A Prescription for Forced Decivilization

A look into NC Pharmacist turned Colonizer of Colorado's bill to kill the State's Oil and Gas Industry.

In "How Innovation Works," Matt Ridley emphasizes the significant role of property rights in fostering the United States' emergence as a leading oil and gas powerhouse. Ridley argues that the unique system of mineral rights ownership in the U.S., where private individuals can own and profit from the minerals found beneath their land, has been a fundamental driver of innovation and investment in the oil and gas sectors. The personal ownership of mineral rights in the United States incentivizes landowners to allow exploration and development on their property, knowing they will receive a share of the profits. This has led to a highly competitive, diverse, and innovative industry, marked by rapid technological advancements and efficient extraction methods. Ridley points out that such a decentralized approach to resource ownership has encouraged a more entrepreneurial spirit among oil and gas companies, facilitating a culture of risk-taking and innovation that is less prevalent in countries with state-controlled resource sectors. As a result, the U.S. has not only become one of the world's top producers of oil and gas but has also been at the forefront of developing and deploying new extraction technologies, such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, further solidifying its status as an energy superpower.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, people could obtain ownership of plots of land in the Western United States via various Homesteading Acts provided the homesteaders improved the land. In those eras, this typically meant farming or ranching. Westward expansion also gave large plots of lands to Territorial or State Governments and to special interest groups such as Railroads. Up until the more recent Homestead Acts in the early 20th Century, mineral rights and surface property rights were bundled together. In the more recent Homesteading Acts, they were decoupled leaving the Federal Government with the mineral rights.

It was also possible, and still is today, for surface property owners to separately sell or lease their mineral rights to other parties. Such transactions could have been done throughout the history of these lands, and often before the current property owners took possession. This is in part why real estate listings, especially in rural areas in the Western US mention whether they purchase includes mineral rights and why it’s advantageous for any person interested in purchasing property in these areas outside of any well-established city or metropolitan area core to due their due diligence in understanding what they’re buying. This can usually be done by hiring a title company or attorney.

Such due diligence is especially important in the Front Range Colorado, home to millions of people, who overlap the valuable Niobrara shale oil and gas fields. Here the interests of hundreds of thousands of new residents (often Coastal Elites with no idea where stuff comes from), existing residents (as in the ones who haven’t been pushed out), and interests of the oil and gas industry collide. A property owner, more often than not these days in this conflicted region is someone who owns a piece of semi-rural property in the county, or people in newer single family housing developments in the suburbs receives letter in the mail with a deadline to reply. This letter is from an oil and gas operator or representative indicating they wish to either purchase or lease the mineral rights. If the property owner doesn’t respond, and/or does not consent to the offer, then the operator can invoke “forced pooling,” a legal doctrine that exists in Colorado and other Western States that in the end requires the property owners to sell or lease the minerals to the developer.

Thanks to a series of Corporate Press articles in Colorado, forced pooling has become highly controversial, in some circles being analogized as “corporate eminent domain.” Forced pooling horror stories from property owners have been the bread and butter of much of the anti-oil and gas movement in the Front Range whether that comes from politicians, activists, or the Corporate Press.

Matthew Sura, an Oil and Gas Attorney, explains the concept in more detail (see attached PDF in the footnotes¹) though indicating the offers property owners receive have to be reasonable. For an offer to not meet that criteria can be as simple as a mismatch in the response time.

Per Sura:

A lease offer may also be found unreasonable if it gives insufficient time to respond or contains unreasonable terms. For example, for a homeowners association that only meets once every six weeks, it would be unreasonable to expect it to decide on a lease offer in less than six to eight weeks.

A post on The Mineral Rights Forum clarifies when forced pooling is invoked.

Forced pooling is typically a last resort for operators when they cannot come to terms on an oil and gas lease with a mineral owner. With offers of eight to ten years leases in many parts of Colorado, it seems unlikely that production will be occurring in the near future, and accordingly, those areas seems to be a long ways from a forced pooling application even being filed.

Such facts are (of course) left out by politicians , anti-oil and gas activist colonizers, and the local area Corporate Press who’ve also been captured by the elite.

Of course there are probably instances of an oil and gas developer abusing the forced pooling doctrine, despite the legal and paper trail, taking advantage of property owners and there’s likely a fair argument out there for a revision of the statute surrounding forced pooling to bring it up to date with modern times or to flat out abolish it.

But instead of incremental, reality-backed, feelings and character disorder minimized change being proposed, something’s far more detrimental to everyday Coloradans is about to echo in the chambers of the State Capitol.

