text:
When it comes to water use, the United States,
A. Withdraws billions of gallons more water from rivers, lakes and aquifers than it did in 1970.
B. Withdraws the same amount of water
C. Withdraws less water.
2. The state whose residents use the most domestic water (indoor and outdoor) on a per capita basis is:
A. Nevada
B. Arizona
C. Utah
D. Idaho
3. The biggest water gulping category in the United States is:
A. Golf courses
B. Thermoelectric power
C. Irrigation
3. The biggest water using category in the West is:
A. Las Vegas Fountains
B. Fracking
C. Irrigation
You'll have to read on to find the answers.
According to a US Geological Survey report on water use released last week, the U.S. in 2010 not only withdrew* less water than it did when the agency conducted its previous survey five years earlier, but it also withdrew less than it had since 1970. As the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick, a well-known water guru, put it: We appear to have reached Peak Water, decades ago.The implications are huge. The U.S. has added 105 million people since 1970, and the economy has grown tremendously. Yet we somehow have managed to shrink our overall water footprint. It's not only counter-intuitive; it's baffling. Surely, some of our water guzzling was sent overseas when we outsourced manufacturing and food production. Yet most of the savings can be attributed to simple thrift, and huge gains in efficiency in just about every sector.
It's proof that conservation is not an impediment to economic growth, and that we can limit our collective environmental impact even as the population grows, without sacrificing quality of life. And the western U.S. is leading the way.
The biggest water user in the country is thermoelectric power — most coal, natural gas and solar thermal power plants need water to produce steam to turn turbines and for cooling purposes. Over a five-year period, U.S. plants were able to cut their water withdrawals by 20 percent by installing dry-cooling technology or simply by becoming more efficient. The West has shown even more progress, cutting use by about 50 percent since 2000.
Irrigation is second in water use nationwide, but in the West, it tops the list, guzzling water at almost ten times the rate of Western power plants. Nationwide, irrigators cut water use by about 9 percent since 2005, about the same as in the West, by increasing efficiency and switching from flood irrigation to micro-irrigation, or drip, systems.
Domestic use dropped by 5 percent. Some Western cities hit hard by drought have cut water use by incentivizing homeowners to tear out their lawns, or by limiting turf at new homes. Increasing water rates on big guzzlers has also helped, as have more efficient plumbing fixtures. Las Vegas reduced a tremendous amount of waste simply by plugging the leaks in its pipes.
The mining industry, on the other hand, which includes oil and gas extraction, pulled 39 percent more water from the earth than it did in 2005, thanks to the sharp uptick in drilling. The mining industry still only accounts for about 1 percent of all withdrawals, about half of which consist of the otherwise unusable saline byproduct of oil and gas production, which is then re-injected into the well to stimulate production. But drillers use mostly fresh water for the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water used to hydraulic fracture a single well. This use shows up in North Dakota, for example, where mining's water withdrawals shot up from 5.6 million gallons per day in 2005 to 27 million in 2010. Still, that's only one-sixth of the state's withdrawals for agriculture. In Wyoming, which saw a natural gas drilling bust between 2005 and 2010, mining's water use plummeted.
All of this, and there's still plenty of waste. Las Vegas has taken great strides in conserving water over the last decade, but it still has entire neighborhoods that look like Connecticut, thanks to gluttonous lawn-watering. Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming and California farmers still rely mostly on flood irrigation for their crops. And folks in some of the driest places pay the least for their water, contrary to economic principles. This is all good news, because it means that despite gains, many low-hanging fruit remain. We must pluck them before we even think of building the next dam, pipeline or groundwater pumping scheme.
*The USGS report tracks total withdrawals, or the amount pulled from the source, whether it's returned to the source or not, rather than consumptive use, which is arguably a more critical measure. Consumptive use is when the water is precluded from subsequent use (at least for a while) because it's consumed by humans or livestock or is incorporated into a product or plant. A good deal of the water sucked up by a power plant, for example, goes right back into the source, as does a portion of the water used to flood irrigate a field.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. Follow @jonnypeace
This is Chaco 2408 32P #114H, one of dozens of oil wells drilled in the last few years in northern New Mexico's Gallup Sandstone, one of the nation's newest "tight oil" plays. Chaco #114H and thousands like it in North Dakota, northern Colorado and Texas exist because of high oil prices, driven by demand from China and the developing world. But now, thanks in part to slower growth in China and the flood of U.S. oil, crude prices are falling. Though the resulting drop in gasoline prices benefits most sectors of the economy (average gas prices in New Mexico dropped below $3 this fall), it may dampen or even crush the shale oil revolution.
Chaco #114H can help explain why. The San Juan Basin, home to some 40,000 oil and natural gas wells, was already one of the most prolific natural gas fields in the nation when, in the early 2000s, high prices made it economically feasible to combine horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to drill in tight shale formations. The drilling frenzy that followed glutted the domestic market with gas, causing prices to crash. Rigs abandoned San Juan County for fields also rich with profitable oil. San Juan County's economy faltered; tax revenues from oil and gas are today just one-third of what they were in 2009, when prices were high.
But there remained hope — oil, that is — in the Gallup Sandstone. Spurred by high oil prices, energy companies recently resurrected this old play, sparking a still small but growing boom.
Chaco #114 is one of the boom's pioneers. In early 2013, WPX Energy drilled down about 5,400 feet, turned the bit 90 degrees, and ran it another 5,000 feet horizontally through the oil-bearing sandstone. At 10,000 feet "deep," as drillers say, it's still shallower than North Dakota's wells, which average 20,000 feet. But it's far deeper than its predecessors, which averaged about 4,000 feet deep.
And that helps make shale wells far more expensive, and therefore more sensitive to price drops. In reports to its investors, WPX Energy says its wells in the San Juan Basin cost $5.2 million on average to drill and frack; its Bakken wells run to a staggering $10 million. Old-school oil wells typically cost $500,000 or less to drill.
As much as a quarter of the cost stems from hydraulic fracturing. Chaco #114 was pumped full of nearly 1 million gallons of water and chemicals — everything from walnut hulls to Bactron K-87 Microbiocide — along with 3 million pounds of sand to hold the fractures open.
Chaco #114 responded in March of 2013, initially gushing as much as 272 barrels of oil per day. With oil selling for $108 per barrel on the global market, the well should have turned a tidy profit within its first year.
According to state records, however, each barrel of oil from Chaco #114 has yielded as much as $26 less than the global benchmark for crude, the "European Brent price." Subtract royalties paid to operate on state land (12.5 percent in this case), other county and state production taxes (about 8 percent), and the costs of extracting hydrocarbons, transporting them to market, maintaining the well and disposing of the tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater, and the well becomes a lot less lucrative.
And there's a bigger catch. Oil and gas wells produce heartily during their first months, and then wane. It's called a decline curve, and it's especially steep for most shale wells. Chaco #114's production had dropped by half by the time it was six months old. A year after drilling was complete, it was producing just 50 barrels per day — a decline of over 80 percent. This phenomenon is repeated across the West's shale oil and gas fields to varying degrees.
That means that, just to keep overall production levels stable, energy companies must drill new wells relentlessly. "It's known as the Red Queen syndrome," says Mark Haggerty, a policy analyst with Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit based in Bozeman, Montana. "They've got to drill faster and faster, just to stay still." Collectively, the nation's producers have stayed ahead of the curve, but only by operating 1,700 to 1,800 rigs at any one time, each drilling multimillion-dollar wells.
When prices are high, that might make sense. But when they crash by 20 percent, as they have since this summer, it puts companies in a tough spot. If they stop drilling, production and revenues will fall. If they finish drilling when prices are low, the well uses up that initial production bonus with less of a return, reducing the chances of ever recouping that multimillion-dollar investment. Had Chaco #114 been drilled this October, the company would have made about $82,000 less during the critical first month of production. That math may not stop drilling in the best spots if prices remain in the $80 per barrel range, says Haggerty, but it could result in a total shutdown in smaller, peripheral plays.
For the brand-new boomtowns of North Dakota, and for the reworked ones in the San Juan Basin, a long-term drop in oil prices is a mixed bag. The social and environmental impacts that accompany the drill rigs will dissipate if drilling slows, but so will the taxes paid by the companies to help mitigate some of those impacts. A 10 percent price drop from year to year could reduce North Dakota's mean annual revenues by as much as $300 million, and the San Juan Basin could forget about recovering from the natural gas slump, at least for now.
This dynamic can be influenced by tighter regulations, which can raise drilling costs, or by technological advances, which can lower them. But whether Chaco #114 will ever pay for itself — or whether the regional boom will keep going or lose its steam — hinges primarily on the price of oil and the unpredictable global forces that determine it.]]>
In the 1940s, '50s and even the '60s, DDT was considered a miracle of modern-day chemistry. It was sprayed indiscriminately to kill insects like mosquitoes, which carry diseases, as well as the many others that are harmless. You could dust your tomatoes, your dog, your cattle or your cupboards with the stuff. In one promotional film from the '40s, a guy sprays a bunch of DDT onto his oatmeal, and then eats it.
