Oil industry not as vital to Colorado as many think

Climate change has become front and center every day in the media and elsewhere, perhaps because it is existentially in fact front and center for everyone, young and old.

As just one example, a recent report from the new 2023 Colorado Fiscal Institute Report, “Clearing the Air: Real Costs and Benefits of Oil and Gas for Colorado,” discusses the purported negative impact on Colorado’s economy, as widely disseminated by the oil and gas industry.

While the oil and gas industry in Colorado declined by 21.4% between 2018 and 2021, that did not negatively impact the state’s economy as a whole, which grew by 17.2%.

Direct jobs in oil and gas extraction, pipeline construction and transmission, and other support activities represent only 0.7% of all jobs in Colorado.

The portion of Colorado’s GDP that comes from oil and gas is only 3.3%.

The taxes and fees collected from the oil and gas industry are only 1.2% of the total revenue to state and local governments.

The greenhouse gas emissions leaked during drilling, fracking, extraction and transmission of the oil and gas cause $1.3 billion of damages per year, and that does not include damages from other emitted pollutants.

Other costs include high water usage, pollution of water and soil with toxic chemicals, habitat fragmentation, and lower home values.

When will the transition to suitable, sustainable energy sources be a reality? Clearly, the sooner, the better!

— Tom Stumpf, Longmont

Boulder should support statewide land use reform

The City of Boulder should seize this opportunity to lend support to Governor Polis’s recently announced land use reform recommendations. Because our housing stock is insufficiently diverse and increasingly expensive, we are losing our wisdom (the elderly) and our youth. Both demographic groups are struggling, the former to maintain their foothold, and the latter to secure one. Our workforce is moving further and further away, driving until they qualify and filling our streets during the day, without contributing to and strengthening our community at night or on weekends.

Affordable housing is both a regional and a transportation challenge. Density along transit corridors and cooperation at a regional level are both required in abundance, and urgently. No community can long survive its own hollowing out. But neither can a single community, acting alone, meet the challenge.

An incremental regional sales tax should be authorized by the legislature and be spent, cooperatively, by communities willing to address together the affordable housing and transportation challenges and opportunities they share. We don’t have and may not need regional “government,” but we desperately require regional thinking at scale, with adequate funding (ideally, matched), to empower local governments willing to play fair with each other, who bring some of their own skin to the game, to address this existential, spiritually compelling challenge.

If our land use policies don’t enable ALL of our people to work, shop and play closer to where they sleep, what kind of community are we building? Apartheid created on purpose is no less shameful than apartheid created unintentionally, when, once revealed, nothing is done about it.

Step up, Boulder. Lead the way.

Carpe Diem!

— Ed Byrne, Boulder

Appliance legislation actually limits our options

In February 9 edition, in your story on proposed Colorado legislation targeting home appliances, Democrat Cathy Kipp disingenuously says, “We just want people to have climate-friendly options…” In fact the legislation does exactly the opposite. We already have more options, and this proposed legislation will limit our options. It is about control, as usual, and follows similar limitations dictated in 2019, just one more step in the same direction.

The legislators should focus on improving our state highways, reducing the damage from high tech censorship, remove political and sexual indoctrination in schools, eliminate wasteful spending programs and letting the market decide what we buy and how we live our lives. Voters should see through the deceptive words and vote for people who will allow America to operate in a free market with minimal interference from misguided do-gooders who think they know better than we.

— Chris Kelly, Loveland