North Dakota Faces Oil and Gas Drilling Revenue Trap

Are communities really making money off of oil and gas drilling if they have to spend nearly all of the tax revenue building infrastructure to support oil and gas drilling?

The state should invest up to $5 billion in northwest North Dakota communities with the most oil activity, the president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council said Wednesday.

Ron Ness, while testifying to a group of legislators meeting in Williston, said communities need significant resources to do long-range planning, but the state’s grant program for those areas is only helping them react. Ness called for a five-year plan with $800 million to $1 billion per year invested in schools, roads and infrastructure for communities in the core areas of the Bakken. [...]

The industry paid $1.3 billion in oil and gas production tax last year, and will pay even more this year, Ness said. Those dollars should be targeted at the counties with the greatest oil activity, he said.

It makes oil and gas drilling sound like a Ponzi, doesn't it? You'll make lots of money eventually, but only if you keep re-investing! As places like Virginia consider whether to allow oil and gas drilling, politicians like Gov. Bob McDonnell make it sound like every penny of tax revenue will go to existing roads and schools. But if the oil and gas industry expects the money to be spent on supporting the industry, how much will really be left for your community?

And that's to say nothing of the societal costs. "Just about anybody I talk to that's a neighbor — and some of them are getting wealthy — are sick of it. It's never going to be the same in this country, and they're starting to realize that we had it kind of good, even though we weren't No. 1 in oil and we weren't the No. 1 state economically," North Dakota rancher Donnie Nelson told NPR. "We had a good life up here."

Hey, America! The 1% Has A Brown Job For YOU!

Are you ready for a risky life of hard labor digging up dirty fuels the 1% can sell to make billions in profit? Get excited for the brown jobs revolution!

No, really. An editorial in today's Wall Street Journal calls for More Brown Jobs. Even though American oil use is declining and what's being produced isn't lowering gas or home heating oil prices here - it's just being sold overseas.

So get excited! From drilling for oil shale to fracking for methane gas to digging for uranium to building pipelines that bring Canadian tar sands to Chinese oil tankers, corporate polluters are eager to exploit the crushing economic crisis their Wall Street friends created to make unemployed workers think they have to sell out their children's health to put food on the table now!

What's that? Worried your community will be turned into an industrial wasteland? That you'll be able to light your tap water on fire? That soon you too will be saying things like, "Just about anybody I talk to that's a neighbor — and some of them are getting wealthy — are sick of it"?

Come on - corporate America wouldn't lie to you! Right?

Colorado Senator Slams Bush's Oil Shale Fantasy

Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO) has a great op-ed in the Washington Post today on the false promise of oil shale:

Bush and his fellow oil shale boosters claim that if only Western communities would stand aside, energy companies could begin extracting more than 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil from domestic shale deposits. If only the federal government immediately offered even more public lands for development, the technology to extract oil from rock would suddenly ripen, oil supplies would rise and gas prices would fall.

If only.

Since the 19th century, we in the West have been trying to extract oil from the vast oil shale riches that lie under our feet. It is no easy task, and past efforts have failed miserably. Commercial oil shale development would require not only immense financial investments but also an undetermined quantity of (scarce) water from the Colorado River basin and the construction of several multibillion-dollar power plants.

Sen. Salazar goes on to point out "that oil would not come easily. It would take around one ton of rock to produce enough fuel to last the average car two weeks." ThinkProgress has a great analogy about the amount of energy stored in all of our oil shale: Think of it like a trillion tons of tater tots.

So how can we tackle our energy problems? How about recharging America's economy with renewable power and energy efficient technology?