Then Rachel Carson's Silent Spring revealed the dangers DDT posed to humans and the environment, and in 1972, it was banned for agricultural use in the United States. The public's perception of the pesticide had radically changed. I still remember my horror when I first stumbled upon a bottle labeled "DDT." I was about 10 years old, looking through my late grandfather's shop for some tool, and it was as if I had discovered that he wasn't actually a farmer, but a war criminal.
DDT is long gone from this country, and nobody's eating pesticide-laced porridge these days, at least not on purpose. But as Rebecca Clarren reports in this issue's cover story, millions of pounds of other pesticides are still sprayed annually from helicopters and planes onto forest clear-cuts in order to kill the shrubs and weeds that can crowd out profitable timber. In windy, steep terrain, the chemicals sometimes drift away from the target and onto nearby homes and communities, as happened at Gold Beach, Oregon, in October 2013. The short-term consequences of this can be horrific, as the victims of that spraying can attest, but the long-term hazards may prove even worse.
Americans today are generally more aware of pesticides' dangers than they were back in the 1960s and '70s, and the applicators are far more careful about where they spray them. But in Oregon, at least, the regulatory framework has been unconscionably weak.
After word spread about the Gold Beach incident, though, Oregon's attitude seemed to shift. The state did a belated investigation, and the timber company and sprayer were slapped with a bigger fine than usual. And now the Legislature is pondering tougher regulations on aerial sprayers. It might not be Silent Spring, but it's a significant example of how information can spur action. The DDT fanatics of the 1950s could still plead ignorance. Today's leaders and regulators have no such excuse.]]>
Oil production in the Powder River Basin, formerly one of the nation's hottest coalbed methane zones, has gone up from 38,000 barrels per day in 2009 to 78,000 per day earlier this year. An October report from the state's Economic Analysis Division says that after the economy was battered by low natural gas prices during recent years, the oil industry is helping bolster it, "backed by about twice as many applications to drill as the previous year."Yet the state's overall employment remains stagnant. The number of jobs in the mining and logging sector, which includes oil and gas workers, grew by a mere .9 percent since this time last year, and it was already low due to the devastating natural gas price slump.
Is a boom even a boom when it has no jobs? In Wyoming's case, the answer is yes, at least sort of. All of that extra oil production, which was sold over the last year at a high price, brought in enough severance taxes to offset the decline resulting from the natural gas slump, and then some. Sales taxes on oil drilling equipment also got a boost.
The Wyoming situation throws into question the notion that if you lower taxes or give generous tax breaks to mining or drilling companies, the jobs they will bring to the state as a result will more than offset the loss in tax revenues. That might work sometimes, but without a relatively strong policy for taxing oil and gas companies, Wyoming would be in the economic pits right now, watching empty-handed as companies siphon its oil across state lines in exchange for fat profits. Instead, the state's bringing in over $1 billion per year to fund schools, roads, conservation and a trust fund.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. Follow @jonnypeace Homepage image of drilling in New Mexico from Flickr user Drriss & Marrionn.]]>
Because wind and solar fluctuate, utilities build expensive power plants, usually fueled by natural gas, to smooth energy spikes and dips. The cost increases the price of solar and wind. Renewable energy advocates argue that, instead of the West's 38 grid operating entities each having its own fleet of backup plants, it makes more sense to pool resources, buying and selling backup power on the open market ("The power grid may determine whether we can kick our carbon habit," HCN, 6/3/13).
As of Oct. 1, the California Independent System Operator and PacifiCorps, which together power 32 million customers, joined such a scheme, called an energy imbalance market — the first one ever created in the West. It will help them smooth out variations in burgeoning renewable power sources and make those sources more cost-effective and appealing to utilities and their customers. Should the market succeed, proponents expect other Western grid operators to join in as well.]]>
Turns out their instruments were just fine. The atmosphere? Not so much. In early October, the researchers released the results of their study, which used satellites to "discover a regional signature of large CH4 emissions not seen in prior studies." The study's title says it all: "Four corners: The largest US methane anomaly viewed from space."
The findings led to a lot of speculation regarding what was going on in this region. And, perhaps naturally, many of the headlines and sound bites that spilled into the Twittersphere following the study's release were accuracy-challenged. Some simply blamed "fracking" for the methane releases. Then the Associated Press came out with a story, picked up by many outlets, that attributed the problem to methane venting during coal mining, not fracking. Fuelfix.com took it a step further, with the headline, "Coal, not fracking, blamed for US methane hot spot." None of which quite jives with the study's actual conclusions.
The hot spot's boundaries line up fairly closely with the most intensely drilled area of the San Juan Basin, which for decades has been one of the most prolific natural gas, i.e. methane, patches in the nation. Drilling for oil and gas has been going on here since the 1920s. Coal mining and two huge coal power plants were layered on top of that in the '60s and '70s to turn the landscape into a fossil fuel sacrifice zone, and the economy into one dominated by the energy industry.
Yet another drilling frenzy ensued when economically feasible methods were found in the 1980s to extract coalbed methane — natural gas that's trapped in underground coal formations.* Since then, the land has been increasingly pockmarked by drill pads, thousands of miles of roads and a tangled web of pipelines, compressor stations, processing plants and other oil and gas related infrastructure, helping to make the basin the nation's biggest source of coalbed methane. As the study found, it's also the nation's biggest source of the potent greenhouse gas, accounting for as much as 10 percent of all the methane emissions from natural gas operations in the country.
Since the shale gas boom erupted in the mid-2000s, scientists have been focusing on methane released during hydraulic fracturing, the process of shooting water and chemicals and sand at extremely high pressure into a drilled well to get the oil or gas flowing from tight shale formations. Given the high volume of oil and gas development in the basin, it wasn't a stretch to assume hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was to blame for the emissions. But the scientists aren't so sure. From NASA's press release:
The study's lead author, Eric Kort of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, noted the study period (2003-2009 + 2012) predates the widespread use of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, near the hot spot. This indicates the methane emissions should not be attributed to fracking …
Actually, coalbed methane wells are, and were, fracked. A 2004 Environmental Protection Agency study delved into the practice, and included a detailed look at fracking CBM wells in the San Juan Basin. Approximately 2,500 coalbed methane wells were operating in the basin in 2001, it says, and "almost every well has been fracture-stimulated, using either conventional hydraulic fracturing in perforated casing or cavitation cycling in open holes." It's a fascinating read, particularly for those who think fracking is a newcomer to the energy world.
That seems to indicate that fracking could have created the hot spot, after all. Yet if it is the primary cause, then other major drilling zones at that time — the Piceance Basin in northern Colorado, the Powder River Basin and Jonah Field in Wyoming — would also be methane emissions hot spots. But they're not — those places show up as a pale yellow on the map, meaning there's a higher-than-background level of methane, but nothing like in the Four Corners. Most baffling is that Weld County, a northwestern Colorado sweet spot not only for oil and gas production, but also for cattle feedlots — known methane emitters — does not appear to be a methane hotspot, either. (The second brightest hot spot on the map appears to be above Harris Ranch, California's largest beef producer, but also near the Bakersfield oil fields).
How about the AP's read of the study, that the methane was released during coal mining? It's possible: The same coalbed methane that drillers are after is a hazard to coal miners, and it's vented from underground mines or released fugitively into the air during surface mining. Surely, that's one source, as the study acknowledges, but probably relatively insignificant. After all, other coal mining regions, most notably the Powder River Basin where mines are many orders of magnitude larger than the three mines in the San Juan Basin, aren't plagued by glaring hot spots. (I suspect that the AP writer was confusing coalbed methane production with venting methane from coal mines — an honest mistake since the two processes are similar, with different goals).
So what's the cause? Leaks, says Kort, the study's author. A bunch of leaks. From wells, from pipelines, from processing plants, maybe even from the coalbeds themselves, where they broach the surface. Nearly one trillion cubic feet of natural gas, i.e. methane, is sucked out of the basin every year, and it all flows through infrastructure that has been around for years, maybe decades, developing fissures, cracks, pinholes, loose valves or the like. Add the sum of all those leaks to the other emissions in the basin, from coal mining, power plants, hydraulic fracturing, drilling and cars and trucks, and it's hardly surprising that the place is a methane hotspot. The region's entire fossil fuel industry, which is immense, is to blame.
It's a discouraging conclusion. If there was just one culprit, such as hydraulic fracturing or coal mine venting, a solution would have been conceivable, if politically challenging to achieve. But if, indeed, thousands upon thousands of tiny leaks and fugitive emissions are to blame, spread out among that dazzling array of infrastructure and equipment, how does one even begin to tackle the issue?
Over the last few years, coalbed methane and other natural gas drilling in the San Juan Basin has been on a sort of hiatus, waiting out the current price slump. But the boom's bouncing back in the form of fracking-intensive oil drilling in the Mancos Shale. A new wave of drilling will be accompanied by more pipelines, more infrastructure and maybe more leaks. The Four Corners could be a hot spot for years to come.
*The coalbed methane boom raised an interesting question with huge implications: Does the owner of the coal also own the methane? The US Supreme Court ultimately considered the question. Find out what they decided.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. He's based in Durango, Colorado, on the northern edge of the Four Corners methane hot spot. Follow @jonnypeace
Well, that journalist was me. And I did say that.