Situated immediately north of the Denver metropolitan area, Colorado Senate District 17 (SD17) composes of the cities of Longmont, Lafayette, and Erie along with semi-rural and rural space in between in parts of the counties of Boulder, Broomfield, and Weld. In the 2020 election, that seat was won on a comfortable margin with over 2/3 of the votes by Sonya Jaquez Lewis, a Progressive.

Senator Lewis, a native of North Carolina of, grew up there, attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, obtained a Pharmacy Degree in the 1980s. It was during her time in college, in the late 70s, where she began in involvement in politics, first in student councils, and then in 1980 was appointed to a town planner position by the alderman of a small NC town. By the mid 1990s, she made it onto roles at the county level including the Chair of the County Commissioners. Sometime shortly after that she moved to Colorado, roughly a decade after that move she became a delegate to the DNC. Throughout her career, she also practiced pharmacy, and served on a number of non-profits.

All of this, with the exception of her degree and alma-matter is left completely out of her About Me page that she still has active from her 2020 election campaign for State Senator of District 17. She instead tries to insist she’s not an outsider to the state, and tries leverages her Latina identity since both are apparently important election talking points.

Lewis focuses her “unique middle name” Jaquez (literally the Basque and Spanish equivalent of the English Jacob, or French Jacques), and her family’s origins in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, an area long settled by the descendants of the Spanish Conquistadors and the Basque people from back when that region of the state was a part of Spanish and then Mexican territory. For anybody not familiar with how people in those eras came to legally own land, they had to come from nobility or something close to it.

She also made her About Me page available in Spanish using a machine translator such as Google Translate as she apparently either does not speak the language herself or could not find a fluent speaker to do so.

Most importantly, Lewis also states she’s an Oil and Gas Impacted Coloradoan as she describes in her About Me page.

She and her wife were victims of forced pooling, writing:

Last year we received a letter from the oil and gas company Crestone Peak Resources stating their intent to put a massive, multi-well production pad 500 feet from our home. We were forced to sell our minerals due to an antiquated Colorado law called Forced Pooling. We were told there was nothing we could do. Instead of moving or just accepting our fate, we organized.

Lewis is of course leaving out the rest of the story behind how forced pooling works in Colorado and what it does with one’s property rights, but that doesn’t matter because as a lawmaker she has the power to write and vote in the Colorado General Assembly. She also doesn’t inform anyone that she and her wife received monetary compensation for the oil and gas activity as is to be expected from leasing one’s minerals.

Lewis is the primary author and one of several sponsors of the recently introduced Colorado Senate Bill 24-159 boringly titled, “Mod to Energy & Carbon Management Processes.” In a non boring way this bill, if passed, will end the oil and gas industry in Colorado as we know it on top of being an affront to property rights. Existing oil and gas well would be permitted to operate until they’re either no longer producing or when the legal Karens get their way and make them illegal in some other way. Permits for new oil and gas permits would not be issued per this law after 2030. Existing oil and gas wells after 2030 would also no longer be allowed to scale up their production should it become otherwise economically viable to or some new extraction methods become available. The law also contains incomprehensible legalese that appear to impose more environmental regulations on oil and gas operators.

Section One of the bill contains no laws itself but instead is long list of virtue signaling hysteria involving both the effects of the so-called climate emergency and the heath effects of the already heavily regulated and clean oil and gas industry. One can imagine screaming coming from the Progressive Sound Board accusing opponents of “hating the health of people,” “hating the environment,” “not caring about [insert marginalized group],” etc.

As frustratingly covered in Another Year, Another Defeat for Nuclear in Colorado, the Colorado General Assembly is captured by the same ideology that de-civilized California turning it into a Feudal State. From the other coast, the state also faces ruin by demon anti-freedom, anti-energy, anti-civilization, hypocritical demons such as NYC’s Michael Bloomberg. The Long March towards the destruction of Colorado is drawing closer to the end.

SB24-159 imposes massive costs on the property rights of million of Colorado residents, the oil and gas industry, and civilization in Colorado as a whole with the benefits only going to unproductive narcissistic Progressive Colonizers in search for their next virtue hit.

A great Thomas Sowell quotes comes into mind.

“It is especially important to weigh costs against benefits when there is crusading zeal and heady rhetoric in favor of something that virtually everyone regards as desirable, because crusaders seldom pause to do cost-benefit analysis.”

A hearing for the bill has yet to be scheduled but given the non-success of the nuclear bill, Colorado is going to need a great deal of help ensuring this bill goes to where it belongs: the toilet.

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Whatisforcedpooling

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