Four Colorado Localities To Hold Votes On Whether To Impoverish Themselves

This is like when Colorado banned so many guns and magazines, a gun manufacturer decided to leave the state, except pre-emptive. These cities want to prevent jobs from even starting.

Four cities are going to hold votes on whether to ban fracking -- you know that enormously lucrative and productive new-fangled (it's not really that new, I use "new-fangled" in the "scary" sense) natural gas drilling technique.

“[W]e’re endorsing Question 300 on principle, the principle that a community should have the right to exert local control when it comes to keeping corporations and misguided governors from compromising public health and safety,” said a Thursday editorial in the liberal Boulder Weekly.

Meanwhile, industry officials took a more visible stance against the measures last week at the Natural Gas Symposium, sponsored by Colorado State University. The suggestion that voters must choose between jobs and health is a “false choice,” said Noble Energy CEO Chuck Davidson.

“There’s a lot of facts there that show we can have both,” said Mr. Davidson. “This is not a choice between clean water, clean air, and having energy and jobs, this is truly both. Just shutting something down is not the answer to how America works.”

This is one of those no-brainers that's almost too sad to watch, except not so sad I'm not going to laugh at these people if they actually do it.

I don't even know what I just wrote there, but it's like this: Fracking brings prosperity with it. Full stop. Wealth and fracking go hand in hand these days. They're K-I-S-S-I-N-G up in a tree. And while it is definitely good for the communities that get to partake in this big energy industry revolution, it's also good for the rest of us too. Cheap energy, happy little economies, etc.

These four localities, on the other hand, are saying they don't want to participate. They'd rather not have the jobs and prosperity that their neighbors will enjoy because, well, dubious science says that fracking is scary.

They haven't voted yet. And maybe good sense could spontaneously break out in liberal bastion Boulder, CO. Or, y'know, maybe we should respect their decision to be stupid. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot so publicly, it'll provide a nice lesson for future generations.

Think about that for a minute. Liberals are usually quite good at obscuring the effect their policies have on economies. For liberals, it's never their fault that their policies always seem to turn out bad; it's greedy companies, or greedy people, or darn regulations, or the passive-voiced "mistakes were made by somebody who shall remain nameless." But this is a straight-up vote, the long-term outcome of which cannot possibly be blamed on the companies that they choose to ban from town.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 03:41 PM

| Access Comments