And oil prices have been dropping. The current slump, thus far, has pushed the price from $110 per barrel this summer, to about $90 now, the lowest it's been since 2010. A big drop, yes. A catastrophe like the one in the 1980s that led Wyoming and Colorado drillers to scrap their rigs and get out of the business? No. At least not yet (the price would have to hit $30 to match the '80s bust).
Still, the price plunge is potentially a big deal, and soon could be felt in the emerging oil plays in the West.
The price drop is being driven by a combination of factors. As economic growth in places like China has slowed, so has global demand for petroleum. At the same time, supply is relatively abundant as the chaos in the Middle East has yet to significantly disrupt production. Saudi Arabia appears so far to be more interested in holding on to market share rather than keeping prices high, so it has yet to cut production as it has done when prices dipped in the past. And, of course, the domestic oil boom — paired with a pause in our petroleum gluttony — has enabled the U.S. to cut oil imports, leaving more on the world market. Supply is up, demand is down and prices are, too.
The current domestic oil boom is typically attributed to an advance in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies that allowed drillers to access oil and gas locked up in shale formations. That's true, but not the whole story. While the boom was enabled by technology, it was actually fueled by high natural gas and oil prices, and never would have occurred if prices had remained at 1990s levels — unconventional drilling is simply too expensive. Rig counts follow prices. That's why, when natural gas prices crashed in 2009, the rigs went down with them. In that case, the overall rig count remained healthy because the rigs could simply move to a neighboring county or state and go after high-priced oil.
If oil prices drop another $10 or so — analysts say that $80 per barrel is the point at which unconventional drilling stops making economic sense — we're likely to see a drilling bust. Only now, natural gas prices are still depressed, so drillers can't simply chase another commodity (unless it's water, I suppose). Though all the wells drilled in recent years would continue to produce, the impact on places like North Dakota would be profound, since the drilling phase of oil and gas production is the most labor-intensive.
Even if prices stay high enough to keep the rigs drilling, oil-patch economies will feel the sting of the 20 percent price drop. Royalties, severance taxes, property taxes and the like are usually based on the value of the oil or gas being extracted. So states and counties that rely heavily on such revenue streams are going to end up with less cash in their coffers at the end of the year than they anticipated. Counties that are rich in natural gas, but don't have oil, are still reeling from the price crash a half-decade ago.
I'm not about to make a prediction about how low prices will drop, or how many drill rigs will be idled. But I will say this: No matter how low oil prices go, they'll eventually come back up, and the drill rigs will come back with them.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. Photograph of pumpjack near Lander, Wyoming, on hcn.org homepage by Michael C. Rygel via Wikimedia Commons.
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At first listen, it sounds like a bunch of hot air. Hoover Dam is hard to match as a component of the grid, $8 billion is a lot of cash to scrounge up, and the permitting alone could take years, even decades. Besides, a similarly ambitious project by Power Company of Wyoming — two huge wind farms paired with the direct current TransWest Express line to California — is already much farther along than Pathfinder. In fact, the Pathfinder plan isn't even new: It's been on the table, stagnating for years.
Still, there are some twists in that new/old proposal that are buzzworthy: A massive energy storage component that utilizes underground salt caverns in Utah; and the proposal to use an existing transmission line that stretches from Utah to California. Though the whole endeavor may be pie-in-the-sky, it gives a glimpse into a post-coal — and possibly post-hydropower — West, and reminds us how inextricably entwined the Interior West's energy ambitions are with California's energy hunger.
The Pathfinder project would work like this: Wind turbines near the southeastern Wyoming towns of Wheatland and Chugwater, with a collective generating capacity of 2,100 megawatts, would send 6 to 9 terawatt-hours* of electricity each year through the 525-mile direct current Zephyr transmission line (to be built as part of the project), across Colorado, to Delta, Utah. There, the line would connect into the Intermountain high voltage direct current line that now carries coal-generated electricity from the Intermountain Power Plant, also in Delta, to Los Angeles.
Building the Zephyr DC line enables Pathfinder to send its wind power straight into the California grid, without the possibility of getting diluted by fossil-fuel-generated electricity along the way, thus making it more compatible with California's renewable portfolio standard requirements (the proposed TransWest Express is also DC). Meanwhile, since Intermountain's biggest customers, Los Angeles and other California utilities, must kick coal by 2027, the Intermountain line into L.A. should have plenty of available space on it in a few years. Rather than building a brand new transmission line across California, an increasingly difficult and expensive task, the project can utilize that existing line.
Then there's the storage part. When southern California's load, or electricity demand, is low, but the wind is cranking in Wyoming, excess energy will be used to compress air, which will be pumped into underground salt caverns near Delta. When the wind's not blowing, or when the California load increases, then the compressed air can be released, combined with natural gas, and used to turn turbines to generate electricity that can go back into the grid. It's cool stuff, for sure. But is it as good as a massive dam, like Hoover?
*Proponents claim the Pathfinder wind farm would generate 9.2 terawatt-hours, or 9.2 million megawatt-hours, per year, which would amount to a capacity factor of about 50 percent. But the capacity factor of existing Wyoming wind farms tends to be closer to 35 percent, which would result in about 6 terawatt-hours per year.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.
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These days you can ride the light rail into lower downtown, an area that was half rail yard, half urban blight back when Dynasty was wrapping up, and look up at the bright blue sky reflected in the facades of brand new, steel and glass residential/office/retail buildings. A gleaming white arc-like structure stretches over the stop for the Amtrak trains, and beyond that, the century-old, but beautifully refurbished Union Station rises up, it's neon telling you to "Travel by Train." The vibe is futuristic hip, a far cry from that old quasi-Houston feel.
Or maybe not. See that new energy-efficient building adjacent to Union Station? It is the headquarters for Antero Resources, one of the top oil and gas companies drilling in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays in the East. Apollo Exploration employees look out at all the new buildings from a couple blocks away. Noble Energy and Encana Oil and Gas have offices on the other side of downtown; in between are Anadarko, Halcon Resources, EOG Resources, QEP Resources and plenty more. One estimate has 30 percent of Denver's downtown office space occupied by oil and gas industry workers.
Over the last couple of decades, Denver has transformed itself into a greener, transit-oriented city, and a trendy magnet for millennials. Fossil fuels have helped drive the metamorphosis. According to statistics recently released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Denver now has one of the healthiest gross domestic products in the nation. The metro area's GDP grew by 4 percent in 2013, about half of which is attributed to extractive industries. Close to 30,000 people are directly employed by the fossil fuel industry in northern Colorado, either in Denver offices or the oil fields of Weld County, which yielded some $4.5 billion worth of crude last year. Greeley, a cow-town north of Denver with a massive meatpacking plant, saw its GDP jump by a whopping 10 percent, and it has nothing to do with cattle.
The story's similar across the West: The shale oil boom has pulled old energy towns — thrown into a slump by the sudden and massive deflation of natural gas prices a few years ago — back into the black, as well as creating some new ones. Among the top performing metros are Casper, Wyoming, Fargo, North Dakota, and Bakersfield, California. Jimmy Carter's dream is finally coming to fruition: Domestic oil production has reached levels not seen since Blake Carrington and Alexis Colby were duking it out on Dynasty, and oil companies are raking in record profits — $1.8 billion for Anadarko last year, $2.6 billion for EOG Resources. Now if someone would just make another Western soap opera that includes wistful, moonlit dialogue scenes on drilling rigs.
Since all the big energy states tax the oil and gas that comes from the ground, those state governments should be flush, too. And in some cases they are. Alaska regularly pulls in around $4 billion per year from energy production taxes, and North Dakota's severance tax revenues totaled more than $2.5 billion in 2013, or more than $3,500 per resident. Colorado, meanwhile, only got about one-sixteenth what North Dakota did (and just $28 per resident). That's despite the fact that Colorado produces about one-fifth as much oil as North Dakota, and nearly ten times the natural gas.
Colorado, it turns out, has one of the lowest effective severance tax rates in energy country. A Headwaters Economics analysis found that Colorado would collect about $1.2 million in taxes from the same well from which Wyoming or North Dakota would collect $2.2 million. And a Colorado Legislative Council study earlier this year painted an even more disparate picture. When exemptions and tax credits are figured in, Colorado has an effective severance tax rate of just 1.5 percent, compared to North Dakota's 10.7 percent.
In theory, that would lure drillers to set up their rigs on the Colorado rather than the Wyoming side of the state line, thus giving Colorado the jobs, as well as state and local taxes and impact fees, those rigs bring. But a look at drilling activity in oil and gas fields that cross state lines show no such preference — geology and land ownership, and perhaps regulations, appear to be more influential. Similarly, despite the fact that Colorado has a 4.63 percent corporate income tax, and Wyoming has none, oil companies tend to set up shop in Denver, not Cheyenne. Regardless, another study, this one out of the University of Michigan, found that many states have actually been lowering their tax rates as production has increased.
