 | SHERIDAN - When it comes to laying down a carbon footprint, Wyoming is the nation’s Big Foot.
A carbon footprint measures human activities in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, primarily CO2. By this yardstick, Wyoming ranks as worst in the nation - on a per capita basis.
| Our geography and geology conspire to give us a bad rap. It’s a long way from Jackson to Cheyenne (433 miles) or Sundance to Evanston (571 miles). In fact, the average driver in Wyoming drives 18,000 miles a year, almost 5,000 miles more than in runner-up Mississippi.
Having to put so many miles between home and destination means we have to have a back-up rig, of course. The average Wyomingite owns 1.26 vehicles per person. That’s also more than any other state, per person. Personally, I’ve owned quite a few cars that fit that .26 category.
From the earth beneath our feet come more CO2 producing fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) than the dirt of all but a few countries. Coal in particular gives Wyoming its Shaq-like imprint (the man sports a size 22 EEE). In 2006, we dug 447 million tons. One site alone, Arch Coal’s Black Thunder Mine in the Powder River Basin, provides 7- percent of the nation’s supply.
All impressive facts and numbers, no doubt. But do they make Wyoming the big bad boy of global warming? Not really and not by a long shot, mostly for reasons that have to do with our puny population, vast empty spaces and the fact that we end up burning very little of the coal, gas and oil that we produce.
To place the statistical burden on Wyoming’s broad shoulders, in fact, is like blaming Afghanistan, which grows more opium poppies than anyone else, for international heroin addiction. And it raises the question of whether “carbon footprint” as it is now calculated, makes any sense at all.
The truth is that anything calculated on a per capita basis makes Wyoming look dangerous, or bad, or the home of some feudal overlord. A little more than half a million people spread over 97,818 square miles leads to warped conclusions among numbers crunchers.
For example, in 2006, 195 drivers or passengers expired on Wyoming highways. That’s the 8th lowest total in the nation. By comparison, the same year, 4,236 died on California’s highways.
But use this number - 195 - on a per capita basis and any reasonable person could be forgiven for having the quakes driving to the Safeway store. In both 100,000-per-general population and 100,000-per-licensed-drivers, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ranks Wyoming as the deadliest driving state in the nation and getting worse, by the way.
Those CO2 podiatrists who measure carbon footprints also tend to look at things on a per person basis, unfairly so. When it comes to actual total energy consumption, Wyoming ranks 49th in the nation both commercially and residentially. In overall carbon output, we’re Number 31.
Still, Wyoming doesn’t like any restrictions when it comes to our bread and butter. In fact, we put our aversion into law. In 1999 a group of eight Republican knights of the energy industry, including former gubernatorial aspirant Eli Bebout, successfully sponsored a piece of legislation making reducing our carbon footprint a thought crime.
University of North Dakota law professor Joshua P. Fershee highlighted this in a 2007 article in Land and Water Review, a legal journal published by the University of Wyoming law school. Fershee comments, “Wyoming, as a leading coal supplier, has a significant interest in protecting both coal suppliers and coal users from restrictions (such as CO2 emissions caps) that would limit coal consumption. In fact, the Wyoming legislature has specifically forbidden the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and the Wyoming Environmental Quality Council (EQC) from “propos[ing] or promulgat[ing] any new rule or regulation intended . . . to reduce emissions as called for by the Kyoto Protocol, from the residential, commercial, industrial, electric utility, transportation, agricultural, energy or mining sectors”
This puts Wyoming in a minority position when it comes to national trends. According the Environmental Protection Agency, Wyoming, unlike 29 other states, has neither a greenhouse gas inventory nor greenhouse gas mitigation plan.
Instead, Wyoming concentrates not on prevention or reduction but CO2 capture and storage. In other words, managing the disease, not trying to find a cure. During the 2008 session, the legislature passed a pair of bills concerning carbon sequestration. One gives the land’s surface owner – as opposed to the mineral owner -- control of underground “pore spaces” where carbon dioxide can be sequestered. The other piece of legislation gives the DEQ the authority to regulate the long-term storage of CO2.
To its credit, Wyoming is also a founding member of the Climate Registry, a Los Angeles-based greenhouse gas monitoring organization. It’s a self-funding non-profit that relies on voluntary – the operative word -- information from 56 individual state environmental agencies, Canadian provinces, Indian tribes, and Mexican states. The Climate Registry claims to swear off advocacy and the board has nary a corporate nabob among its ranks.
Data collection and analysis for the Climate Registry “is a principled process,” says John Corra, head of the Wyoming DEQ, “and driven by the states themselves.”
Given the clout of coal in Cheyenne, I suppose we should see this work with the Climate Registry as the Wyoming Way to address climate realities. In fact, it’s a testament to how far this state has moved since the 1999 head-in-the-sand posturing against any move that might acknowledge we have a problem. Furthermore, the fact the 2008 legislature inked a deal to split the cost with GE Energy on a $100 million pilot coal gasification research center shows that maybe – just maybe - it’s in our best interest to be proactive on clean coal.
Meanwhile, we’ll still have to live with the Big Foot image. This attitude of forbearance is not lost on Mark Northam, Director of the University of Wyoming’s School of Natural Resources. “Realistically, an entity's carbon footprint should be calculated by the amount of CO2 they produced through combustion for personal consumption. Under those guidelines, we would not get credit for the CO2 from PRB (Powder River Basin) coal burned in Iowa.”
There are no established guidelines for ‘carbon footprints,’” says Northam, “so anybody can claim anything that they want. However, I rarely see the Middle East credited with 25 percent of all the CO2 emitted in the US simply because 25 percent of the oil comes from there.”
If so, then maybe those who measure us by our carbon imprint can scale us down by a shoe size or two.
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