March 19, 2015 06:49 AM UTC

Step Right Up and WIN! This Boom will never Bust, Baby!

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• by: PKolbenschlag

 (Promoted by Colorado Pols)

This Time Is Going to Be Different, Really…

“All that I am asking for is $10 gold dollars, and I can win it back with one good hand.  …I got no chance of losing, this time….”      The Loser, R. Hunter/J. Garcia

Colorado is about to lose thousands of jobs, again, as the latest boom and its promise of vast riches crashes into the reality of a volatile commodity market.  Again.

Like in the last bust in 2008 that hit the western Colorado gas fields, it was just months prior that the boosters, peddlers, hucksters and snakes, oil-salespeople were all saying this time would be different, this time we would ride the mineral riches to everlasting everything. 

Until we’re not.  Until the prices, in the most volatile of animal spirited commodities—fossil fuels, drop. Again.  And then Colorado is left holding the bag.  Again.

Last month there was an article about how poorly reclamation is happening, if at all, in Colorado’s oil and gas patch, a dry time in a dry land.

Sure the PR teams at shops popping up like mushrooms in the mountains after a monsoon, weave webs of spin to convince you, Colorado, otherwise. 

This time will be different.  Just like the last time would be different.  And the time before that. 

I love you, Colorado, I would never hurt you.

Again.

Of course Colorado is no stranger to the vagaries of volatility, in the boom and bust that is—in fact—the historical mark of the Mountain West.  

The original mining boom that put Colorado towns on the map 150 years ago — and the toxic waters that still leech from these mines today,  a century later.  

Historical coal mines collapsing under homes, or still burning, or venting copious amounts of potent heat-trapping methane, 65 years after operations stopped.  

It’s more than thrice-told-tale—in towns that never quite do as well for themselves as they ought: our Nuclas, our Leadvilles, our Somersets. 

Hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up irradiated messes across the Colorado Plateau, a whole town removed to a waste cell. Tens of millions more from the U.S. Treasury to clean up after the boom-that-never-was, oil shale. 

Whatever profits were made in these decade bursts of activity sandwiched between longer decades of struggle and decline, have long been secured away while the bills keep coming due, stamped: U.S. Taxpayer. 

So who will clean up the mess this time?  Just the obvious stuff, not the lingering and long term threats that loom from an ever increasingly toxic planet.  Not the climate damage being wrought by pursuing our dirty, deadly carbon addiction into the very dregs of the earth, cracking open rock for another fix beneath our own homes, water supplies, and communities.

Who will clean up just the physical mess on the landscape? The weed infested pads? The eroding roads?  Who will ensure that abandoned or mothballed equipment does not spew pollutants, deteriorate, corrode and leak as operators go belly up, dump non-profitable assets, lay off workers? 

Who will pay for the state regulators leveraging tens of thousands of dollars in bonds against hundreds of thousands of dollars in remediation?

If history is a guide we already know the answer.