Severance tax allocation varies from state to state — some goes to general funds, Wyoming sends kids to college, Alaska sends checks to everyone. Ideally some of the money's put away into a trust fund, or used in a way that makes the affected communities more able to weather the next bust. A repeat of the 80s crash is unlikely — the preceding boom was driven less by scarcity than by geopolitics, first, and then federal energy policy, including massive subsidies, which were discontinued by the Reagan administration. This boom is driven by drilling technology and the rising price of oil, which is fueled by burgeoning demand from China, India and developing countries. That's not likely to go away entirely, but every boom busts someday, and when it does, Colorado may regret throwing away all those would-be severance tax revenues.
But when that day comes, Denver will be far better prepared to deal with it. Despite energy's outsized role, the economy is far more diversified than in the early '80s — finance, high tech and so-called cleantech, which includes wind and solar companies, are also big sectors. Plus, public funds have been invested wisely in infrastructure, transportation and in making the city a desirable place for companies — including oil companies — to relocate, with or without high taxes.
And as long as the oil and money are flowing, those script writers may as well start working on a Dynasty for the millennial set.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.
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That cyclist? He was me. I know, I wear pink lycra. Hot pink. It brings out the color in my eyes and, also, it makes me more visible, in the naive belief that motorists like yourself will aim your steering wheel away, rather than toward, a fellow human being. Maybe you're the guy who wrote that comment online recently: "I've never seen a friendly bicyclist in Durango … I must say, my desire to not smash them under my car is no longer balanced by my desire to not go to jail." And maybe you were talking about me.
Anyway, I'm writing to apologize. For the profanity, for making derogatory references to your mother and your dog, for flipping you the bird, and for getting this close to marring your car's paint with my blood. My behavior was rude. Emily Post would not approve. And yes, I know, my fellow cyclists sometimes do stupid things. They — okay, we — might roll through stop signs and ride two abreast on country roads and sometimes swerve into traffic to avoid gravel or glass or a pothole or turn without signaling or even cross the double yellow as we strive for a Strava course record. I drive a car, too, and that kind of thing drives me crazy, not least because it gives a bad name to other bikers.
But here's the thing. While my words and actions might annoy you, cause a little ache in your heart and even inspire murderous rage in your soul, it's nothing compared to the damage you, while piloting that car, can inflict with an ill-timed flick of the wheel, a moment of inattention, a rush to get home in time to watch the game. Hit me straight on? I'm dead. Playfully whack me with that giant side mirror? I'm in the ditch, seriously injured, maybe dead. That car of yours, two tons of internal combustion-powered steel and glass and plastic and wire, can maim, injure, kill.
The evidence is in the numbers. From 1994 to 2012, more than 13,000 cyclists and 90,000 pedestrians were killed on U.S. streets and roads (another 50,000 cyclists were injured). Both numbers pale in comparison to the number of motorists killed, but that's only because there are far more people in cars. A 2003 study found that in the U.S., a cyclist is 12 times and a pedestrian 23 times more likely to be killed on the road than a motorist. And New Mexico, California, Arizona, Colorado and Oregon all have higher cyclist fatality rates than the nation as a whole. A majority of the deaths occur on rural, high-trafficked roads of the kind we seem to specialize in here in much of the West.
Most mornings, I send my two daughters on a two-mile bike ride to school. Sometimes they groan about the heat, or the cold, but I know that they appreciate the freedom their bikes give them. And I'm happy not to have to climb into a carbon-spewing car and contribute to the stop-and-go traffic of commuters, students and parents — yes, we have traffic jams even in small-town Colorado. And yet, every day as they ride down the street, those statistics, and fear, run through my brain. I point them away from the fastest route because it involves a narrow stretch of heavily-traveled road with absolutely no shoulder — though it is a popular stretch for cyclists, our town and county government can't even get it together to build a small space for bikes and pedestrians. Even so, most of their route is on streets, meaning they are relying on motorists to pay attention, be careful and slow down. Forgive me for my lack of confidence.
Progress is being made, though. Just last week, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced a federal initiative to make the nation's streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians. The program will start out by assessing road safety in every state, and then will provide "multiple resources to help communities build streets that are safer for people walking, bicycling and taking public transportation." They'll guide communities on creating "road diets," or redesigning streets to better accommodate bikers and walkers. "When used on rural highways that pass through small towns," according to a U.S. Department of Transportation press release, "(road diets) can reduce crashes by almost half."
While waiting for that to kick in, California, one of the deadliest states for bikers, implemented a law that requires motorists to give cyclists three feet of space or more when passing them. Twenty-three states already had similar laws, including Arizona, Nevada, Washington and Colorado. Most of its value is probably educational: The rule lets drivers know that it's dangerous to pass too closely to bicyclists (even when the vehicle doesn't touch the cyclist, its draft can exert force on the cyclist, causing him to swerve and possibly crash). But in my experience, around 7 out of 10 drivers regularly violate the rule here in Colorado, particularly on rural roads. And there's very little enforcement, even when the violation results in an accident. In fact, it's fairly rare for motorists to be prosecuted and convicted for hitting a cyclist at all.
Cyclists must take some responsibility here. We need to abide by the rules of the road, not ride like idiots and ride defensively, as if we were invisible. The one time I got hit by a car, it was probably my fault as much as the driver's. More caution on my end could have prevented the accident. Still, 40 percent of fatal bike/car collisions entail the car hitting the bike from behind. Those bikers, now dead, never saw it coming. They were powerless to save themselves. So, motorists, a plea: Pay attention, slow down and remember that, as annoying and gaudy as those lycra-clad bikers might be, they are dads, moms, daughters and sons. And that car you drive, no matter how much you adore it, is a deadly weapon. Treat it that way.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.
Follow @jonnypeace]]>
Once again, Burning Man has come and gone: 70,000 people have converged on Black Rock City, which pops up every year in late August in the Nevada desert north of Reno and then more or less disappears in a cloud of dust. This year's art theme was "Caravansary," but the many villages and camps included old favorites, such as the air-conditioned "Orgy Dome" sponsored by a group called "And Then There's Only LOVE." The shenanigans — which take place throughout the week before Labor Day on a playa, or dry lake bed — traditionally climax with the burning of a giant man-shaped effigy.
However chaotic it may appear, Burning Man is by no means a free-for-all. Nor is it free: Tickets this year were $380. Organizers say they spent $26 million to put the spectacle together, with some $4.5 million going to the Bureau of Land Management. But even that couldn't buy good weather. Usually, the biggest elemental problem is incessant dust, which makes its way into every nook and cranny of every man, woman, machine and anything in between. This year, though, the enemy was mud. When the first wave of "Burners" showed up on Aug. 25, they were turned away because heavy rains had transformed the playa into a gloppy mess that mired vehicles and pedestrians. Burning Man was closed for the next 24 hours or so.
So where'd all the burners go in the meantime? The Wal-Mart in Reno, of course. Well, not all of them, but quite a few found their way to the retailer's parking lot (which allows overnight RV stays). It wasn't quite what they had in mind. Burning Man (except for those pricey tickets) is a cash-free zone, Walmart not so much. But then again, a Super Wal-Mart's almost as big as Black Rock City, and the stores do have a hallucinogenic air about them. "We're just trying to stay positive," a woman named Driftwood told the Associated Press. "Positivity can raise everything up." There is no word on whether a makeshift Orgy Dome was erected in the Wal-Mart parking lot, but once the sun dried the playa, the gates re-opened and the Man was ultimately burned, once again.
Another, albeit much smaller, pop-up town raised a recent ruckus in a Colorado ski community. Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light held a contest this summer, the 1,000 winners of which would get to spend "three days of unexpected fun" in the "epic town" of Whatever, USA, which is actually a real town, painted blue and otherwise altered to fit the Whatever theme, whatever that might be. The real town in this case was Crested Butte, Colorado, whose citizens, ironically, pride themselves on their burg's authenticity. Anheuser-Busch offered to pay the town $250,000 to rent and paint the historic main drag to entertain its contest winners for a few days. The details of the event are supposed to be kept secret until the last minute, to keep the place from being flooded by freeloading, non-contest-winner party animals. But that didn't mean the locals didn't know about it, and less than two weeks before the event, hundreds of Crested Butte residents, apparently lacking the blasé temperament of an ideal Whateverarian, packed a town board meeting to express both support and opposition. Supporters ultimately got their way, though the beer company had to pony up another $250,000 to make it happen, and Crested Butte elected officials shrugged their shoulders as their streets turned blue.
