I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is surrounded by mountains. In my time there I occasionally drove south, out of the valley, into the midlands of the state. It gets so flat out there that every nub and knot on the horizon feels like a wrinkle on your eyeball. And if you’re driving in the afternoon, the sun skims in so bright down in front of you that even with sunglasses, you find yourself blinking away blindness every few minutes. At other points, it feels like traversing an alien landscape. It’s a wonder that anything lives out there. Luckily for us, a lot of things have died there too.
My dad started running rivers for Holiday Expeditions when he was a teenager. One of their main hubs is the town of Vernal, also known as “Dinosaurland.” Dinosaur National Monument is located 20 minutes away and contains over 800 paleontological sites. My twin brother and I learned to drive in Vernal on the runway of an airport under what I still consider impossibly bright stars. We would refuel at the Sinclair gas station, whose mascot is a green dinosaur.
South of Vernal is the Uinta basin, which the Green River bisects. The Uintah basin is where most of the oil reservoirs in Utah are located. Every trip we took down there, we saw great ranges of oil derricks grazing on the simmering hardpan of the land. On the way back, we would pass by Dinosaur, Utah, occasionally stopping to check out the fossils.
Before coming to law school, I worked a number of service jobs. I like talking to people, and getting paid to do it felt like I was committing a heist. My favorite place where I worked was the Grand America Hotel, an alabaster mass of angles and glass among the uneven skyline of downtown Salt Lake City . The building is worth one billion dollars. It has marble sourced from a specific quarry in Italy. Chandeliers cut from the same set of natural glass. It is the eighth tallest building in Salt Lake, with 775 rooms and 75,000 square feet of conference space. I met James Harden, Frank Abegnale, and Rick Steves when I was there, let alone the other unspoken millionaires who politely complied with the awkward mating dance of a clerk performing highly specialized check-ins as the hotel sought its fifth star.
The Grand America is owned and operated by the Sinclair Oil Company. The same one that operates the gas station in Vernal that we used to refuel at. Last time I was there, I think it had a plywood sheet as a bathroom door. It's been a long time since I've been there.
Uintah County has a population of 35,620 people and a median income of $69,821. Its poverty rate is just 11.1%, which is pretty incredible—there are plenty of rural places which have lower income and higher populations. But Uintah County is large, clocking in at 4,500 square miles. This is nearly the size of the Diablo mountain range at 5,400 square miles. As a Utahn, I’ve been staggered by the fact that California’s top 100 cities (by population), as listed by population, tapers out with Livermore with 85,000. Delving deeper, Oildale California has a population of approximately 35,324 and a poverty rate of 26.9%. It is 8 square miles, and its median income is $50,000. So, Uintah County has a lot going for it, even considering the transportation costs of just getting around.
Uintah County has an economy partially driven by mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction. Within that sector, the median wage is around $121,000. Taken in a vacuum, this sounds amazing. But fossil fuel salaries don’t often represent the full picture.
To get a sense of what it’s like to chase oil as a worker, rather than an investor, I could not more highly recommend Michael Flanagan Patrick Smith’s article detailing his experience joining the oil rush in Bakken, North Dakota. He is now a folksinger, and while he’s likely bled his fingers into the strings of a guitar, he’s also bled his experiences into a book called The Good Hand. While it is not a simple issue, I took away the sense that the two most serious problems with these hyper-competitive extractive economies are as follows. First, a significant increase in income in an area like this leads to a significant increase in cost of living expenses, wiping out what we presume to be a windfall for the risk and demands of these kind of jobs. Second, these economies are not aberrations, but serve oil company interests far more than they do their workers, and oil companies are incentivized to keep the damaging components of these economies (such as scarcity, competition, high hours, and local strain on infrastructure) in place.
Because here’s the kicker—even with that high income and low poverty rate, if you multiply Uintah County's population by its median income, you can estimate an annual income is $2.4 billion. Sinclair Oil’s 2024 revenue is reportedly $28.58 billion. That does not include other income from the hotels and resorts which the Holding family was able to invest in due to their oil profits.
Vernal, Utah, is both a fossil town and a fossil fuel town, but it could end up a fossil of its own.
The billions of dollars pumped out of town translate more to corporate profits than they do to community benefit. These resources don’t replenish, meaning that while the town’s economy is maintained, even healthy, due to this extraction, when the last drop of oil is squeezed out of the stone, there might be no Vernal left.
Extraction is not limited to the extraction of material. It can also be thought of as extracting value from a community in a disproportionate degree to that which it contributes. Utility-scale renewables projects echo many of the predatory practices and extractive effects of the fossil fuel economy.
Ann Eisenberg’s forthcoming paper, due to be published in Volume 59 of the UC Davis Law Review, applies internal colony theory to the current practice of siting utility-scale renewable energy projects (which require thousands of acres of land) in rural areas. Some 99.8% of utility-scale renewable energies are sited in rural areas. While this does create some jobs, the benefits of those jobs disproportionately go to the cities that receive that power. While not physically extracting the resource, it is still forcing the majority of costs on a community while benefitting another area. That is the same mode in which fossil fuel extraction has operated.
Nearly six percent of the land area of the United States has to be dedicated to renewable infrastructure for our nation to be truly climate neutral. The United States has about 2.27 billion acres, and six percent of that is 136 million acres. There are more than 450,000 brownfields in the United States. In fact, the EPA already funds Land Revitalization Projects to encourage communities and land owners to reuse and redevelop land that was previously contaminated and turn it into public parks, restored wetlands, and new businesses. Why not invest in a community’s ability to use that land for solar farms or other renewable projects, instead of prioritizing corporate profits and interests while damaging great swathes of otherwise usable land?
This is yet another component of the green transitions that should be managed wisely; while just transitions should shift to incorporate community transitions, environmental justice should be refined to incentivize voluntary development. If a fossil fuel community is going to lose its jobs, it should be the first one offered to host renewable infrastructure. Therein lies the beauty of the brownfield. By seizing a brownfield, the government ensures that a landowner is compensated but cannot further profit from their poisoning of the land.
At the same time, installing renewable infrastructure in these communities helps to decarbonize the community. I think that we often overlook the fact that decarbonizing America doesn’t mean that we just have to decarbonize cities; we have to decarbonize rural areas, too. If it is so important to decarbonize, this should represent sufficient justification to seize, transfer, and repurpose land. If that is not an acceptable solution, then maybe the problem isn’t as serious as we think. But you, and I, and everyone else, know that it is.
This is not fog, or snow, but engine exhaust and other emissions, caught between the warmed-up valley floor and a layer of cold atmosphere.
Original picture by Eltiempo10, and posted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 International License. Unfortunately unaltered. This is how my home looks every winter.
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