Former governor Bill Ritter reflects on Trump reversal of climate change policies and points to work that can be done at the local and state levels
by Allen Best
In 1987, Bill Ritter Jr. and his wife, Jeannie, took a break from their Colorado lives. Ritter went on to be elected district attorney of Denver and then, in 2006, to a four-year term as governor.
But from 1987 to 1990, the Ritters worked as Catholic missionaries in the African country of Zambia. There, they operated a food distribution center. It was and is a poor country as measured by material possessions. In 2022, the World Bank reported that nearly two-thirds of the 12.6 million residents lived on less than $2.15 a day.
“They have an almost zero-carbon footprint, but they live in a fairly dry, arid, hot place,” Ritter told an audience in Lakewood on June 19. “It will become extremely dry and hot and arid and uninhabitable, really, because of greenhouse gases.”
In other words, those in Zambia will be victims of a problem they did not create.
“In America, we always kind of think about justice as you pay for the crime you did. No one should pay for crimes they did not commit. That’s why it’s a justice problem, and that’s why we should be outraged … We should be outraged about what’s happening at the federal level.”
The United States, he said at New Energy Colorado’s annual fundraiser, has abdicated its leadership role in the world during the presidency of Donald Trump and his backers. “And people will literally die because of it, because we backed out” of commitments to the clean energy transition.
Ritter described the situation as “sad” but told his listeners that they should have hope, because of their capacities for personal agency. We can, for example, make choices in the cars we buy.
“The electric vehicle tax credit at the federal level is going away. I really don’t think there’s any saving it at the federal level. I hope that doesn’t mean people stop buying electric vehicles,” he said.
Local governments have a capacity for furthering the work toward achieving a low- and eventually no-emissions future, such as by the building codes they adopt.
Municipal franchise agreements with Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest utilities, also provide a fulcrum for action by local governments.
“Negotiating that franchise agreement is one of the most important things you can do right now,” he said to his audience in Lakewood. “Denver’s is up next year. One of my best friends works at Xcel, but I think even he would agree, that’s where the power lies in terms of ensuring that the utility actually is at the bargaining table with you, and you (can insist) upon certain things.”
Ritter said he met with Denver Mayor Mike Johnston about the city’s 20-year franchise agreement with Xcel. It was struck in 2016 but provides an off-ramp.
“We said, ‘Listen, I ran for office 19 years ago. Nineteen years from now is 2044, four years past the 2040 (decarbonization) goals in Colorado. Think about it. Try to look around the corner. If the emissions continue and heat continues to rise, people will be dying on the streets — even in Denver. That will produce the need for public buildings, for places people can get out of the heat.’ Those are the kinds of things that you have to be thinking about now,” said Ritter.
Temperatures in Denver reached 101 degrees two days after Ritter spoke. How hot might they be in 2044? No climate reports conducted by Colorado agencies have pinpointed warming in that particular year, instead describing 2050 and 2070 scenarios.
A 2024 report commissioned by the Colorado Water Conservation Board reports an “average” year in 2050 across Colorado will be warmer than the very warmest individual years through 2030. That’s if the global emissions are in the medium-low levels.
By 2070, it gets hotter yet. A rise of 2 degrees Fahrenheit will make Denver more like Pueblo. And 4 degrees will make it more like Lamar. A point of reference is this: Denver on Sunday reached 94 degrees, Pueblo 97, and Lamar 100.
Temperatures hit 101 degrees on Saturday afternoon in downtown Denver about the time that this man was asking for help from drivers stopped in traffic along Park Avenue West. Photos/Allen Best
Ritter was elected governor in 2006 at a sharp crease in Colorado history. Colorado Green — the state’s first major wind farm and then the largest in the United States — had started operating in 2004. That same year, despite the strong opposition of Xcel Energy, Colorado voters approved Amendment 37, the nation’s first voter-initiated renewable portfolio standard. It passed by a margin of 54% to 46%.
Electrical utilities were still heavily investing in coal, though. Xcel Energy was building Comanche 3 in Pueblo. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, Colorado’s second-largest electrical generator, was on a $100 million spending spree devoted to its ambitions to build a humongous coal plant in Kansas. Tri-State’s leaders fervently believed in a future of coal combustion. The tumbling of wind and then solar prices had only started
During 2006, as the election approached, Ritter had a choice. His campaign advisers urged him to be a good old boy in his TV campaign ads, joshing with locals in rural Colorado. That would have been easy for him. He had grown up on a wheat farm east of Aurora and had worked construction jobs while in college.
