A U.S. senator since 2009, Bennet believes he can be more effective as governor. He advocates “carbon cap and invest” as the way for Colorado to move forward on climate action. Details, though, were sparse.
Michael Bennet wants out of Washington. In the time of Trump, being a U.S. senator from Colorado, a purplish state now gone dark blue, just isn’t much fun. Bennet thinks he can be more effective as governor.
Bennet, 61, has been in the Senate since 2009, when he was appointed by Gov. Bill Ritter to fill out a vacant seat. Smartest guy in any room, Ritter said. Bennet has subsequently been elected in 2010, 2016 and 2022.
In his remarks to the Colorado Climate Week session at the Limelight hotel in Boulder, Bennet described his career as checkered. He has a law degree from Yale University. He worked in law for several years before moving to Colorado in 1997. In Denver, he worked for six years as managing director of investment for the Anschutz Investment Company before returning to the public sector, serving first as chief of staff for then-Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and then chief of Denver Public Schools.
As for his climate plank, it seems to exist almost solely on the idea of cap-and-dividend and cap-and-invest. See this primer on how these ideas vary from a carbon tax.
Bennet made no mention of it in his remarks in Boulder, but like his Democratic opponent, Phil Weiser, his mother survived a Nazi Holocaust camp. Notably, his remarks were interrupted by two men who shouted objections to his candidacy before being escorted from the forum. About 240 people were in the crowd, many of us squeezed into tight spaces against the wall.
Big Pivots has modestly condensed and, in some cases, clarified his remarks.
Anything you want to share to kind of kick us off?
This is a profoundly reactionary period in American history, But we have been through these periods before. One-hundred years ago, we were living in a Gilded Age in America, just like the gilded age that we’re living in today. Rockefeller was the Mark Zuckerberg of that age. It wasn’t Washington that fixed that problem. It was the American people, through their municipalities, through their states, that led that fight.
I think that’s the fight we’re in again today. That’s why I’m running to be governor of Colorado and why I feel like this is a moment where one’s best work can’t really be done in Washington D.C. The fact that you are here, that this room is as crowded as it is, is evidence to me that nobody here needs any persuasion from me. We really are in the cycle of American history where we are about to start building what is coming after Donald Trump, what is coming after the chaos and division that he represents, and I have absolutely no doubt that we’re going to get to the other side of this. No doubt.
We have had an amazing lineup of speakers today, people in this room who represent businesses and industries and academia, nonprofits, government — folks who are all connected into the climate and energy space in some way, shape or form. They are going to be quite eager to hear about your energy and climate platform if you’re elected governor, including what are some of your top priorities, and how do you know if you’re being successful?
Our work is cut out for us. We will not have any leadership at all from Washington D.C. I have spent almost the last 20 years of my life writing climate legislation in Washington to support the wind and solar industries in Colorado, our transition to a clean energy economy. We passed the Inflation Reduction Act (in 2024), the most significant piece of climate legislation that any government in the history of the world has ever passed.
Now it’s been completely destroyed because we elected as president somebody whose energy policy is Sarah Palin’s cartoon expression of an energy policy, which is drill, baby, drill. That is now the energy policy of the United States of America. And I can tell you that I blame Trump for many, many things, but getting elected is not one of those things. I blame the National Democratic Party for losing to Trump twice. It is a disgrace that we lost to Trump.
INTERRUPTION – a man in the crowd began yelling about Bennet’s record on Mideast conflicts, accused him of accepting a $750,000 donation from Michael Bloomberg. “He is not going to protect us from an authoritarian regime. He is part of this establishment that has gotten us to this place. We need less people like him.” He was ushered out, shouting on the way.
Thank you all, for I’m glad we live in a free country. I’m glad we live in a country with free speech. But where were we? Very destructive. We shouldn’t be sitting in this position. And when I say we, I mean particularly my own three daughters, the kids that I used to work for in the Denver Public Schools as their superintendent, and the kids who are living all over rural Colorado who want, really do want the same thing for themselves that the parents in Denver want for their kids.
There is a consensus in America that climate change is real and that we have to address climate change, and yet we lost to a climate denier that is not going to help us achieve our climate goals. I don’t think there is a state in America that’s more on the front line of climate change than the state of Colorado.
INTERRUPTION – a second man in the crowd began yelling about Bennet’s vote in support of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, taking away green energy funding from Colorado and other topics. He was ushered out.
I really would love to say a word about Chris Wright This is a coordinated attack. You heard it from my opponent earlier. You’re now hearing it from somebody in the audience.
