This article series by reporter Chase Woodruff first appeared on Colorado Newsline. The current installment is from his article, “Climate Inaction: Lawsuits, roadmaps and Colorado’s uncertain clean-energy future”, posted on October 7, 2020.
“Where does the governor stand on these issues?”
That was the question posed by Auden Schendler, a then-member of Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission, in early July, just after the commission missed what climate-change activists had interpreted as a statutory deadline to propose comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions rules. And it’s the question that has defined much of the last two years of Colorado climate policy.
It was Polis’ opposition to early drafts of historic piece of emissions legislation, House Bill 19-1261, that had delayed its rollout by top Democrats at the Capitol and ultimately softened some of its key provisions. It was Polis who had quietly issued a signing statement that the bill’s supporters interpreted as undermining its intent. And it was Polis, many climate-action advocates had come to believe, who had steered the AQCC and regulators at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment away from enacting strong, enforceable regulations in the year since HB-1261’s passage.
As a result, Colorado’s efforts to confront the climate crisis during the first half of Polis’ gubernatorial term have differed sharply from what many advocates envisioned two years ago. While Polis, a multimillionaire tech investor whose campaign spending helped shake up state politics in the mid-2000s, has never been a conventional Democrat — “he’s kind of a libertarian,” Schendler said in an interview — few anticipated the degree to which he would stand in the way of the climate policies favored by much of the rest of his party.
In 2018, Polis campaigned on a promise of putting the state on a path to a 100% renewable electric grid by 2040 — but, in a sign of what was to come, stressed to his conservative critics at the time that his plan didn’t include “top-down” regulatory measures like raising Colorado’s renewable energy standard, which was first passed by Colorado voters in 2004 and mandates that utilities generate a certain percentage of their electricity through renewables.
Instead, Polis told Colorado Politics at the time, his plan relied on “a bottom-up approach using market mechanisms, like encouraging distributed wind and solar projects (and) removing regulatory barriers to siting wind projects on state lands.”
That preference for market-driven climate action has endured throughout Polis’ governorship. Even before being sworn in, he joined executives from Xcel Energy at a press conference in Denver to unveil the utility’s pledge to achieve an 80% cut in emissions by 2030, and he hailed a similar announcement by Westminster-based electricity wholesaler Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association in his 2020 State of the State address. He’s frequently seized opportunities to celebrate clean-energy efforts by the private sector, from Lyft’s 2019 announcement that it would add 200 electric vehicles to its Colorado fleet to an effort to encourage breweries to sell excess CO2 to marijuana growers.
Even one of the few enforceable climate policies enacted by his administration — a zero emissions vehicle rule requiring automakers to sell a certain percentage of electric cars within the state — came through a “compromise approach” negotiated with industry groups.
“How much of it is … incentives and market enhancements, versus more mandate-heavy (policies)?” Elise Jones, an AQCC commissioner, said in an interview. “I think it’s fair to say that this administration would love to see how far they can get with a whole array of different programs, some of which include regulation, but not all of them.”
That’s not a view widely shared by clean-energy experts and advocates around the world, many of whom stress that aggressive policy intervention and massive public investments will be necessary to meet science-based emissions targets. Especially in more challenging sectors like transportation and buildings, scientists say, governments have a central role to play in achieving the “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a 2018 report are necessary to avert the worst impacts of a warming planet.
The lawmakers who passed HB-1261 believed they had crafted legislation that required state government to play an active role in making those changes. And plenty of supporters of aggressive action sat on the AQCC, including Schendler, a sustainability executive for the Aspen Skiing Company who had been appointed to the commission by former Gov. John Hickenlooper in 2018. Schendler is the author of a 2009 book, “Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution,” that reads in many ways like a rebuke to the private-sector-led approach to decarbonization that Polis would pursue a decade later.
“Government agencies and nonprofits pushing green business have a vested interest in the story that this is a pretty smooth ride,” Schendler wrote. “The former are trying to make policy and politicians look good, and the latter are trying to push their mission and raise money based on their success. The same is true for corporations, which are trying either to position their brand or to convince customers and shareholders that what they’re doing makes sense and works.”
“Business is designed to make money, and making money means creating more carbon emissions, often through growth,” he continued. “Without carbon regulation … business is always going to default to profit at the expense of the atmosphere, because it costs nothing to pollute.”
As Jones, Schendler and other members of the AQCC grew more vocally dissatisfied with the pace at which the state’s implementation of HB-1261 had moved, the commission held the first in a series of “Greenhouse Gas Strategy Subcommittee” meetings in July, offering commissioners, administration officials and environmental advocacy groups a chance to potentially hash out their differences on the state’s long-term approach to climate policy. For the first time, CDPHE staff outlined a regulatory schedule that included rulemakings on transportation and buildings, two of Colorado’s largest sources of emissions, in mid-to-late 2021.
Schendler, however, won’t be around to participate. Days before the commission’s August hearing, he and two other commissioners were notified by the Polis administration that they hadn’t been reappointed to the commission following the expiration of their terms.
“It was done in a very disrespectful way,” said Schendler. “Several days before the meeting, so I’d already prepared, and then it was, ‘Thanks, we’re going a different direction.’”
In place of the outgoing commissioners, all of whom had been solidly in support of more aggressive climate regulation, Polis appointed three new members to the commission, two of whom had ties to the oil and gas industry: Randy Ahrens, the former mayor of Broomfield, and Gary Arnold, the business manager for Denver Pipefitters Local 208. A fourth commissioner whose term had expired, Charles Grobe, a former executive at Tri-State, was reappointed to the commission for another two years.
Perhaps more than anything else in the last two years, Polis’ unexpected shakeup of the AQCC convinced climate-action advocates that their differences with the governor were deep-seated and potentially irreconcilable.
“It’s pretty clear there is no hope of change at the (AQCC) right now,” said Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director at advocacy group WildEarth Guardians. “They’re going to do exactly what the governor wants them to do. There’s no longer a majority on that commission that is willing to push for more, and that speaks volumes to where the governor is truly at right now.”
“The governor believes the science is clear on the pace and scale of what is necessary to combat climate change, and will continue to advance a bold and comprehensive suite of policies, regulations, and incentives designed to protect the health and safety of Coloradans today and for generations to come,” Polis spokesperson Conor Cahill said in a statement. “The AQCC plays a role in this work, and we are excited about the diversity in background and professional experience that the recently appointed commissioners bring to the table.”
“The governor is a fan of Auden Schendler’s urgent drive to act on climate and hopes that he continues his climate advocacy,” Cahill added.
Schendler, however, says that the shakeup sent a clear message. Colorado climate activists had entered 2019 with powerful allies in both chambers of the state legislature and on the AQCC, but ultimately, the path to regulatory action ran through the governor, whose intentions were now clear.
“I think it was a signal to slow down, and I think it will slow down,” Schendler said. “The AQCC was pushing pretty hard to do as much as it could, and the consequence is that it got restructured in a way that made it less likely to achieve those emissions reductions.”
“I think it’s fair to say that the governor is a very hands-on governor in all things, including climate,” said Jones. “He has a vision for how he wants to get there, and he is not shy about articulating that.”