of threatened species in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem under the Endangered Species Act.
Other provisions in the Interior Department’s appropriations bill would cut funding for revising the BLM’s Rock Springs Resource Management Plan “so they can’t continue to deny access, management and use of 1.8 million acres, destroying our oil and gas industry and our pastoral economy down there.”
She welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court’s Chevron decision, which downplays the role of bureaucrats in interpreting federal law, and praised another Supreme Court decision concerning “the waters of the United States” and the government’s ability to keep them free of pollutants.
Hageman, who worked on the case before her election to Congress, said the government had designated an irrigation ditch as a navigable waterway and her client would have faced a $65 million fine before the case could be decided in his favor.
Her first bill, which she said was signed into law just last week, expands victims’ rights to reparations. “There is no reparations for family members,” Hageman said. “So I worked with Senator John Cornyn and we came up with what’s called the (Victims’) Voices Act, and it expands the number of people who are eligible to seek reparations from crime perpetrators.”
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent, nonprofit news organization focused on the people, places and politics of Wyoming.
