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Want to guess who the anti-energy, anti-fracking activists in Colorado have adopted as their patron saint, so to speak? None other than the murderous Communist revolutionary, Che Guevara:

At Monday’s “direct action” in Denver, protesters displayed signs with messages including “Ban Fracking Now,” “Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground,” and “End Fracking—Renewables 100%.”

“What we have is an energy revolution that is at our feet, and we are the boots on the ground that this revolution wants to be. We are the energy of change,” said Shane Davis, who runs the Fractivist website, in Saturday’s opening speech at the Holiday Inn Stapleton.

He encouraged the anti-fracking movement to draw inspiration from Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, a leading figure in the communist overthrow of Cuba.

“This is the time when we need to shake the political and economic fracking industry’s empire and their rule over global fossil-fuel energy consumption,” Davis said. “Fifty years ago, Che Guevara, a revolutionary humanitarian, fought similarly against ruling forces that were harming local communities.”

The Statesman‘s Valerie Richardson recorded at least two different groups’ efforts to secure anti-fracking measures in 2016, with more than two different measures–a constitutional amendment and a measure to give localities veto powers over development.

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Speaking of fracking and one of the most persistent myths extolled by anti-fracking proponents–groundwater contamination:

Some of the same researchers who previously claimed that groundwater in the Marcellus region was being contaminated by shale development released a new study this week finding no evidence that hydraulic fracturing fluids have migrated up into drinking water – consistent with what independent scientists and regulators have been saying about fracking for years. The new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, led by researchers at Yale, includes Robert Jackson (now with Stanford University) and Avner Vengosh, who were both behind the Duke studies that purported to find widespread contamination from shale development. But as their new study explains,

“We found no evidence for direct communication with shallow drinking water wells due to upward migration form shale horizons. This result is encouraging, because it implies there is some degree of temporal and spatial separation between injected fluids and the drinking water supply.” (p. 5; emphasis added)

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Colorado is catching legal heat for attempting to export its regulatory schemes, like the state’s renewable energy standard, forcing other states to follow “extraterritorial regulation”:

In April, 2011, E&E Legal sued the State of Colorado due to the unconstitutionality of the state’s renewable energy standard. As the case was working its way through the 10th Circuit, the Colorado legislature rushed to amend the law in an attempt to fix the most blatant unconstitutional provisions. They did not, however, cure all the problems.

Dr. David W. Schnare, lead attorney and E&E Legal’s General Counsel, noted at the time the Colorado legislature attempted to correct the RES, “This bill appears to remove some but not all of the unconstitutional elements of the statute. However, it also mandates new unconstitutional requirements by increasing the renewables standard to levels that, that like the current statute, cannot be justified when balanced against the harm they cause to interstate commerce.”

Specifically, the Legislature kept the sections that authorized Colorado to tell electric generating companies what means they had to use to sell “renewable” energy into Colorado, including companies that operated in other states and in some cases where the electricity they made did not and could not even reach Colorado. This is known as “extraterritorial regulation” and is prohibited under the Constitution.

Colorado is not alone in its efforts to tell other states how to regulate. California has the hubris to tell egg producers in Iowa what size chicken pens have to be. They have also told Canada how to make goose liver. Indeed, there is a growing effort for states to try to export their regulations onto other states.

Explained Schnare, “a state may not project its legislation into other states and may not control conduct beyond the boundaries of the State.”

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The Environmental Protection Agency’s raft of new regulations has sprung a leak with the aptly named Waters of the United States rule:

Chief Justice John Roberts may have salvaged ObamaCare, but lower courts are proving to be more skeptical of executive overreach. On Friday the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stopped the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Clean Water Rule on grounds that it probably exceeds the agency’s legal authority.

The EPA rule, issued in May, extends federal jurisdiction over tens of millions of acres of private land that had been regulated by the states. In August a federal judge in North Dakota issued a preliminary injunction in 13 of the 31 states that have sued to block the rule, and the Sixth Circuit has now echoed that legal reasoning by enjoining the rule nationwide.

Ohio, Michigan and 16 other states challenged the rule, and a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit ruled two to one that the “petitioners have demonstrated a substantial possibility of success on the merits of their claims” and that a stay is needed to silence “the whirlwind of confusion that springs from the uncertainty” about the rule’s requirements.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, the most recent and significant threat to the waters within the United States came from the EPA itself:

The court also shot down the Administration’s argument that “the nation’s waters will suffer imminent injury if the new scheme is not immediately implemented and enforced.” As it happens, the single biggest recent injury to U.S. waterways is the EPA’s own Colorado mine disaster that turned the Animas River a toxic orange and flushed toxins into rivers across the Southwest.(emphasis added)

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And the irony of the EPA threat to the nation’s waterways continued, as last week the agency triggered yet another spill in Colorado:

“Once again the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] has failed to notify the appropriate local officials and agencies of the spill in a timely manner.” These are the words of U.S. Congressman Scott Tipton (R-CO) of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District in response to another toxic spill resulting from EPA activities at an abandoned mine in western Colorado.

According to the Denver Post, an EPA mine crew working Thursday at the Standard Mine in the mountains near Crested Butte, triggered another spill of some 2,000 gallons of wastewater into a nearby mountain creek. Supporting Tipton’s remarks to Watchdog Arena, the Denver Post report states that the EPA had failed to release a report about the incident at the time of its writing.

Unlike the Gold King Mine, where on Aug. 5, an EPA mine crew exploring possible clean-up options, blew out a structural plug in the mine releasing over 3 million gallons of toxic waste into the Animas River, the Standard Mine is an EPA-designated superfund site, where the federal agency has been directing ongoing clean-up efforts.

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The EPA’s Clean Power Plan gets bipartisan pushback from Senators in Mississippi and North Dakota:

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Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman’s efforts on behalf of the state in battling overreaching EPA regulations has earned a great deal of visibility given the state’s party split between constitutional offices, with Democrat Governor John Hickenlooper spearheading Clean Power Plan implementation, and the Republican Coffman pushing back, rendering Hickenlooper a “spectator,” according to the Wall Street Journal:

Colorado’s wide-ranging litigation efforts, for example, have been spearheaded by GOP Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, who was part of a state coalition that won a ruling last week blocking Interior Department rules for hydraulic fracturing on public lands. She also had Colorado join a group of 13 states that won an August ruling blocking an EPA plan putting more small bodies of water and wetlands under federal protection. And Ms. Coffman recently said she would have Colorado join the suit against the EPA greenhouse-gas rule, expected to be filed as soon as this month.

“The rule is an unprecedented attempt to expand the federal government’s regulatory control over the states’ energy economy,” Ms. Coffman said in announcing her decision.

Mr. Hickenlooper, the governor, didn’t encourage the attorney general to join any of the cases; in fact, he is focusing on implementing the regulations, said spokeswoman Kathy Green. “The governor’s approach has been to work collaboratively and avoid costly lawsuits wherever possible,” she said.