This article series by reporter Chase Woodruff first appeared on Colorado Newsline. The current installment is from his article, “Climate Inaction: How Colorado’s landmark emissions law went up in smoke,” posted on October 6, 2020.
Gov. Jared Polis marked the end of his first year in office with his annual State of the State address to the Colorado General Assembly on January 9. He came bearing a carefully choreographed piece of good news, courtesy of the Westminster-based Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which provides electricity to rural utilities serving more than 1.3 million customers across Colorado and several neighboring states. Tri-State had long been criticized as a laggard on clean energy, but that, the governor said, was about to change.
“Just this morning,” Polis told lawmakers, “Tri-State and its members announced that they will be replacing their remaining coal power in the state with thousands of megawatts of cheaper and cleaner renewable energy sources by 2030, resulting in a 90% reduction in the utilities’ in-state greenhouse gas emissions.”
It was exactly the kind of clean-energy victory that fit neatly into Polis’ theory of change: a voluntary commitment demonstrating that the transition away from fossil fuels was being “driven by the private sector” and “technological advances,” he said, not government mandates.
Ean Thomas Tafoya, an organizer with environmental advocacy group GreenLatinos, heard the opening lines of Polis’ address from the halls of the State Capitol, just outside the House chambers where lawmakers were gathered. By the time the governor turned to climate change and Tri-State, however, Tafoya and 37 other activists were outside in handcuffs, being loaded into police vans.
“I got arrested because I was trying to raise my voice about what was happening to immigrant children,” Tafoya told Newsline in an interview.
The 38 activists, mostly members of the groups Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement, were hauled out of the Capitol by state troopers after chanting, singing and dropping banners from the House gallery before and during Polis’ speech. Demonstrators had sought to put pressure on Polis and the legislature to accelerate the transition to clean energy by ending fracking in Colorado, especially near vulnerable communities.
“No wells at Bella Romero,” one banner read, referring to the predominantly low-income and Latino school in Greeley where a nearby drilling operation was underway. “No more sacrifice zones.”
The protest, which resulted in trespassing charges that were later dropped, was yet another battle in Colorado’s long-running oil and gas wars, which have dominated energy politics at the state level for much of the last decade. The pattern has recurred throughout the post-2010 shale drilling boom, with Colorado’s Democratic establishment trying — and mostly failing — to keep the peace between hardline anti-fracking activists calling for bans or harsh restrictions on drilling and the deep-pocketed industry groups who wield enormous influence at the Capitol.
While the issues of climate change and oil and gas extraction are closely intertwined in the eyes of many environmental activists, Colorado Democrats have largely sought to keep them separate from one another in setting state energy policy. That much was plainly evident during the 2019 legislative session, when Democratic lawmakers passed Senate Bill 19-181, a long-awaited package of oil and gas reforms that made little direct reference to climate change, and House Bill 19-1261, a climate-change bill that didn’t mention oil and gas drilling.
HB-1261, dubbed the “Colorado Climate Action Plan” and championed by some of the legislature’s most powerful Democrats, was a historic bill, committing the state to a series of greenhouse-gas emissions goals that included a 26% cut by 2025, a 50% cut by 2030 and a 90% cut by 2050. But while the bill was highly ambitious in scope, it had at least one thing going for it: by sidestepping the issue of oil and gas drilling, its implementation would, in theory, prove far less controversial than Colorado’s never-ending fracking wars.
There’s a broad expert consensus on how Colorado and governments around the world can achieve net-zero emissions, and it can be boiled down to a simple mantra: clean up the electric sector, and “electrify everything.” Replace gas-guzzling cars with electric vehicles, or, better yet, electrified public transit; replace gas-burning furnaces with electric heat pumps; replace gas-burning stoves with induction appliances — and power it all with an electric grid that runs on wind, solar and other carbon-free alternatives.
To moderate Democrats and mainstream environmental groups, these “demand-side” climate policies have far more appeal than fracking bans or other measures that seek to limit the supply of fossil fuels. While they present enormous technological and financial challenges of their own, demand-side policies represent a less direct and immediate threat to powerful oil and gas interests, attempting instead to ease the industry into a market-driven decline. In the words of former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper — long a target of activist criticism for his record on energy issues — policies that “cut off the demand” for fossil fuels will help “make fracking obsolete.”
That’s a transition that could take decades to complete, but experts say that deep, unprecedented global cuts must be achieved within a matter of years. In a landmark 2018 report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists urged world governments to reduce overall emissions 45% by 2030. While technically feasible, such a rapid decline would represent a dramatic reversal from more than 150 years of nearly uninterrupted global emissions growth.
Like the United States as a whole, Colorado has seen its annual greenhouse gas emissions decline slightly since peaking around 2010, a shift driven largely by the electricity sector’s move away from coal-powered generation in favor of renewables and natural gas. In most other sectors, however, including transportation, building fuel use and industrial production, statewide emissions have continued to rise steadily — a trend that will need to be quickly reversed to meet the 2025 and 2030 targets set by HB-1261.
With the bill now law, the responsibility for putting the state on a path to achieving its goals fell to the Air Quality Control Commission, a seven-member rulemaking panel composed of part-time, volunteer commissioners who meet once per month. The commission is assisted in its work by staff from the Air Pollution Control Division, part of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
While the task given to the AQCC by HB-1261 was daunting, advocates for aggressive climate action believed the new law was in good hands, with broad agreement among commissioners on the need for swift, sweeping regulatory action. On November 21, 2019, six months after the bill’s passage, the commission was briefed by officials from the APCD and other state agencies on the development of a policy “roadmap” to meet HB-1261’s goals.
“I would urge us and you to continue to think about how to accelerate the timeline,” Auden Schendler, an AQCC commissioner and vice president of sustainability for the Aspen Skiing Company, told state officials. “I was looking at some analysis of the gap and what we’re trying to do — it’s super aggressive.”
“I find myself with a sense of urgency that wants to push us to go faster,” agreed commissioner Elise Jones. “My understanding is that the gap we’re trying to make up is pretty significant.”
“I think we share the sense of urgency,” replied John Putnam, the CDPHE’s director of environmental programs.
Over the course of the following year, Colorado climate-action advocates would grow less and less certain that that was the case.