Quote Originally Posted by PhiAlpha View Post
What “oil and gas overlords” are attempting to stop other industries from growing here or have attempted to prevent the state from enticing/incentivizing other industries to move here? Please site specific examples, especially over the last 10-15 years.

The oil and gas industry is always brought up as some evil boogie man here when it comes to conversations about diversifying the economy and no one ever elaborates on that outside of attempt to find a scapegoat and assign blame. I fail to see how it’s actively tried to prevent the growth of any industry here over the two decades that I’ve really been paying attention to it…especially when aerospace, defense, renewable energy, tech, tourism, and others have all made strides during that time, but I would be happy to consider any evidence disputing that.
Plus a good number of people in the Oil and Gas industry are highly educated. Even the field worker probably has a lot more skills than your average retail employee. If the O & G industry went completely belly up tomorrow, those workers could find a skills based blue collar job that no one wants to do because it is not 'sexy' and I say this as a college educated data analyst.

We need a lot more funding in K-12 and perhaps the first two years of college to teach young adults how to learn and use critical thinking skills. The higher education landscape is going to look significantly different 20 years from now as we figure out how to integrate all this vast wealth of information to the traditionally college system.