Instead, Ritter insisted upon an advertisement that had him standing amid tall grasses in front of the turbines of Colorado Green. Ritter won his election with 57% of the votes compared to 40% for his Republican opponent, Bob Beauprez.
Once in office, replacing Gov. Owens, who had close ties to the oil and gas industry, Ritter accorded environmental groups a place at the table. “They had sort of been shut out of the conversation for a long time,” he told his listeners in Lakewood. And their support mattered, he said. “You cannot imagine how good it feels to have the support of folks when other people are shooting arrows at you.”
After his four years as governor, Ritter joined his alma mater, Colorado State University, creating the Center for the New Energy Economy. There, he worked with governors’ offices and state legislators from 46 states before he left earlier this year to join a lobbying firm.
“We had a really serious bipartisan conversation,” he said. Instead of politics, they talked about common gains to be had from an energy transition. Prominent in that national conversation was the Conservative Energy Network.
Among the utilities that have pivoted away from coal was Tri-State. The decision was formally made in 2018 with a new chief executive, Duane Highley, who was given the mission of charting a new path.
“So this group that was fully committed to fossil fuels for as long as they could see the future is now going to .,.. reduce their emissions 80% by 2030,” he said.
In Colorado, the argument has shifted to natural gas. Xcel, Tri-State and Colorado’s other major utilities see a need for new generating capacity from natural gas. Environmental advocates see a far more limited role. That argument is playing out in several forums before the state’s Public Utilities Commission.
An entirely different argument — if it can be called that — is underway at the federal government. Donald Trump and most of his Republican followers are determined to crowd out competition to fossil fuels. The president with support from a majority in both the House and the Senate “who really view us as hostiles, people who believe in climate change, people who believe that we should be in an energy transition. There’s so much sadness about that,” said Ritter.
Ritter said he expects the pending legislation now in the Senate, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will be made into law, ending tax credits not only for EVs but also for solar, wind and energy efficiency. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2023, widely proclaimed as the most important climate change legislative ever in the United States, will almost entirely be gutted.
In contrast, fossil fuels “will continue to have the advantage of a variety of tax credits, and that’s how we manage energy policy in this country, through the tax codes,” said Ritter. “It’s going to be tough for a few years.”
Why the switcheroo under Trump? The president famously believes in very little save for what helps Trump enjoy power. Martin Voelker, of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society, asked Ritter why politicians cannot understand they’re “about to kill a trillion dollars of private investment in clean energy. It’s private money. It’s not government money that’s being destroyed? Do you have an explanation for their willful blindness?”
Ritter pointed to campaign contributions to Trump and other Republican politicians. He recalled that he had chosen to devote the final chapter of his 2016 book, “Powering Forward,” to the need for campaign finance reform.
“At the heart of your question is how are they not making rational decisions about private investment when, as a party, Republicans typically believe that private investment is a virtue,” he said. “But this case has been so wildly politicized by the oil and gas industry. If you think about the group that Trump had to Mar-a-Lago, he said he raised a billion dollars. ‘I’ll go in and I’ll wipe out all these EPA rules.’ It was a quote right. It was a direct quote.”
Big Pivots could not find that direct quote, but it found plenty of stories about the 2016 and 2024 Trump campaigns and his plans to gut the EPA. For example, see this Guardian story from February 2025: “It would be devastating’: inside Trump’s plan to destroy the EPA.”
“And if a Senate campaign costs $25 million to $150 million in any given state, no matter how big or small it is then, then people who are senators wind up being beholden to the folks that are financing their campaigns.”
It sounds futile, but still, Ritter saw room for hope.
“As bad as it may seem, we’ve survived really difficult times before. We survived the naysayers in 2007 and 2008, and we’ve survived a lot since then. We’ve seen ebbs and flows, but the progress has been generally upward,” he said. “It’s not linear, but it is generally upward.”
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I am grateful for Governor Ritter’s optimism. Thanks for putting this together Allen.
Ritter is a useful idiot of the American Communist Party. The ruin of Colorado started when he became Governor. Anthropogenic climate change is a hoax.