LION, OPERA, BEAR and OTTER COUNTRY
If you encounter a mountain lion, experts say you should make yourself look large and threatening and wave a big stick around. You also might try singing opera, as Kyra Kopenstonsky did when a mountain lion stalked her as she was hiking near Placerville, Colorado. It worked: She made it out of the woods without a scratch, though she didn't say whether it was Mozart or Verdi that did the trick. But if you run into an otter, forget about singing, just get out of there quick. An otter attacked an 8-year-old boy swimming in a river in a park near Seattle. When his grandmother tried to help, she was attacked, too. Both humans were hospitalized; the otter's still at large. Oh, and don't feed the bears. DON'T. FEED. THE. BEARS. On Aug. 5, a Lake Tahoe woman, who had reportedly been feeding the bears around her house for years, was attacked, bitten and scratched by a black bear. Just in case the attack, which put her in the hospital, didn't get the message across, she may be cited for unlawfully feeding wildlife. Although it appears that the bears may no longer need handouts: Washington State University researchers recently found that bruins have figured out how to utilize tools to get at a glazed doughnut.]]>
Overspending on Tesla – or any other company – could be a net-loss game in which fewer public resources are then available for investments in areas that benefit all employers, such as education and training, efficient infrastructure, and public safety. All state and local taxes combined equal less than 2 percent of a typical company's cost structure, but lost tax revenue comes 100 percent out of public budgets.
While the Tesla incentives are sizable, they aren't the biggest Western state and local governments have offered a corporation by any means, according to an incentive database compiled by Good Jobs First. In 1993, New Mexico gave Intel some $645 million in incentives to locate its facilities in Rio Rancho, a suburb of Albuquerque; 11 years later it added another $2 billion (Intel has also gotten big incentives from Oregon and Arizona). Oregon has given Nike over $2 billion in incentives over the years, and Washington has kept Boeing around by giving over $8 billion.
Utah hasn't given any billion-dollar-plus incentives, but has nevertheless been a big and able player in the incentive game, handing out millions to companies that clearly don't need any help, like Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile, Utah spends less per student on education than any other state in the nation. Colorado doesn't give huge incentives, but does give a lot, primarily to energy companies, including: Northern Colorado Wind, BP, WPX Energy, Encana, Bill Barrett Corp., and Exxon-Mobil.
Nevada has been relatively stingy with its incentives, rarely handing out more than $10 million to any single corporation. The exception was Apple, which in 2012 received $89 million in incentives from state and local governments to lure a server/data center to the Reno area. Renewable energy companies have also received similar, albeit far smaller packages from Nevada.
It's not easy to quantify the long-term payoff of these gambles. The Apple server center in Nevada provided a lot of construction jobs, but just a few dozen permanent ones -- school districts and mega-resort casinos on the Las Vegas Strip are by far Nevada's biggest employers, bigger even than Tesla will be (but with lower salaries). And over in financially-strapped New Mexico, the $2.6 billion in subsidies to Intel have resulted in 3,500 jobs, making it just the state's 13th biggest employer, outranked by universities, national labs, school districts and health care providers.
Of course, the economic impact of a $5 billion, 5 million-square-foot factory goes beyond just the jobs at the plant. If Tesla really employs 6,500 people, and pays them at least $25 per hour, as it promises, that will ripple through the economy as those people buy new homes, shop at local businesses and the like -- the Governor's office expects the factory to increase the state's employment by 2 percent. Under the incentive agreement, Tesla will also contribute $37.5 million in direct payments to public education. And the Gigafactory also is likely to increase Nevada's draw as a headquarters for renewable energy companies, perhaps creating other jobs, and perhaps more customers for the aforementioned lithium mine. So maybe the billions in subsidies make sense.
But then, who knows, maybe Tesla would have moved to Nevada for far less money. And Nevada could have used all those incentives to build another school or two. Or hire some teachers: That $1.25 billion could pay the salaries of more than 22,000 Nevada public school teachers.
Note: Since this article was first published, the Good Jobs First subsidy tracker has continued to add subsidies to its database. We have updated our chart accordingly as of 9/10. The chart's total for Nevada does not yet include the Tesla incentives because they have yet to be approved by state lawmakers.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. He is based in Durango, Colorado.
Follow @jonnypeace]]>
It's probably useless to speculate about what O'Keeffe herself might have thought about the drilling. While she obviously had a deep appreciation for and connection to this particular landscape, her fondness was that of an artist, not an environmentalist, and her aesthetic sensibilities might have been more offended by the constant stream of highway traffic than the slow grind of a completed oil well.
The late summer afternoon ritual commences, and high puffy clouds coalesce into a grey almost as dark as these elephantine dunes. Time to go. Some seventy years ago, as a war raged in Europe and scientists on a mesa not far from O'Keeffe's home developed a weapon that could destroy worlds, the artist spent the night out here in a tent. When she awoke, this is what she saw:
It was a pale dawn, as dismal as anything I've ever seen— everything grey; grey sage, grey wet sand underfoot, grey hills, big gloomy looking clouds, a very pale moon … and still the wind.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. He is based in Durango, Colorado, and tweets @jonnypeace.]]>
As I dug through past blotters, though, I had a hard time scraping up incidents that involved land mines, riots, terrorists or ambush of police officers.
And yet, over the past several years, La Plata County's law enforcement agencies have received over 5,000 battlefield-tested items from the Department of Defense, including (but certainly not limited to): at least 100 bayonet knives, three ordnance- and explosive-disposal robots, 18 5.56 mm rifles (M16s), five 7.62 mm rifles (M14s), 15 .45 caliber pistols, 30 bipods for machine guns, four night vision sniper scopes, two exercise bikes and a Cat-1 MaxxPro Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP).
They got them through program 1033, which distributes surplus military equipment to local law enforcement agencies at little or no cost, essentially equipping cops and sheriffs' departments in even the most rural Western counties to go to war. Though it's been happening for decades, the militarization of our local cops has escalated in recent years, as billions of dollars worth of equipment is shipped home from Afghanistan and Iraq. The protests in Ferguson, Missouri in response to the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, brought a heavy-handed response from the police. Images and accounts of local cops outfitted with military-grade gear have alarmed the public and politicians.
Back in La Plata County some citizens recently expressed concern about all of the new gear, particularly the MRAP. So Durango Herald reporter Chuck Slothower asked the sheriff's office why it needed a $658,000 armored combat vehicle. The vehicle, a department official said, would only be used to rescue people from a natural disaster, or to evacuate people during an armed standoff. He also said he felt a lot safer (from irate cyclists and trail mix-pilfering bears, perhaps?) while cruising around in the thing. Okay, fair enough. But what about the M16s, the bayonets and night vision sniper scopes?
Program 1033 was created as program 1208 in 1990 in order to give local law enforcement the equipment they needed to fight the so-called War on Drugs. Our local sheriff has been an enthusiastic soldier in that conflict since he took office in 1995, and it hasn't always gone well. In 1997, the SWAT team entered a house on a marijuana bust and roughed up and pointed guns at kids (they did the same in a bust a year earlier), drawing a lawsuit. Then, in 2007, on a meth bust, the disoriented team, equipped with combat gear and gas masks, entered a home and encountered not a gun-toting Walter White, but 77-year-old Virginia Herrick, who was watching the Price is Right at the time. They ordered her to the floor and searched the home before realizing that they had gone to the wrong address. "I'm not about to argue with those big old guys," Herrick told the Durango Herald, "especially when they've got guns and those big old sledgehammers."
These are the same folks who now have an MRAP and an increasingly large arsenal. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Innocent folks can die, for one thing. The conservative think tank the Cato Institute has mapped botched paramilitary raids across the U.S., some of which have led to both civilians and officers getting killed. And a recent analysis by Richard Florida for CityLab found that Western states, namely Arizona, New Mexico and Utah -- all of which are big recipients of program 1033 gear -- are among the worst in the nation for arrest-related deaths per capita.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. He is based in Durango, Colorado, and tweets @jonnypeace.
Statistics released earlier this year by the National Highway Safety Administration suggest that your fear is perfectly rational. In 2012 — the most recent year of data — more than 1,300 pedestrians and cyclists were killed on Western roads. And Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico had unusually high pedestrian fatality rates, putting them among the top ten most dangerous in the nation for walkers.
Meanwhile, being safely ensconced inside a hurtling can of death — er, a car — isn't so safe, either, particularly in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, where motor vehicle fatality rates were about twice the national rate. While that's likely due to the fact that folks in those states drive more miles, on average, than just about anywhere else in the U.S., there's also a correlation between fatalities and energy booms: Many of North Dakota's fatal crashes were clustered in Williams and McKenzie counties, home of the Bakken oil rush, and that state has seen a major jump in the number of fatal crashes involving large trucks.
As has long been the case, Native Americans are killed by car accidents — both as occupants and as pedestrians — at a much higher rate than other races and ethnicities. New Mexico's poor ranking (number 2 in the nation) in pedestrian safety is partly driven by a high pedestrian death rate in McKinley and San Juan counties, both of which have a high population of Native Americans. An analysis by Governing magazine found that pedestrian fatalities also occur at a higher rate in poor neighborhoods nationwide, and New Mexico is one of the poorest states (the South outdoes the West, though, when it comes to killing-by-car).
On the brighter side, the nation's highways are generally getting safer, for both motorists and pedestrians. The period from 2009-2012 was the least deadliest string of four years on the nation's highways since 1966, and the fatality rate dropped from 26 deaths per 100,000 population in '66, to 11 per 100,000 in 2012. Pedestrian fatalities have also decreased nationally over time.
Still, one death is too many, and hundreds is downright barbaric. It's time our state and local highway departments stepped up and made cyclist and pedestrian safety the top priority of road and highway design and construction. We simply should not have to fear for our lives when taking a simple stroll or ride down the road.


