‘A great transition 50 years from now’

Hickenlooper opines as Colorado organizations get $329 million in EPA program for reducing emissions from buildings, landfills, coal mines and other places

by Allen Best

They brought home the bacon, $328.7 million for climate programs in Colorado, and Colorado’s U.S. senators were at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 8 headquarters near Union Station on Monday morning to explain why it mattered — and how they had made it possible.

“The cost of climate change is all around us,” said Sen. Michael Bennet before enumerating everything from wildfires to mudslides to the most severe drought in the Colorado River in the last 1200 years.

“That’s why we wrote the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate legislation that has been passed by any government, by any country in the world to this day. And Colorado had a big hand in passing this.”

Hickenlooper produced smiles in his time at the lectern: “One of the great things in life is when you’re lucky enough to have a mentor who’s 10 years younger than you are, teaches you humility and how the world works. And after I follow him, he’s done all the hard work. He’s thanked everyone.”

But Hickenlooper was just getting started. After crediting Bennet – once his chief of staff when he was mayor of Denver – with being “one of a handful of people that have been talking about this for year after year after year,” he said this:

“Part of our challenge is to keep this fresh and have a sense of urgency, because there are still a lot of folks out there – some of them have very large public relations budgets – they’re saying, ‘Oh, climate change isn’t that big a deal. Not sure it’s that high a level that we should rush into spending this money.’”

“This money, it’s a significant amount of money coming into Colorado, (and) it’s a drop in the bucket, right? This is a placeholder because what we’re doing now is creating the framework by which we are first in this country and then the industries that we train and build are then going to be exported to train and build the systems in other countries around the world to do this great transition.

“And it’s going to be a great transition 50 years from now. We’re hoping to look back on this period as that time when people finally stood up and said, ‘All right, we’re going to, instead of being ruled by technology, we’re going to use technology, and we’re going to find different ways of getting energy, and we’re going to recognize that we’ve got people all around the globe that right now don’t have any access to energy. We’ve got to make sure that they get energy, but we do not continue to pollute our air and water, the environment we live in when we access that energy, and we know that we can do that.”

“We don’t have all the answers but we must have a level of optimism and urgency to get this moving at a faster level. And that’s why this grant is such a big deal. Nobody thinks that the Inflation Reduction Act was a perfect bill, but you look at these two projects — going into coal mines and solid wastes and places where we know there’s a tremendous amount of methane coming into the atmosphere. Methane is more than 80 times more harmful in terms of climate change than carbon dioxide. And yet, for a long time, we never did anything about it,” said Hickenlooper.

“Colorado was the first state, actually the first government entity of any type to regulate methane, 10 years ago. We should be very proud about that, what’s now accepted not just in this country but increasingly around the world was created by collaborative efforts. It’s a little bit of punching and a little bit of pushing, but it happened right here with that distinctly Western approach that we take here.”

Colorado’s recipients had been notified two days in advance of the event that their projects will get money. One speaker, Jeff Baker, the board chair of the Denver Regional Council of Governments, joked that it was kind of like the dog who caught the car. “What do you now?” But he quickly assured listeners that DRCOG (widely pronounced Dr. COG) did indeed have well-laid plans – although in some cases the specifics have to be worked out.

Colorado Energy Office, $129 million

The Colorado Energy Office will get $129 million for work in five sectors.

Methane: Deploy advanced methane monitoring technology to produce data that will inform regulatory policy. Reduce methane emissions from landfills and coal mines through existing and new monitoring and measurement programs.
Fund energy efficiency and electrification upgrades in large commercial buildings that are otherwise hard to decarbonize.
Distribute subawards and support to local governments to implement projects that reduce emission from buildings, transportation, electric power, waste and materials management, plus land use. The money is to be administered through a new program, the Local Government Climate Action Accelerator.

Electricity was produced from methane emissions at the closed Elk Creek Mine for about a decade before in volume such that electricity could not be generated.

“We’re so excited — and shocked in the best way quite honestly — to accept this award that will help us meet our greenhouse gas reduction goals, make our air cleaner, and save Coloradans money,” said Dominique Gomez, the deputy administrator for the Colorado Energy Office.

