Community Benefits Are Elusive When Fossil Fuel Industry Comes to Town

Breiner’s excellent feature report on the Climate Progress blog takes a wrecking ball to the argument, most recently advanced by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and climate denier Bjorn Lomborg, that fossil fuel development is the key to solving energy poverty. Breiner opens with a capsule profile of the county of Gardendale, Texas, where the best oil and gas jobs go to qualified outsiders and the community is left with the environmental impacts. “The detrimental effects of fossil fuel extraction and combustion add up. Air pollution is worse where non-white and low-income people live. Living near fossil fuel operations means dealing with spills and explosions from an industry that routinely shows they have little incentive to prevent these incidents,” he writes. As for economic benefits, a Headwaters Economics study “found that longer periods of specialization in oil and gas meant lower per-capita incomes, more crime, and lower educational achievement. Per capita income was found to be as much as $7,000 lower in counties with a long-term focus on drilling compared to those that only experienced a year of it.”