Hageman proposes a Boulder, Colorado, fossil-fuel-free experiment

JACKSON—U.S. Rep Harriet Hageman on Tuesday touted GOP efforts to thwart campaigns reducing fossil fuel use, proposing that Boulder, Colorado, be stripped of its hydrocarbon infrastructure in a pilot program to test renewables.

Hageman made her comments at a Jackson town hall, where she dutifully appeared as promised when running for office. She touted GOP fights against the Biden administration, hailed her first successful bill — expanding victims’ rights — and railed against bureaucrats she’s fought for decades as a water and land-use attorney.

In deep support of Wyoming’s coal, oil and gas industries, she proposed a pilot project that would strip Boulder, Colorado, a progressive enclave, of its fossil fuel infrastructure — all to be replaced with windmills and solar panels on the city’s open space.

“The pilot project is, you take out all their gas stations,” she said to a crowd of about 70 people in the Teton County Library. “We take away all their internal combustion engines — cars. We take away all of their highways and streets, because that’s all oil-and-gas-produced.”

She drew applause and laughter.

“Marvelous!” one audience member exclaimed.

“They’ve been a no-growth city for decades,” Hageman said, “so they have a lot of open space around them.

“We fill out open space with windmills and solar panels, and we’ll see if we can actually run a city of 100,000 people [with] no fossil fuels whatsoever.”

“We’ll see if I can get that off the ground,” Hageman said.

Boulder blowback

Although Hageman earned chuckles and applause from her largely partisan group in Jackson, her suggestion rankled Boulder City Councilman Mark Wallach.

“One of the things that makes people so leery of politics and politicians is when people make ridiculous suggestions like that,” he said in a telephone interview with WyoFile.

“Nobody on the Boulder Council suggested we can do without all the fossil fuels at this point,” he said. “We make efforts to do better — to recognize that climate change is real and we do things we can do to combat it.”

“If she doesn’t understand the actual serious nature of the threat posed by climate change, I’m afraid she’s going to be living in a very warm state in the next decade.”

He pointed to the Marshall Fire, which ignited in the winter of 2021 and destroyed 1,000 Boulder homes, as serious evidence. Further, firefighters just finished combating four separate wildfires in the Boulder area.

“If somebody wants to make light, that’s their business,” he said “I deal in the real world, not in her fantasy world.”

Wallach refused to cut Hageman any slack for using hyperbole, exaggeration or attempted 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 an olive branch.

“She’s invited to tour the site of the Marshall Fire anytime she chooses,” Wallach said.

Hageman may not need to travel to Colorado to see the effects of a wildfire.

“As you may know over the last week my family has suffered from some losses,” she told the Jackson audience. “We did have a pretty big fire on our ranch.”

“We didn’t lose any cattle,” she said. “We didn’t lose any horses. Nobody got hurt. They were able to keep most of the fire up in the mountains rather than coming down on the prairie, so they were able to control it,” Hageman said.

“There are so many people around the country who have gone through this exact same thing and are suffering as well,” she said. “You just realize what people go through and how difficult it can be.”

She touts GOP budget

Hageman touted five of 12 federal budget bills recently passed by the GOP controlled U.S. House, one of which calls for removing the grizzly bear from the Endangered Species Act list of threatened species in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Other provisions in the Interior Department’s appropriations bill would defund the BLM Rock Springs Resource Management Plan revision “so that they cannot go forward with denying access, management and use to 1.8 million acres, destroying our oil and gas industry, destroying our grazing industry down there.”

She hailed the U.S. Supreme Court’s Chevron decision that de-emphasizes the role bureaucrats play in interpreting federal laws, and applauded another high court decision regarding the “waters of the United States” and the government’s ability to keep them free of pollutants.

Hageman, who worked on the case before being elected to Congress, said the government claimed an irrigation ditch was a navigable waterway and that her client faced $65 million in fines before the case was resolved in his favor.

Her first bill to be signed into law — just last week, she said — extends victims’ rights regarding restitution. “There’s no restitution available for family members,” Hageman said.“So I worked with Sen. John Cornyn, and we put together what’s called the [Victims’] Voices Act , and what it does is it expands the number of people who are entitled to restitution from people who commit crimes.”

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