How might Ken Salazar have moved the climate change needle?

He had brief ambitions to run for president in 2024. Had he succeeded, how would our climate story be different today? I have to wonder.

A longer version of this piece was published several weeks ago at Big Pivots. This version was shared with other Colorado media.

by Allen Best

Given that November election results were almost universally understood as a rebuke of President Donald Trump, I have to wonder about the 2024 presidential election. What if President Joe Biden had not taken so doddering long before bowing out of the race? What if candidates not named Kamala had been given time to seek the Democratic nomination?

In his new book, “Borderlands,” Colorado’s Ken Salazar says he had decided to seek the Democratic nomination. Confronting climate change, Salazar says, would have been the second major plank of his campaign.

Trump and his team have excised the phrase “climate change” from the federal vocabulary. A good example is the Bureau of Reclamation’s plan for operating the Colorado River that was released several months ago. You have to go far into the document to find the words “climate change,” and even then only to respond to public comments that used those words.

Instead of embracing the enormous challenge and opportunities of this energy transition, the Trump team have insisted that old technologies will be key to our future. Like we should all have land lines and drive standard-transmission cars.

In “Borderlands,” Salazar talks about growing up in a large family in the San Luis Valley near Manassa in a house with no power lines to deliver electricity. He got an education, and it has served him well. In 1998, he was elected Colorado attorney general, then U.S. senator. In the administration of President Barack Obama he was secretary of Interior. Under Biden, he was ambassador to Mexico.

“My Fight for an Inclusive America,” the subtitle of Salazar’s book, summarizes well his essential message. Salazar believed a different conversation was possible, one driven not by the language of differences but rather of heightened understanding of commonalities and acceptance of unimportant differences. More broadly, he describes a future of cross-border unity, a North America with greater shared purpose.

As for climate change, he foresaw an opportunity for the United States taking the lead on “blunting and eventually reversing the ravages of climate change.” That, he wrote, “wouldn’t just make the United States and Mexico safer — we would make all people everywhere safer.”

Since release of the book in August, Salazar has been on a fast-paced book tour across Colorado and beyond. I caught up with him in October in Arvada, his second event of the day. Among the crowd of 40 to 50 people were two people who were his second or third cousins. Colorado can still be like that, one very big small town.

On stage, Salazar wore a turquoise bolo tie, Western boots and I am guessing a Stetson hat. Never, at least in recent years, have I seen him with a bare head.

Often he stitches history in his meandering soliloquies. For example, he told about Colorado’s governor a century ago, William “Billy” Adams, a product of the San Luis Valley, after whom Adams State College in Alamosa is named. In Salazar’s telling, Adams was elected governor in 1926 in a rebuke of the Ku Klux Klan that then held a grip on Colorado. That included the governor after whom Denver’s first big airport was named. Only in recent years has the name of Stapleton been excised from the site, now a neighborhood called Central Park.

As for climate change, I wanted to know more than his skimpy overview in his book. What exactly would he have sought to do as president?

Like much of his book, Salazar responded at a high level, avoiding details. He called climate change an existential issue for our planet and talked about the work of former U.S. Sen. John Kerry, the secretary of state under Obama. He also shared that the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, who is the first woman president of any nation in North America, was a climate scientist by training. He did not, however, answer my questions.

During his 90 minutes on stage, Salazar used the word “courage” 11 times . By this, he meant that elected officials need to take positions even when they are not politically expedient.

Salazar is a people person, a relationship builder. He exhibits warmth. Trump has a different persona. His charisma — for he does have followers who would follow him anywhere — is of the bullying, blustering kind. I would like to have seen them in debate.

Trump is a city guy who, ironically, has his most fervent support in rural America. Salazar came from rural America, and he clearly has not forgotten his roots even as he made his way in cities.

As for climate, instead of bestowing favors on the billionaires who peddle fossil fuels, as our current president has done, what if Salazar, as president, had helped us move more rapidly along on this big, very difficult and very necessary energy pivot? I can only wonder.