July 13, 2008 06:35 PM UTC

Schaffer v. Facts (a Look at today's Sentinel guest column)

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• by: Oliver

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Today the Grand Junction Sentinel has an oil shale face off between Colorado Senate candidates Mark Udall and Bob Schaffer.  

I will get around to Rep. Udall’s column, but since it is more factually based, I thought I would begin with Mr. Schaffer’s column, which is rife with inaccuracies.

Schaffer has been in the news repeatedly, primarily in ways his campaign would probably not prefer.  Between junkets to sweatshops, Colorado roots ads with Alaska’s Mt. McKinley, financial shenanigans, and his efforts to benefit his Big Oil clients at the expense of Iraqi stability, media reports have put the lie to the notion that all publicity is good publicity.

Follow me for a look at his most recent attempt to spin his campaign to a better place, at the expense of truth.

Borrowing from the GOP talking points, Schaffer places blame for America’s energy woes not with the crashing dollar, not with our insatiable demand and the failure of the GOP congress (and Bob Schaffer) to update fuel efficiency standards, not with reckless speculation, not with putting oil men in charge of energy policy, and not with his own efforts to profit off high prices.

Sadly, some of the worst culprits are from Colorado. I’m running against one of them – Boulder County Democrat Mark Udall

After dodging blame and attempting to lay it primarily on the Democrats, Schaffer begins by fudging the facts and misrepresenting reality.

Colorado’s oil and gas industry contributes over $20 billion to the state economy and employs 71,000 people – many on the Western Slope. We need to replace the politicians who insist on punishing these Coloradans.

However each of these statements are false.  The State of Colorado counts about 27,000 oil and gas workers, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.  According to a story that ran in the Pueblo Chieftain :

But state labor statistics for April list 27,700 jobs in natural resources and mining, which include the oil and gas industry.

…”I think our economists would take some exception to how far that net is cast,” said Bill Thoennes, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

Second a large number of these workers are not Coloradans.  They are transient workers, with few ties to the communities, who follow the boom and precipitate the bust.  A Denver Post story reports:

The energy boom in northwestern Colorado has brought with it thousands of workers. It has created a severe lack of housing, but developers are wary of building permanent apartments for a temporary workforce. Once the wells are constructed, there is practically no work except for sporadic checks on production.

Transient workers bring numerous problems, in addition to the temporary housing, man camps, and illegal RV parks that spring up like knapweed on a well pad, the Post story continues:

K-Cose said she occasionally has problems with drunken energy employees breaking furniture, but she said they have not been significant.

“These are good people, generally. They just work hard and drink hard,” Borchard said.

A Rocky Mountain News article reports:

The incursion of industry and its many transient workers also has its downsides in torn-up roads, congested neighborhoods, strained emergency services, stressed water and sewage plants, and spiking crime rates.

An article in the San Diego Union Tribune reports on the growing crime problem around the Garfield County gas fields.

The number of arrests in Parachute has skyrocketed. Criminal arrests in 2004 totaled 916. By mid-December, 2005 arrests totaled 1,629. During September and October 2004, Parachute police made 101 arrests; during the same period in 2005, police made 353 arrests.

…”We just have a lot of people from out of state,” Parachute Police Sgt. Cary Parmenter said. “They come out here and work the rigs for a few months and then they leave. They don’t care about our community. It kind of puts an impact on us.”

Getting back to Schaffer’s guest column, he suggests that we should subsidize oil shale development:

We should hold out incentives for unconventional technologies such as oil-shale, oil sands and others.

This is precisely the wrong approach, and much of the analysis of the devastation that cratered Colorado’s economy in the early 1980s (Black Sunday) pins the blame on exactly this type of ‘solution,’ the artificial stimulation of the infusion (and withdrawal) of federal subsidies.

Bob Schaffer offers old and wrong ideas to get us out of America’s energy mess, which only new, clean energy sources and lowering demand can truly solve.  

In my next installment, I will look at Rep. Udall’s column and deconstruct the myth that oil shale provides any solution that would benefit Colorado, be environmentally benign, or do much to help America’s energy woes.