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Syufy Enterprises
150 Pelican Way,
San Rafael, CA 94901
(415) 448-8300
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in Business
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- For more than 64 years, Century Theatres has been bringing the highest quality of entertainment to American movie audiences. In 1941, founder Raymond J. Syufy opened his first indoor movie theater in Vallejo, Calif. Combining first-run films with first-rate business skills, Syufy expanded throughout northern California. He then went on to lay the foundation of one of the country's largest and most successful regional theater circuits. Today, the second generation is in charge. Brothers Raymond W. Syufy and Joseph Syufy continue to champion the values their father instilled throughout the enterprise while building, maintaining and exceeding the standards in state-of-the-art movie theaters. Century Theatres continues to pursue an aggressive expansion campaign. The company owns and operates over 1,000 screens in 12 states including California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Iowa, Oregon, Illinois, Texas, Alaska, and South Dakota. The company is headquartered in San Rafael, Calif.
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wallpaper: Stacey by Wen-MWatch
©2008-2016 Wen-M
Beautiful work! I love it!
great work!!!!!!!!! i like the colors and everything
This is so very very beautiful! It reminds me of how I felt in Fern Gulley when the fairy made the seed grow. Anyhow, this is wonderful!
I really love you work! ^^
very nice details and colors
Dude this picture is awesome. I love how it makes you feel like your there, it has really great depth to it as well as lighting. I like what you did with this piece and definitely deserve a +fav.
It's so cool!
I love the expression. She just has a great smile.
Looks wonderful...
Have you ever been to Barcelona? It reminds me a lot of the wax faery figure from the "Bosc de les fades" tabern, near the wax museum.
Have you ever been to Barcelona? It reminds me a lot of the wax faery figure from the "Bosc de les fades" tabern, near the wax museum.
EEEEEEEEEEEE I love it! I'm on the seldom-used home computer, so when I get on my laptop I will def. make this the new wallpaper! A few more inches and my hair will be about that long!
wooooo long hair, i wanna see photo
A very unique Smile
wow, very pretty
Very pretty face on the girl.
face is cute..and atmosphere is nice..even if lines are erm...ah whatever..
very pretty love the detail!
I love the quality of this gal's hair and the beautiful expression on her face. This is one of my favorites of yours. Good job!
you must sign them, I've seen that you're one of the most persons with art theft problems :s
steal all they want, what i treasure the most isnt my work, but my friends <3
she looks so pure, and cute, like the creatures or people that live inside the mistical forests
thats the impresion it gaves to me
thats the impresion it gaves to me
Stacey's mom has got it goin' on...shes all I want and I've been waiting for so long
Love the drawing and everything!
Love the drawing and everything!
I love how you captured her expression.
i really like the hair ^_^
she's so pretty \>w</
out of all your art, this is one of my favorites
This one is probably my favourite out of them :3 <3 <3
its grogeous man lol and so is she XD great work!!!
lol i dont think i ever commented one of your pics but ive had u on watch for the longest i love all ur work man youve inspired me alot!
lol i dont think i ever commented one of your pics but ive had u on watch for the longest i love all ur work man youve inspired me alot!
very nice
I'm entranced; it's like I'm lost in a forest, and all of a sudden I see this hottie sitting behind a tree smirking at me ~O:
This is very nice. Thanks for sharing.
Great lighting
Beautifully done.
the background looks so great! you do amazing stuff wen-m-chan!! she's very pretty! i think i'm going to use this one as a wallpaper if you let me
Cute facial expression! I love the hair and the surrounding as well.
beautiful o3o the atmosphere awww X3 and her face is sooo wonderful *3*
woah awesome as usual
I like her faical expression its cute ^^
I like her faical expression its cute ^^
aw, awsome
Perfect, as usual
I love her shy/quiet smile in this. Better than the usual emotionless smile I find in pictures. I'm trying to learn how to draw that kind of expression. (Ah well, practice makes perfect)
I can easily understand why you love it so much. XD


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I completely agree, if the rider is not doing their job correctly, the horse cannot do theirs. Our horses reflect every movement we make in the sadle.
As many Top Level Riders say - 99.9% of mistakes that occur, is rider error.
Also, if the rider is riding hands first and seat last, this will be the effect as well, but that falls under the "dressage" category to ride seat into legs into hands to aid your horse to round and come up into you.


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* Location: on the main blvd., near stores
* Pool: they have a nice basic outdoor pool and hot tub
* Staff: courteous
* Rooms: Clean and plenty of blankets/pillows and they have A/C
* Breakfast included
* No bedbugs, etc.
* Ample parking, so often this is missed unless you don't get a spot, but I noticed a few vehicles with U-Haul trailers taking multiple spots and there were still spots left for the rest of us.
* Location: on the main blvd surrounded by lots of traffic
* Restaurant: none, but with so many in the area it was not missed
* Rooms: did I say Basic?? But you do get shampoo and 4 towels...
* Breakfast: Paper plates, etc. Best thing was waffles, but it was all cook yourself and everything else was very basic, no fresh fruit or any fruit, but they had a few breads, yogurt, juice, 3 cereals and coffee. They had about 6-7 tables so we had to take our food back to the room.
All in all, it was basic, if that is all you need, then this meets the bar. Perfectly fine for a quick overnight stay and be on your way. This is not the kind of place you would generally have horrible memories about, but not the wonderful ones either. It is a basic hotel and it is doing "basic" well.
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A second clipping will be required later, with cutter-bar tilted well upward.
It had open guard fingers, a knife made of triangular sections, reciprocating in the guard, and a cutter-bar on a hinged frame.
When the cutter-bar of the mower is tilted upward, the danger of smothering is reduced.
The basic idea in the reaper, the cutter-bar, is the whole of the mower, and the machine developed with the reaper.
This machine does not cut the wheat close to the ground, but the cutter-bar, over twenty-five feet in length, takes off the heads.


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Welcome to The Orchard
The Orchard is a Residential covenant controlled community in the unincorporated Golden, CO area near 44th and Fig Streets. It is in Jefferson County with scenic vistas of the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
On this website you will find links to the covenants, by-laws, architectural standards, past meeting minutes, and anything else deemed of interest to the community.
The Current Board
Feel free to contact us by using the e-mail information below.
|Justice Keller
|Mary Parsley
|Vice President
|Bill Brown
Fence Damage
Contact the board immediately regarding damage to any perimeter fence by sending an e-mail to email@example.com. Be sure to include your name, contact information, and a brief description of the damage.
Exterior Property Improvements
For questions or information regarding exterior improvements to your property reach out to the Design Review Committee by sending an e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.com. Be sure to include your name, contact information, and a brief description of the improvements your are interested in making.
This site is always being updated! Please feel free to send suggestions to the President for website content or inaccuracies.


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Private Efforts Strengthen the Market
Schneider, Howard, Mortgage Banking
America's real estate industry combines government and private activities. Lenders often assert that public policy needs to support housing--such as by keeping interest rates low--while at the same time reducing regulatory burdens.
But relying solely on government initiatives to overcome market imbalances, boost confidence and jump-start demand won't yield satisfactory results. Our industry is healthiest when appropriate regulatory supervision is combined with a healthy dose of innovation by private companies that understand market needs.
For instance, some home builders are reducing housing costs by using factory-made modular components when possible, rather than totally constructing on-site. Another example of innovation, is a new homeowners insurance policy being rolled out by Home Value Insurance Co., Columbus, Ohio, which protects consumers against losses on property sales.
Yet another example ol private efforts to solve industry concerns is offered by Comergence Compliance Monitoring LLC, Mission Viejo, California. President Greg Schroeder notes that ongoing due diligence on third-party originators isn't mandated by government regulations. Yet studies have shown incidents when mortgage brokers who have lost their state licenses have continued selling loans to wholesale firms, he adds.
Lenders keep reporting high levels of mortgage fraud on seasoned loans, according to suspicious activity reports (SARs) data from the U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
"Reports of mortgage fraud in the U.S. surged by nearly 88 percent in the second quarter of this year" compared with 12 months earlier, states The Wall Street Journal. More than four-fifths of that activity occurred more than two years ago, the Journal notes.
Faster approvals
Reduced costs and faster turnaround are possible when lenders outsource part of the broker approval and monitoring process, claims Schroeder. Otherwise, he says, lenders must increase or reduce the number of workers performing those functions as market conditions fluctuate.
Lenders are interested in seeing profit-and-loss statements (P&Ls) and balance sheets on potential brokers and correspondents, Schroeder adds. Affiliate companies such as escrow firms also are identified, and any loan quality-control reports are included in the information Comergence puts together. Regulatory sanctions and lawsuits against broker candidates are compiled as well.
Schroeder says lenders are looking for previous criminal activity or current financial strains that could encourage an originator to commit fraud. Ongoing surveillance of public records allows Comergence to alert lenders if, for instance, one of their brokers files for bankruptcy. …


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Administrative Assistant
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Associate of Applied Science (AAS)
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Text of the Crooked River Collaborative Water Security and Jobs Act of 2014
This bill was enacted after being signed by the President on December 18, 2014. The text of the bill below is as of ().