My opponent in this race knows what I’d say about Chris Wright, which is that I voted for Chris Wright, who was a citizen of Colorado, because I hoped that his being from this state would mitigate his worst impulses. I voted for him because I hoped very much it would mitigate his worst impulses in order to defend NCAR, in order to defend the climate bill that I was just talking about. Which, by the way, represents so much effort in my life, dedication in my life, over a long period of time to be able to do the right thing for the people of Colorado — when my opponent wasn’t working on any of that stuff.
That’s why I voted for Chris Wright. I have long ago said I deeply regret it. I apologize for it. I wish we had more politicians who had apologized for mistakes that they have made, but that’s the reason why I voted for him. For Phil to sit here and say that somehow it’s an act of cowardice to have voted for — there is no easier vote in America than for a Democratic member of the Senate to vote against Donald Trump’s nominees. I hope everybody here understands that and knows that there is no easier vote. But that was the vote that I took, that I have said over and over again I regret, but that’s the reason why I voted.
The point, though, is we lost an election. Somebody is a climate denier. I don’t believe there is a state in the nation that is more susceptible to climate change than Colorado. The next governor — and I think it is going to be me — will face an unprecedented moment in terms of water, in terms of wildfire, and I think we can create the model for the entire nation here in Colorado. We have the building blocks of a clean energy economy here in Colorado.
I think we need policy to help it. And I am the only candidate in this race — notwithstanding my vote for Chris Wright — to have an economy wide approach to capping emissions, my cap-and-dividend cap-and-invest program. Phil has said that he doesn’t think that TABOR (Taxpayer Bill of Rights) will allow us to do it. I think that we should be ambitious in Colorado to lead the rest of the nation and have the most progressive policy that any state in America has.
How would you think about navigating this cap-and-invest in our current fiscal environment?
It would be economy wide. I think a thread would be that we would join other states — including California and Washington and consider other places as well — to make sure that the market is a deep market for it. The broader question about the fiscal situation — I have really worried about the fact that our state is managing this crisis one year at a time, one year at a time. We’ve been shackled to this set of political choices (TABOR) that were made 40 years ago.
As the (schools) superintendent in Denver, I know what it looks like for teachers and our kids to be fighting these battles, whether it’s climate or education, with one hand tied behind her back. We have to reform the way this works. These constitutional constraints are killing us, and we have to be in a place where we’re solving, not just the problem for the next year, but for the next 10 years. And I think we can do it.
As the only person in this race who’s actually dealt with incredibly complex fiscal challenges, both in the private sector and in the public sector, in the city and county of Denver and in the Denver Public Schools, I look forward to bringing that experience to bear to solve this problem, so that we can look at things like cap-and-invest as a way of moving us forward.
We have had a lot of significant progress in Colorado. What do you want to build on that we’ve been doing as a state? And what needs attention?
Cap and invest. You know, to have an economy-wide cap on emissions, that is not part of what we’ve done so far. There is a huge affordability crisis in Colorado right now, and we have to make sure that that our as we go forward, our energy is affordable, that it’s reliable, and that it’s clean
I’m not somebody who’s much for slogans, but I do think those three ideas really capture where we’re going. And what Trump is trying to argue is that you cannot get the affordability or reliability with policy innovation or the economic innovation that Colorado has demonstrated. And I think that is the huge cost of having somebody in the White House who believes that climate change is not real and drill, baby drill is real, because it will stifle innovation.
A (journalistic) piece today told about the EV factories in the Midwest that are shutting down, because they no longer have a demand for electric vehicles. That’s an example. And China, by the way, is moving ahead while we sit in Donald Trump’s eddy, not actually inventing the future.
Nobody is riding to our rescue from Washington, D.C. We are going to have to set the example here in Colorado, build on the excellent example that Gov. Polis has (provided) us, but take it much further, and that’s what I’m doing. Not only is Phil not signed up for that, there is no other candidate in America who’s running for governor who has put forward as part of their platform the kind of the cap-and-invest program that I have suggested. The way to get to affordability, to get to reliability, and clean energy. If we don’t have that kind of signal, we’ll never get it done.
What’s your approach, or would be your approach if you’re elected as governor, to work with the local municipalities on climate and energy priorities?
On climate, like on housing, I think there’s basically a shared view of the need to work together. I do believe that the job of the governor, if it’s done best, is not to have a command-and-control approach from the central office in Denver. I think it is to unleash the imagination of our private sector, our county officials, our municipal officials, our students, our academics — the people who are going to push back on the chaos that we’re seeing right now.
