For those following the debate over hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the associated economic benefits of the oil and gas industry are already well known. However, these numbers are rarely related to the people they represent. It is time to humanize these numbers.
According to an economic impacts study released Monday by the CU Leeds Business School, Colorado’s oil and gas industry supported over 111,000 jobs, provided $6.5 billion dollars in wages and accounted for nearly $30 billion in economic output in 2012 alone.
To put 111,000 jobs into perspective, it is approximately equal to the combined populations of Boulder and Superior. Tie in $6.5 billion in total wages, and those employed directly and indirectly by the oil and gas industry have an average income of $74,800 — about 1.5 times higher than the average income in Colorado. This means that there is a city’s worth of people across the state that can spend more when it comes to the clothes, homes, furniture and necessities of life supplied by the rest of the economy. In the end, this creates $30 billion in economic output that helps everyone else pay their bills and feed their families.
I have lived in Boulder all 17 years of my life, and am proud to attend high school in such a forward-thinking community. However, it amazes me to see the hostility towards those who power our lives in more ways than one. While we debate how to extract the resources that we use for everything from gasoline to t-shirts, we need to keep in mind the livelihoods of the 111,000 people who help keep Colorado running strong. To ban the extraction of these resources is to tell a veritable city of people to report to the nearest unemployment office. Sleep on it.
SEAN MOORE
Boulder