“Local governments have a major role in reducing emissions in several key sectors of the economy, and the urgent need to increase their capacity to do that work is evident,” said Gomez. “The state can help, but the local governments really need to take the action, and our agencies will help us to build on local successful programs that are helping reduce emissions.

CEO will administer the program partly in conjunction with the state’s Department of Natural Resources and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

Michael Ogletree, director of the state’s Air Pollution Control Division, said Colorado had estimated the projects would result in an annual reduction of more than 10.7 million tons of methane.

“We’ll use advanced technology, including satellites and aircraft to find the largest methane emitters in the state. Because we need the best possible data to inform a rigorously scientific approach to methane emissions reductions, we can achieve significant near-term methane emissions reductions by collecting this data and rapidly sharing it with operators who are in the position to immediately address their emissions. We intend to create a rigorous and predictable detection and response protocol so that we have clearly established methods for sharing this data with operators. This grant will also allow us to embark on an ambitious, exciting program to study methane emissions from coal mines across the state and then figure out the best way to capture those emissions. This study will focus on the science of coal mines emissions and also the legislative and regulatory changes needed to draft a feasible program for emissions capture.”

As for the money for methane capture from coal mines, this correspondent asked about coal mine capture and whether anything could be said about the methane at Coal Basin near Redstone.

“We haven’t planned out exactly which areas where we will do capture projects yet,” said Gomez. That will be decided soon in consultation with the Department of Natural Resources and CDPH&E.

DRCOG and buildings, $200 million

Dr. COG, as the metro-area agency is widely known, will get just a few hundred thousand dollars shy of $200 million for its Zero-Emission Building Initiative. DRCOG includes nine metro-area counties and 49 municipalities, from Silver Plume to Deer Trail, and from Castle Rock to Firestone. DRCOG says it has more than 50% of Colorado’s residents within its member jurisdictions.

The goal will be to electrify and weatherproof more than 60,000 buildings and provide education for up to 3,800 new workers and upskill 1,000 existing workers. There’s a large carve-out for lower-income residences.

DRCOG’s Baker said the EPA grant “will supercharge our efforts to meet this challenge head-on by electrifying and decarbonizing buildings.” He noted that the member jurisdictions had also committed matching funds of more than $73 million, “so we’ve got skin in the game.”

Robert Spotts, the mobility analytics program manager for DRCOG, described some particulars of how the $200 million will be used. “This is not sexy,” he said, as he described energy efficiency and building electrification. But the work that will occur will almost certainly yield savings over and above the investment across time.

Reaction to Biden decision

After other remarks and questions from the press, including one from this correspondent about the money for coal mine methane, a reporter from KDVR asked about reactions to the announcement by President Biden the previous day that he was not seeking re-election.

Bennet – who earlier on after Biden’s bumbling debate performance was the first U.S. senator to suggest to Biden that he consider stepping aside – credited Biden with making a difficult decision, but one that Biden believed was in the interests of the American people. He credited Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, with being “well prepared to prosecute this campaign in the next four months and to beat Donald Trump.”

U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, a former aide to Phil Anschutz, who made a fortune in natural gas and oil, said that Trump’s biggest applause line during hid acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was drill-baby-drill.

Bennet added: “We need her to win for the reasons that we’re here today. Because you saw at their convention what their version of energy policy is, which is drill-baby-drill. That got the biggest applause of anything that Donald Trump said when he was up there. And that is not where Colorado wants to be. That’s not where the United States wants to be. We’re not interested in giving handouts to the richest, biggest oil companies ever known to mankind. We’re not interested in more trickle-down economics that cut taxes for the wealthiest people in the country. When we’ve got the worst income equality that we’ve had since the 1920s and think it’s somehow going to just trickle down to everybody else.”

“I believe Donald Trump is a symptom of the economic turmoil that the American people have faced because of 40 years of trickle-down economics. That’s what I think.…. I think she can win.”

Hickenlooper followed and also credited Biden with making a difficult decision – a sacrifice, really. “That was his life’s goal, and he walked back from it.”