This article series by reporter Chase Woodruff first appeared on Colorado Newsline, beginning on October 5, 2020.
Ean Thomas Tafoya stood beside a service road just outside the Phillips 66 Denver Terminal, a fuel distribution facility located just north of city limits. Denver’s skyline loomed faintly in the distance, masked by summertime smog and a layer of haze from wildfires to the west. The smell of asphalt and burnt plastic hung in the air as a line of tanker trucks idled outside the terminal gates, a guttural rumbling over the dull roar of Interstate 270 a few hundred feet away.
Climate change can be a difficult problem to comprehend. Its effects, while increasingly dramatic, unfold slowly, often the product of complex chains of causation not easily grasped in real time. Its causes — the heat-trapping gases emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere by human activity, mostly through the combustion of oil, gas and coal — are literally invisible and so woven into the architecture of the modern world that many of us take them for granted.
But the warming of the planet, and the fossil-fuel economy driving it, are also tangible realities, physical processes that can be seen, sensed and viscerally felt — just not by everyone.
“Where industrial point sources are — wells, infrastructure, all that — is predominantly in low-income and/or communities of color,” said Ariana Gonzalez, Colorado climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “And it’s the same for coal plants and gas plants.”
All over the world, the sprawling industrial complexes required to extract, transport, process and distribute fossil fuels tend to be found in a certain kind of area: economically distressed, historically disadvantaged and home to a high percentage of immigrants and people of color. West Oakland. South Philadelphia. Houston’s Ship Channel. Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” These fenceline communities — some call them “sacrifice zones” — are the product of decades, if not centuries, of racial and economic inequality.
In Denver, it’s the city’s north side, along with outlying parts of Commerce City and unincorporated Adams County, where Colorado’s largest concentration of fossil-fuel infrastructure shares a roughly 20-square-mile area with some of the region’s poorest and least white communities.
Growing up in Denver’s Cole neighborhood, Tafoya, an organizer with environmental advocacy group GreenLatinos, could see the smokestack of Xcel Energy’s Cherokee Generating Station from his home. A steady stream of coal trains, which can spew hazardous dust particles, thundered through a nearby railway interchange. His front yard was part of an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site, its soil having been reclaimed to remove toxic metals deposited by the lead smelting plants that operated in the area beginning in the 19th century.
“It becomes normalized to you,” Tafoya said. “Whether it’s the noise pollution, or the air pollution, or the water quality.”
In a new report commissioned by the NRDC and the Sierra Club, analysts collated transportation emissions data with income and demographic figures from census tracts across Colorado, and found a consistent trend: the higher the emissions, the higher the percentage of low-income and non-white residents.
“There are communities that have already been bearing the burden of pollution, in addition to income inequality, racism, all of these things,” Gonzalez said. “There are people who are bearing multiple burdens all at once already.”
These disparities are not merely an urban phenomenon. In the mountains, “downvalley” communities home to low-income and immigrant workers in the agricultural and tourism sectors are just as likely, Tafoya said, to feel the impacts of environmental racism. And in rural Weld County on the Eastern Plains, home to 90% of Colorado’s oil production, activists have railed against a drilling project near Bella Romero Academy, a predominantly low-income and Latino elementary school in Greeley; the site was chosen in 2016 after previous plans to drill near a ‘whiter’, more affluent school were abandoned.
And residents of these communities aren’t just bearing the brunt of the costs associated with the causes of climate change — increasingly, they’re suffering the worst of its effects, too. Higher temperatures exacerbate health hazards in neighborhoods where air conditioning is rare and which suffer from the urban heat island effect. Warmer, sunnier weather increases the risk of ozone-polluted air. The chronic “hot drought” that has gripped much of Colorado since 2000 — the most severe dry spell the region has experienced since the 16th century — is causing increased stress on water supplies across the state, hitting downvalley communities and small farmers and ranchers the hardest.
“What we’ve seen repeatedly over the last few years is that soils in Colorado were super dry when runoff season came, and that’s why 100% of (normal) snowpack in many places turned into damn near 50% of (normal) runoff, which is shocking,” Brad Udall, a water and climate researcher at Colorado State University, told Newsline in July. “Shocking and disturbing, and unfortunately, probably our future.”
Since shortly after the global spread of coal-powered industrial production in the late 19th century, scientists have correctly predicted that the combustion of fossil fuels would eventually release enough carbon into the atmosphere to dramatically alter the world’s climate. Today, average atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, have reached roughly 415 parts per million, 46% above pre-industrial levels and higher than any level the Earth has experienced in the last 2.6 million years. As a result, average global temperatures have risen by more than 1 degree Celsius since 1850, causing profound impacts to weather patterns and ecosystems all over the world, including Colorado’s “megadrought.”
For decades, world governments have officially sought to limit warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius, a threshold beyond which climate change would begin to have globally catastrophic effects, with entire regions of the world transformed by heat and drought and many of its major cities inundated by rising sea levels.
But a landmark report released by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in October 2018 — in the final weeks of Colorado’s pivotal midterm elections — became a turning point for climate activism around the world. The IPCC’s report was the most comprehensive assessment to date of the impacts of 1.5 degrees of warming, and it painted a dire picture, concluding that catastrophic climate impacts were already underway, and will continue to accelerate long before the world reaches the 2-degree limit.
The report also came with a stark warning: limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius would require cutting global carbon emissions nearly in half by 2030, and to net-zero by midcentury. While such a timeline is technically possible, its authors said, achieving it “would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
“We show it can be done within laws of physics and chemistry,” Jim Skea, an IPCC co-chair, told the press at the time of the report’s release. “The final tick box is political will.”
The IPCC’s report, combined with a series of headline-grabbing climate disasters that struck the world in late 2018, set off a global wave of organizing and demonstrations to demand more aggressive climate action, much of it led by young people. A fiery speech from teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg to diplomats gathered at a December 2018 U.N. climate summit became a viral sensation. The Sunrise Movement, a U.S. activist group, held sit-ins in the halls of Congress and began agitating for what they called a “Green New Deal.”