Earth Protect Blog

The Denver Post 

Gov. Jared Polis published a comprehensive roadmap, two years in the making, for Colorado to rapidly and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Now he should support the legislation that will make sure we follow his plan.

Senate Bill 200 is not Colorado’s version of the Green New Deal — a hopelessly ineffective statement of values.

Rather, this legislation, sponsored by Sen. Faith Winter, Sen. Dominick Moreno and Rep. Dominique Jackson, is a precise piece of smart policy to set Colorado down the path of meeting goals to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors of our economy.

The goals have already been established by Polis’ roadmap and by legislation in 2019, and the bill has been amended to align perfectly with those already established benchmarks. Greenhouse gas emissions will be cut by 26% below a baseline 2005 level by 2025; 50% by 2030 and 90% by 2050. Note that these goals are actually less ambitious than the ones former Gov. John Hickenlooper tossed out in an executive order in 2017. This is not a radical new bar.

We’ve already made some progress since 2005 toward the goal, almost exclusively with renewable energy additions in the utility sector and fuel efficiency in cars and trucks. Xcel Energy is leading the way with a push to adopt more renewable energy in their large generation portfolio than even required by Colorado law.

But a single utility company can’t stop climate change alone. Most houses are burning natural gas for heat and hot water; our cars emit greenhouse gases; some manufacturing processes emit greenhouses gases directly; and the extraction process for fossil fuels often emits methane directly into the atmosphere.

Senate Bill 200 would set up the Air Quality Control Commission as the “project manager” of Polis’ roadmap. Winter described it concisely, saying that other regulatory boards are too siloed into a particular industry to do this work — the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, even the existing Colorado Energy Office which handles some homeowner-based incentives for energy conservation and renewable energy projects. Colorado needs an agency that can track our progress toward these goals, across the board, and make rules through a formal process to make sure the state meets them.

Polis doesn’t think the AQCC is the appropriate place to seat the administration of this program. He makes some good points about the fear of an unelected board making decisions that could have vast ramifications on our economy.

But Polis and lawmakers already gave the AQCC this role in 2019 with House Bill 1261, the Climate Action Plan to Reduce Pollution, and in some ways the AQCC was already doing this. For example, in 2019, the AQCC adopted California’s zero-emissions vehicle standards which mandate that lowor zero-emissions vehicles must account for 5% of new car sales in Colorado by 2023.

The portion of the bill that creates an environmental justice ombudsperson and an advisory board does have the governor’s support. Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in Colorado, have been disproportionately impacted by pollution. Establishing an office to ensure the voices of those communities are considered in this process is the right thing to do.

We don’t think it’s a stretch to establish the AQCC as the clearinghouse for attempting to reach ambitious goals across all sectors, and if lawmakers don’t like what the commission implements they have the power to override any such rules with laws.