A tale of two energy economies(By Tom Kenworthy, via Center for American Progress)New research shows that the real energy future for Colorado and much of the West rests not with fossil fuel development but with renewable energy sources and energy efficiency. Some, however, would have you believe otherwise.Throughout a nearly two-year battle to overhaul the way Colorado regulates oil and gas development that concluded recently, the fossil fuel industry and its allies often argued that a comprehensive set of new rules requiring better protections for the environment, wildlife, and public health and safety would be devastating for a sector critical to the state’s economic well-being.“Make no mistake; this is a jobs-killing bill,” said state Sen. Kevin Lundberg last month as the legislature neared final approval of the new rules established by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission that some see as a model for other western states. “It is an energy-killing bill. It closes the door on the future of Colorado’s energy potential.”There’s no question that some western states have been riding a huge oil and gas boom, though it has slowed during the current recession. Assisted by the previous administration’s pro-drilling policies, the boom created political support for states such as Colorado to pass stronger environmental protections.In fact, a report by the House Committee on Natural Resources found that policies pushed by the Bush administration encouraged drilling on federal lands to the point that the number of drilling permits approved nearly doubled—from 3,802 to 7,561—between 2002 and 2007.Those industry-friendly policies also accelerated drilling on private lands, since the federal government owns the rights to oil, gas, and other minerals underlying some 58 million acres of privately owned land—most of it in the West. In Colorado, for example, the total number of drilling permits approved for both federal and nonfederal lands jumped from 1,529 in 2000 to 8,027 in 2008, according to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.But within the larger context of the increasingly diverse western state economies, is fossil fuel development as important to growth as legislators such as Lundberg claim? Probably not, according to a series of eight reports issued over the past six months by Headwaters Economics, an independent nonprofit research group in Bozeman, Montana.Only 4 percent of counties in the West are seeing a “a surge of energy-related jobs,” the study found, and just 2.8 percent of total personal income in the five big energy-producing states (Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) comes from the sector that includes oil, gas, and mining.On the other hand, a separate study released in January by the American Solar Energy Society and Management Information Services underscores the increasing vitality and importance of the green jobssector both nationally and in Colorado. The renewable energy and energy-efficiency fields “comprise some of the most rapidly growing industries in the world,” concluded the report, employing more than 9 million people in the United States as of 2007 and with the potential under a “crash effort” to employ 37 million by 2030.In Colorado, according to the study, the renewable energy and energy-efficiency fields had generated some 91,000 jobs by 2007—more than 3 percent of state employment—and gross revenues of more than $10 billion. That’s about 20,000 more Colorado jobs than existed in the state’s oil and gas industry as of 2007, according to a Colorado School of Mines report, though less than half of the conventional energy industry’s overall economic output.This job increase is due in part to the fact that Colorado has accelerated its renewable energy efforts in recent years, and the study may not even be telling the whole truth. It does not, for example, reflect several large developments by companies such as Vestas, a Dan |