Colorado state Sen. Randy Baumgardner, a Republican, recently proved how unintelligent he is on the subject of fracking. His reasons for defending fracking came out as nothing but an incoherent word salad. He claims to be knowledgeable against anti-fracking propaganda, mainly because he’s attended many pro-fracking seminars, Salon reported.
“I’ve been doing a lot of the fracking seminars, and if people haven’t been, then they really don’t understand it,” said Baumgardner. “They talk about methane in the water and this, that, and the other, but if you go back in history and look at how the indians traveled, they traveled to the burning water. 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.”
Methane is a flammable gas that is dangerous to the environment and atmosphere. The gas is also “the second most prevalent greenhouse gas emitted in the United States from human activities,” said the Environmental Protection Agency. “Pound for pound, the comparative impact of [methane] on climate change is over 20 times greater than [carbon dioxide] over a 100-year period.”
Salon reported that Baumgardner may have confused chemical-laden fracking wastewater with natural, geothermally-heated hot springs. However, the GOP Colorado state senator seems to think that it was the methane gases that Native American worshipped and held sacred.
People actually elected this guy as a public servant to make decisions about what’s best for them. And the way that Baumgardner spoke was like a fracking propaganda video, rather than an interview with a faux Ph.D.-having, right-wing Christian kook.
Watch the interview below:
Josh is a writer and researcher with Ring of Fire. Follow him on Twitter @dnJdeli.
