Personally, I’d be thrilled if Wyoming never saw another oil well or coal mine.
To be clear: you won’t see me around campus in a tie-dyed t-shirt with flowers in my hair. I’m not a radical environmentalist, but if the state can do better, I think we should.
A few years ago, I worked at a paleontology dig north of Lusk, in eastern Wyoming. We camped at the site, and every morning I would wake up early to a chorus of prairie birds. Meadowlarks called back and forth, out to the edge of hearing. Black and white lark buntings flew high in the air and floated singing into the sagebrush. Sage sparrows sat on top of bushes trilling their hearts out. To me, it’s distressing to realize that developing our mineral wealth risks destroying this natural beauty.
The upper Green River Basin in southwestern Wyoming is one example of this degradation. In 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency designated it a “non-attainment” area because ozone levels regularly exceeded federal air quality standards. The pollution comes from oil and gas wells, which emit nitrous oxides and volatile organic chemicals that break down to ozone in sunlight. The most recent figures from the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality show in 2012, wells in the area emitted 22 tons of formaldehyde, 359 tons of benzene, 851 tons of toluene and 713 tons of xylene. Nobody should have to breathe that.
As biased as I am against the industry, I recognize Wyoming would struggle without it. The Wyoming Department of Revenue reports mineral severance taxes contributed $244 million to Wyoming’s general fund in 2014, or 30 percent of the total. They also go to fund roads and highways, water development and education.
The university computers I use on a daily basis and the Hathaway scholarship that brought me here are both thanks to the industry I’m opposing. The road you drove on to get to school was paid for partly by mineral taxes. It’s obvious that a well-funded state government is good for Wyomingites.
I’d be willing to pay more taxes to live in an environmentally friendly state, but how much would it take? In 2014, the Wyoming Department of Revenue reported that total mineral severance tax was $969 million. If state and local governments raised that sum through other taxes, each of the 446,000 adult residents of Wyoming would pay about $2,170 more each year. Two thousand dollars of taxes is almost a semester of UW tuition. It’s certainly more than I can afford.
Of course, that quick estimate doesn’t tell the whole story, but it shows Wyoming’s real dependence on the mineral industry. Higher taxes alone wouldn’t replace the wealth of extractive resources, especially since the industry also contributes significantly to local property taxes and sales taxes. A really good plan for cutting production of oil, gas and coal in Wyoming needs to account for this. While I don’t have that plan, I want to see it happen. We shouldn’t have to choose between natural beauty and solvency.
