The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead publishes a list of surprising facts about the impacts of the Bakken oil boom on rural North Dakota: mile-long traffic jams, $2000-rent for one-bedroom apartments and other costs pricing long-time residents out of their towns, doubled inmate population and doubled staff at the Williams County (Williston) jail, overwhelming influx of undocumented workers (Romney probably won't want to come talk self-deportation there)....
The Forum editorial board looks at what Big Oil is wreaking on North Dakota and sees a free market in need of regulation:
The market is amoral. Without targeted intervention and reasonable regulation, the market will maximize its priorities, which seldom include minimizing the deleterious effects a go-go boom can have on people, communities and cultures.
The troubling trends in oil country cannot be spun away simply because money is being made and government revenues are setting records. The numbers suggest that at the very least, industry should ratchet it down enough for North Dakota's rural small-town ranching and farming culture to catch up. If the industry won't do it, a slowdown imposed by regulators should not be off the table [editorial, "Startling Oil Patch Numbers," Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, 2012.01.24].
Jobs and dollars aren't everything if they obliterate the community you started with. Remember that when Kristi Noem and John Thune and even that nice Jeff Barth fellow tell you that the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline (which would have boosted the Bakken boom) would have been nothing but good for South Dakota and America.
"Dear Lord, please give us another energy boom...we promise not to piss this one away."
http://oilfieldtrashpart2.com/
Looks like Big Oil boom is trying to catch Big Education. Have you priced real estate in Palo Alto? It takes a living wage just to live within two hours of Stanford!
North Dakota has full-blown cases of greed and short-term thinking - of which the synergies will inflict future generations. North Dakotan's should follow the example of their distant Norwegian relatives - have an energy policy, long-term plan, and never spend a nickle of the principle from energy revenues but instead use its interest to fund the government.
But give credit where it's due - the policy was created by an Iranian.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/26/139972557/the-friday-podcast-norways-got-advice-for-libya
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1W4kxHqlq
Dakotas' airbases are likely facing extirpation according to RCJ.
teehee.
Rewild the West.