Source: GPO
The text of this bill is not yet available. Please check back soon.


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Domingo "Dingo" Sanchez Villereal
Captain / Arms Master
Click here to send a missive to Dingo.
After several years of running successful defenestration workshops at public houses, Dingo met a man from the Far East who taught him many valuable lessons. The first such lesson was a thing called force redirection, greatly improving Dingo's knowledge of defenestration. Second was the philosophy of Buddhism. Dingo swiftly took to these teachings and being a quick study, mastered many of the concepts during their time as companions. Dingo's fervor for these philosophies was not always shared by his shipmates. Between that and his enjoyment of the aforementioned public houses (some of which had not yet forgotten him) he shifted the focus of his studies to the law. Given his love of philosophy, his dislike of windows, and his legal knowledge, it should come as no surprise that he has a perfect record representing himself on the grounds of self defenestration.
Kenneth "Biscuit" O'Quinn
Click here to send a missive to Biscuit.
It has not exactly been determined where this young sailor has come from, been, or is right now, but stories seem to start somewhere on the borders of England and Scotland. Biscuit tells of being trained in the east in the ways of the sword… and also claims to have a few law degrees. There are also mutinous rumors that have been attributed to Biscuit along with epic tales of thievery. However, as ship's attorney, it's hard to really determine what is or is not true. It also seems strange that no one can remember exactly how he came to be on the ship, but there he was one fine morning cooking "biscuits" and gravy for the crew.
Robert "Ramrod" McMurphy
Click here to send a missive to Ramrod.
Matthew "Main Mast" Masterson
First Mate
Click here to send a missive to Main Mast.
Main Mast has been sailing the seven seas since he was just a wee lad. Of course, when you're the largest crew member of PDXYAR, wee is a relative term. Main Mast can be found singing with Greta, crossing blades with Dingo, or quaffing an ale and toasting the glory of PDXYAR with Redgoat.
Greta Isabella Thørbjørnsen
Click here to send a missive to Greta.
The "wee but fierce" Shantymistress' origins are something of a mystery, but it's possibly fear of her threatening axe or sharp wit preventing further inquiry. Rumored to be half-Valkyrie, an escaped singing nun, and the legendary Overduchess of the Northern Fjords, she merely claims to be from "Scandahoovia" and possesses a singing voice to shake the timbers. Aside from leading the crew in all manner of shanties, you can also find her freewheeling fire from her fingertips and packing powder on the gunline… though never at the same time.
Ragnar "Redgoat" MacHaggis
Master Gunner / Captain Emeritus
Click here to send a missive to Redgoat.
Since stepping aside after several years as Captain of El Tiburon, and now serving as Master Gunner, Redgoat's talents for bravado and black powder haven't dulled the least. His tireless quest for glory continues to serve as both an inspiration and a warning to the faithful crew. Redgoat is a man whose exploits have taken him from the frigid northlands of Nova Scotia to the balmy shores of Uruguay. With a weather eye on the horizon and more than a few unlucky former shipmates in his wake, he sails with PDXYAR out of the Northwest Coast in search of adventure, fortune, and of course… glory.
Fjørd Porkins
Ship's Council / Captain Emeritus
Click here to send a missive to Porkins.
Rumored to be the descendant of Floki Vilgeroarson, the first Viking to discover Iceland, Fjord Porkins made a name for himself through a series of unfortunate events. Shortly after accidentally sinking the Dread Ship Outrageous Fortune (funny story, really!) Porkins was recruited by Redgoat and quickly became the most successful pirate aboard El Tiburon. Porkins served as Captain when the crew, during a particularly drunken evening, mistakenly thought they were voting to make him the capstan so they wouldn't have to weigh anchor anymore. Regardless, he served as Captain well, keeping the crew's pockets full of coin and their bellies full of bacon.
Guapo del Negro
Ship's Cook
Click here to send a missive to Guapo.
While Guapo misses his native land, El Tiburon is his home now and the crew are his familia. Just watch your step in the ship's galley, for there he is the Patron (not the drink, but that doesn't hurt). In his time with the crew, he still tales tales of that cursed Kraken that haunts his dreams, but when he's not, he's making tortillas… the official bread of El Tiburon!


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Let the goodness roll!
By gen dre
from Richardton, ND
Best Uses
Comments about H. WILSON Tuffy Standard Utility Carts - 24"Wx18"D Shelf - 34"H - Blue:
The cart is great! It is easy to put together. The only difficult part is the wheels don't always line up with each other. Some go completely to the edge easily and others you really have to hit them hard to go into the socket all the way.
Bottom Line Yes, I would recommend this to a friend
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Hi Folks
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A lot has changed in photography even in the last year or so, like life, you can never predict what is around the corner, just picked up a Canon Powershot A1200 from a supermarket for £20.00!!, Jessops the camera chain has gone bust and my Nokia Lumia 820 smartphone has a camera onboard that rivals an expensive compact of 3 years ago, whatever next?....nobody knows
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Augmented Reality Systems for Training Health Care Providers
Award Information
Small Business Information
727 Airport Boulevard, Ann Arbor, MI, 48108
Principal Investigator:
Ronald Hay
Research Engineer
(734) 668-2567
Research Engineer
(734) 668-2567
Business Contact:
Charles Jacobus
(734) 668-2567
(734) 668-2567
Research Institution:
AbstractDuring the Phase I period of this contract we will research and develop a Phase II development plan for creating an augmented reality serious game for medic training. Our primary technical research will focus on: Dynamic augmented reality registration of deformable surface. 3D Stereoscopic video and MRI/ultrasound augmented reality overlays. Real-time occlusion tracking, particularly of the hands. Medical gesture recognition for task completion. User-generated, and open-source game content interfaces. Novel scoring systems that account for the user's behavior and react naturally. This scoring system requires a detailed understanding of what tasks should be completed at anytime, as well as team task behaviors. Maintaining realistic haptic feedback for the simulation participants so as the augmented/virtual components of the simulation merge seamlessly with the real world. Working with the sponsor and our affiliates in the serious games, medical, and DoD domains we will: Locate candidate groups for final testing and develop simulation validation techniques. Research and attend and potentially publish at relevant industry conferences. Discover potential customers for commercialization including customers in the private and DoD domains
* information listed above is at the time of submission.
An Official Website of the United States Government


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Is the H1N1 Swine Flu Vaccine Safe? (cont.)
No vaccine is 100% safe for everyone. People with allergies to eggs, for example, can't take flu vaccines because eggs are involved in the manufacturing process.
And flu vaccines cause mild but common reactions. About one in three people get a sore arm from the shot, some with a little redness or even swelling. Some 10% to 15% of people feel tired or get a headache; some may even run a low fever.
And vaccines can trigger rare but serious reactions, even among people with no apparent allergies or sensitivities.
So if vaccines aren't 100% safe, why risk them?
Approved vaccines -- including the 2009 H1N1 swine flu vaccine -- are calculated to be much, much less risky than the diseases they prevent. For example, out of every million people who get a flu shot, one or two will get a serious neurological reaction called Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS).
But flu itself causes serious problems, including GBS, in far more than two in a million cases. And since a large proportion of the population will get swine flu, the vaccine risk is far smaller than the disease risk.
In clinical trials, 10,000 to 15,000 children and adults have received various manufacturers' brands of H1N1 swine flu vaccine. Nothing serious happened to any of them, including this reporter, who received a double dose of the Sanofi-Pasteur swine flu vaccine.
That's still not proof that no harm will come from the vaccine. Clinical trials cannot detect something bad that happens to one or two out of every 100,000 people vaccinated.
"There could be unknown side effects. Something could happen. But we think that is highly unlikely," says infectious disease and vaccine expert Mark Mulligan, MD, executive director of the Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta.
"The CDC, FDA, HHS [Health and Human Services Department], the Department of Defense, and several large HMOs with great medical records are all collaborating in enhanced surveillance for this national 2009 H1N1 vaccine campaign," Mulligan tells WebMD. "If there is a signal for a rare or late adverse event, we will identify it as early and as quickly as we can."
Isn't the 2009 H1N1 swine flu vaccine too new to trust?
Is the swine flu vaccine brand new? Yes and no. The 2009 H1N1 swine flu vaccine is made exactly the same way as the seasonal flu vaccine, by the same manufacturers using the same materials -- except for one shiny new piece.
What has changed is the piece of the virus the vaccine uses to prime the immune system.
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- 128Promote
Art Print
If I did not work, These worlds would perishby Nicholas Lockyer
Collect your choice of gallery quality Giclée, or fine art prints custom trimmed by hand in a variety of sizes with a white border for framing.
in a really weird way this reminds me of aliens when ripley is in the powerloader near the end haha.
this is awesome! like the head in the..whatever it is & i always love the colours you use together.
this is awesome! like the head in the..whatever it is & i always love the colours you use together.
sweetness :)
Thanks Laura yeah it does doesnt it! funnily enough one im working on now kind of looks like the queen, just an amazing shape old Geigers aliens
this has a nice creepy flow to it ;)
this is heavy, great work.
