Photo: Bill McKibben headlined this year’s Mountain Towns summit in Breckenridge. But the diversity of other speakers testifies to the momentum this organization has. Jos Kusumoto Photograph.
This story by Allen Best appeared on BigPivots.com on October 20, 2025. We are sharing it in two parts.
Mountain Towns 2030 has wheels. It has legs. The evidence of its momentum was ample at the annual conference held October 6-8 in Breckenridge.
More than 600 people attended. More impressive was the lineup of speakers. Mark Jacobsen had come from Stanford University to speak. You can’t wander very far down the energy transition rabbit hole without coming across his work and proclamations.
Electrical utilities took it seriously enough to send representatives, not just some guy or gal in a cubicle at the end of the hallway. Duane Highley, the CEO of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, had driven up from the Front Range for a panel about 100% renewables energy. Bryan Hannegan from Holy Cross Energy was on the same panel, and so was Chris Hansen. Hansen was a sponsor of many of the key pieces of legislation from 2019 through 2024 that framed Colorado’s transition. Xcel Energy was represented by Andrew Holder, the company’s director of community relations and local governmental affairs. The panel was moderated by Jon Creyts, the CEO of RMI, formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Bill McKibben was this year’s headliner. He has a new book, Here Comes the Sun. He reported that he had been in 37 hotel rooms in the previous 40 nights. One of those hotel rooms, presumably, had been occasioned by his visit to the pope’s summer house, which is 45 minutes outside Rome. “It turns out to be on top of a 600-year-old castle on top of a beautiful hill with a stunning view of the Mediterranean,” he said.
Two weeks before, McKibben had been in Colorado to speak at two venues and perhaps more, one just down the street from me, unbeknownst to me until afterward. After his talk in Breckenridge, he was off to Crested Butte. The guy keeps busy. This was the sixth time I have seen him in Colorado during the last 20 years: first in Telluride, later in Boulder, and three times in Denver. Mostly he plays to full houses. One of his Denver visits was to promote a book. Fewer than 30 were at the Tattered Cover event. Highs and lows.
McKibben is on a high now. Copies of his book were available to all who attended the event at Breckenridge’s Riverwalk Center. Nearly all seats were filled, and at least one director of a prominent Colorado state agency was in attendance.
“I live in a mountain town myself,” McKibben said. “Not this high up, but high enough that it has both a downhill ski area and a beautiful Nordic track. I know that most of you come from the gravity-driven section of the skiing world, where you’re willing to let Issac Newton do most of the work. But I hope there are a few other devoted Nordic skiers.”
His remarks during the next 30 minutes were a synopsis of his book, which Big Pivots plans to formally review soon. It’s so current that some of his writing was done in May. It’s hard to write a book about the energy transition when so much is happening so quickly.
And there is distinctly good news to write about, as he shared in both his remarks in Breckenridge and in his book. The economics and superior technology of renewables have become unassailable. Of course, the Trump administration sees the world differently.
The flip side is that it’s getting very, very close to deadline. Already, the responses of the climate to mountain greenhouse gases have become greater than what was predicted. The margin for error has narrowed.
“Climate change is a damaged relationship with the sun,” he said. “So, as with many damaged relationships, the way to repair it is not to avoid that relationship, nor in this case, I think, to fill the sky with sulfur in an effort to blot more of the sun. The way to repair it is to deepen that relationship, to turn to the sun.”
McKibben is clearly at ease at the lectern. At times, he stood with his hands behind is head, as if relaxing at a baseball game. He most certainly would lose points for that at a Toastmasters event. On the other hand, he’s good enough to make up his own rules.
Park City’s Luke Cartin, second from right in the front row, was a driving force behind creation of Mountain Towns 2030. Photos on this page/Jos Kusumoto Photograph
Also notable was Ramón Méndez Galain, the secretary of energy in Uruguay from 2007 to 2015. Uruguay had been an energy importer, placing a grievous burden on its economy. It set out to switch to renewables and has greatly succeeded. Now, 98% of the electricity comes from renewables and 65% of the country’s energy overall, he reported. And the country is now thriving. A very big pivot, if you will.
At the hotel that evening, I happened to walk down the hallway the same time as Ian Billick, the mayor of Crested Butte. I think I had last seen him in the flesh 15 years ago, when he was testifying before an interim legislative committee at the Colorado Capitol. We talked a couple of times at length during our shared time in Breckenridge, and they were rewarding conversations.
I also talked informally with a state employee without the need to have a public information officer present. What a nice 15- to 20-minute conversation that was. I remember 10 years ago writing a story about Colorado River water and going to a conference in Santa Fe where a member of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — the wholesale water supply organization for 26 million people — spoke about water conservation. We talked afterward in the hallway, and what he was able to tell me was very valuable to the story. He said if I had tried to talk with him when he was back in the office, it would have to go through a PIO and he would have been able to say much less.
So that is part of the story of Mountain Towns 2030: a rubbing of elbows and a sharing of notes. And that, incidentally, is something that I tried to do from 2002 to 2019 in a vehicle called Mountain Town News. Early on I had gained an interest in climate change. Immediately after getting myself grounded in the science, I turned to the energy transition. Some of this I shared with my readers in Big Pivots, but I didn’t think I could go too deep.
The irony is that Mountain Towns 2030 came along just as I dropped Mountain Town News in favor of Big Pivots. But the organization of Mountain Towns 2030 has wheels, as I said at the outset. It has succeeded in connecting people in ways that work for those people.
Afterward, I sent questions to Chris Steinkamp, the Boulder-based director of Mountain Towns 2030…
Allen Best publishes the e-journal Big Pivots, which chronicles the energy transition in Colorado and beyond.