Nice mix Nicholas!
Thanks chaps
thumbs up! :D
Thank you Paul
great collage Nicholas.
Thanks Jaime
great style!!love it!!
thanks man just checked out your stuff great work you make too
Oh Yeah, ✯ ✯ ✯ ✯ ✯ 👍 !!!
thanks zoom!
Please like and follow me too! I really like your art style!
cool! so weird is good.
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Supporting Families.
Saving Lives.
Your financial contribution to the SADS Foundation supports awareness, medical education, family support, and directing public policy.
Please fill out the information below and then click continue to add your credit card information.
Jan Schiller, Director of Development and Marketing
Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndromes (SADS) Foundation
508 East South Temple #202
Salt Lake City, UT 84102
COPYRIGHT ©2011-2015 Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndromes Foundation
508 E. South Temple, Suite #202, Salt Lake City, UT 84102


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messyadjectiveuk us /ˈmes.i/
messy adjective (DIRTY/UNTIDY)
B1 untidy: a messy kitchen messy hands/hair His bedroom's always messy.› producing or causing dirt and untidiness: Eating spaghetti can be a messy business. Vicky cooks really well but she's messy.
messy adjective (SITUATION)
› used to describe a situation that is confused and unpleasant: A war will be a long and messy business. They had a bitter, messy divorce.
Serious and unpleasant
synonyms and related words:
adverb uk us /-ɪ.li/


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10 streets in Logan where the parking inspectors love to ping you
- From: Quest Newspapers
- October 14, 2011
STREETS in Springwood and Slacks Creek are places to avoid if you don't want to be pinged by parking inspectors, with Logan City Council officers booking more cars there than anywhere else in the city.
The council issued $310,252 worth of fines for illegally parked cars in 2010, 3316 Parking Infringement Notices in total.
Dennis Rd, Murrajong Rd and the Pacific Highway at Springwood were all ranked in the top 10 of streets where the most fines were issued, but the iconic Moss St at Slacks Creek took out the number one spot.
See the map above for the top 10 locations or visit this Google Map.
The result came as no surprise to businesses in the industrial area.
Mick's Carvery and Coffee owner Mick Castrisios said he had witnessed many arguments as council officers booked drivers who parked illegally along Moss St.
Mr Castrisios's business has off-street parking but does not have the space to fit the trucks and larger vehicles that make up most of his customers.
He said most of the street was marked with yellow lines, indicating no parking, but sometimes people had no choice.
``There's nowhere for them to park and wherever there's a yellow line, they book you,'' Mr Castrisios said.
``I don't think there should be any ``no parking'' at all. Ninety per cent of customers are tradies and have trailers. How are they supposed to get into my business?''
Battery Traders Super Store worker Steve Eldred said although the business also had off-street parking, people often illegally parked across their driveway when other parking lots filled up.
``We're forever yelling at people to move,'' he said.
``If our driveway is blocked we're losing business.''
A Logan City Council spokeswoman said council had provided more parking for Moss St staff along a service road but did not have any plans for other parking solutions for the area.
``The main problem spots were near driveways and especially where parking was along the entire frontage of the business,'' she said.
``Often safety is compromised as motorists park incorrectly, creating the potential for traffic conflict.
``Infringement notices aim to encourage drivers to park in accordance with the road rules to enable the safe regulation of traffic and protection of all road users.''
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Soon you can get a Ph.D. in human sexuality in San Francisco
Sex ed was eroded as part of a political backlash. "In the '70s, there began to be a series of moral campaigns — some were directed against abortion ... some were directed against homosexuality," Herdt notes. "When Reagan was elected, it ushered in a whole new social campaign — and for the first time, opposition to sex education and opposition to abortion was joined, and served as a bridge to connect different groups who had previously never been working together: groups that were against gun control, groups that were against abortion rights, and groups that were against homosexuality."
All of which has led to the current state of affairs, and as things stand, "I consider the United States one of the most backward countries when it comes to comprehensive sexual education and positive values regarding sexual behavior," Herdt says. But he's hoping to play a role in changing that.
The Ph.D. program at CIIS seeks to train a new generation of experts in human sexuality with a pair of concentrations. The first centers on clinical practice for contemporary practitioners, marriage and family therapists or psychiatrists. The current training requirement for clinicians on human sexuality is a measly eight hours, which "just shows the disregard that society has for sexual pleasure, and sexual wellbeing and relationship formation, and so on," in Herdt's view.
The second concentration centers on sexual policy leadership. Asked to identify some of the most pressing policy issues of concern to sexologists, the program director said existing gaps in comprehensive sex education is a top priority, and predicted transgender rights would intensify as a major issue. "I also feel that the Republican assault on women's bodies, women's contraceptive and reproductive rights — this is a huge and very dangerous area."
Herdt became involved with CIIS through a conference called Expanding the Circle, which merges the LGBT community with individuals working in higher education from throughout the country. Prior to that, he ran the National Sexuality Resource Center at SF State. Asked why he'd looked to CIIS rather than a major university to house the program, Herdt responded, "these large premier institutions, such as Stanford and Berkeley — you know, they have many, many extremely important programs ... But they do have a more traditional emphasis when it comes to disciplines."
At CIIS, on the other hand, he found openness to the kind of academic program he envisioned. Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington, columnist and author of numerous books on sex, will be a professor there along with Sean Cahill, director of Health Policy Research at The Fenway Institute and co-author of LGBT Youth in America's Schools.
Promoting sexual literacy is just as important of a program goal as influencing policy, Herdt said. "Americans really continue to have very sex-negative attitudes when it comes to the body, the integration of sexuality with all the elements of their lives. So many people feel that sex is fragmented in their lives, and they don't have a holistic sense of wellbeing."
While advancements in neuroscience, psychology and other forms of research have all served to further our understanding of sexuality, Herdt bristles at the idea that it is all hard-wired.
"I'm very much aware that Americans continue to have a view that when it comes to the important things in sexuality, they're all hard-wired in the brain," he says. "I do not agree with that view. I believe that the most important things in human sexuality are the things we learn in society. The values we learn, the ethics, the way we can form relationships. The way we learn to love. Or not to love, to hate. These are such tremendously important issues in human sexuality and human development." He added, "Let's put it in its proper way: It's interactive."


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The place to find out about arts, cultural and creative events across Torbay and Devon.
To discover events near you, select the map or list view from the left hand menu and enter your postcode. Events are regularly featured within our Newsletter and via our social media channels. You can also get the latest whilst out and about on your mobile.
To add an event, join our network and login to your Member profile, alternatively refer to our User Guides.
Creative Torbay advises that you check with the event organiser(s) prior to attending any event for any last minute changes or ticket information.
Events / 29th November 2016 / 1 to 11 of 11
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Safe Haven
Safe Haven launches on 1st October, is open to all (though we recommend age 12plus) and is completely free to take part. An immersive soundscape and ... Read More
Life Drawing Sessions
Mondays from 25th January, 7-9pm in the Demo Rooms here at Hannahs. £7 per session. These fun, relaxed and welcoming sessions are open to both pro... Read More
Torbay Tech Jam
The Torbay Tech jam is a monthly meetup for anyone interested in Technology, programming, hardware. We hope we can complement the new Computer scien... Read More
Poetry for Pleasure at Paignton Library
10.00 - 12.00 Paignton Library, Great Western Road, Paignton TQ4 5AG Poetry for Pleasure is for anyone who enjoys reading, writing or listening to p... Read More
Poetry for Pleasure at Brixham Library
10.00 - 12.00 Brixham Library, Market Street, Brixham TQ5 8EU Poetry for Pleasure is for anyone who enjoys reading, writing or listening to poetry. ... Read More
Hangings at Brixham Library
Check out the hangings at Brixham Library. During the Summer holidays, in 2013 seven panels were made by recycling used plastic carrier bags into im... Read More
The Torbay Fashionista's : Mon, Tues, Wed : 3.30 to 6.30pm
The Torbay Fashionista's are an open group for people wanting to explore fashion design and creation. Its a new way of learning to sew that encourages... Read More
The Happy Hookers Club : Tuesdays 10 - 12pm
The Happy Hookers Club is the place to learn every thing there is to know about crochet. On a Tuesday from 10 to 12pm The Happy Hookers Club will ... Read More


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Pro-Line Racing PRO-2 Rear Clamping Hex Set
This is an optional Pro-line PRO-2 Rear Clamping Hex Set, and is intended for use with the Traxxas Slash 1/10 scale short course truck. Aluminum hexes are a huge upgrade over the stock plastic hexes in terms of both durability and style. These Pro-Line PRO-2 clamping hexes will stand up to the power you throw at your Slash and will not fall off like the stock plastic hexes. These hexes are also emblazoned with Pro-Line Blue and a laser etched P-L logo.
- Blue Anodized Aluminum Clamping Wheel Hexes
- Stronger and more Stylish than Stock
- Laser Etched P-L Logo
- Clamping Hex design for secure fit
- (2) Rear Clamping Hex
- (2) 1.6x5mm SHCS Screw
This product was added to our catalog on December 7, 2012.
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