I’ve spent my entire career — a checkered career, that is absolutely true — stealing other people’s ideas. That’s been a really great way to approach this. You know, the questions that I have worked on from climate to the child tax credit, to protecting 700,000 acres of Colorado’s public lands — they’ve all been stealing ideas from other people and working from the ground up.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t put a target in place that says this is going to be the emissions cap. It doesn’t mean we, as I proposed, we shouldn’t move past the sector-by-sector determination, which is what the state of Colorado has done, which I believe is insufficient.
That’s about sending a signal to the market. That’s about saying to people, we want to invite you to help us figure out how we’re actually going to reduce emissions. We understand that we will never reduce emissions if we don’t actually have a cap. You must do that with a spirit of collaboration.
I see that as the way that you acquire the wisdom that a democracy actually can supply. There’s too much of our politics right now that is this permanent game of shirts and skins, where everybody gets up in the morning or everybody goes to bed at night believing they have a monopoly on wisdom. That is a deep, deep, deep disservice, I think, to the next generation of Americans, because the wisdom comes from our clashing, our having disagreements about what the path forward should look like. And if we go through a process that looks like that, then the changes we make are actually more durable than they would be made if we do it in another way.
This is not — and I want to say this very clearly — a call from me for moderation. This is not a call for me for coloring inside the lines.
I want Colorado to be the place people point to 10 years from now and say that’s a thriving economy that has actually executed on its climate goals and proves that Donald Trump is a liar about what the future of this country needs to look like.
During a panel earlier today there was talking about decarbonization at scale for industries. One of our colleagues, at random, was talking about the need for stability for industries to think about how they can scale and grow. So how do you think about the role of stability that is needed and change that we also need?
There might be people here that disagree with me, but I believe strongly that we can’t achieve the social justice goals we have or the environmental goals we have if we don’t have a growing economy. And I think we need to be a place that is attracting business, where people feel that it’s a good place for businesses to grow. And we sort of lost a step as a place with that reputation.
That’s what’s great about the cap-and-dividend program, invest program, because it actually creates a target for all of us to shoot for, for all of us to bring on, and then we have to invent what it’s going to look like to get to the future.
I embrace the idea that we should be at net zero by 2050. There may be people here who believe that’s too far out into the future. I actually think it gives us the time we need to get from where we are to where we need to be. We’ve got to innovate to be able to get there.
One of the great sadnesses of the last presidential election is that for whatever reason, our candidates on the Democratic side were unable to make the following observation, which is that we have abundant fossil fuels, we have abundant renewables. We have incredible innovation, which is reflected in Colorado, I think, probably greater than any other state in America. We have — if you’re not talking about Trump — a relative lack of corruption in this country compared to countries all over the world.
There’s no reason this state can’t lead the entire nation in the transition that we need. Part of that is having the predictability that you were talking about. You know, it’s one of the reasons why I have supported carbon capture and sequestration. People in the environmental movement have wondered reasonably whether that was going to extend the life of fossil fuels. As long as these are here, we should be trying to figure out how to make them as clean as we possibly can, and carbon capture and sequestration is part of that.
Human beings worry a lot about the cost of energy. They worry a lot about the interruption in their energy. Having a thoughtful, strategic, ambitious and extended view of how we’re going to get from here to there is the way that we’re going to get there. We’ve lost it for the moment nationally, but we’re at a moment when we when we desperately need examples. Colorado can’t solve it for everybody, but we can point the way.
If you’re thinking about the present, what would you articulate as some of your values?
At this stage of my life, my only political party is the moral obligation I feel to my own children and the moral obligation I feel for the kids in Colorado. That’s why I made the decision to run for governor. It’s because it’s all at risk. I think that if we just put the next generation and their interests ahead of us, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.
The question is whether we can execute in a way that can actually make the kind of difference that we need to make, because we’re not living in a moment where rhetoric is going to matter. We have to actually deliver results, because the young people in Colorado that I’m meeting who are 25 to 35 are raging at my generation because they feel like there is no room for them in Colorado. They hate the political parties. They hate politicians. They don’t really care whether you did or didn’t vote for Trump. They blame both of us for delivering Trump on top of the economy that is not serving them well.
And unless we address that set of challenges, as a state and as a nation, we will lose democracy. Trump is a symptom of our problem. He is not the cause of all, and we need to fundamentally understand that, because if we don’t, we’re just going to keep losing to him over and over and over again, and that is a set of principles and values that I can’t possibly accept for my children or for anybody else’s. So that’s why I’m doing this.
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Once again, Allen, thanks for a useful pair of articles on the gubernatorial candidates. We seem to have two very interesting options for the governor’s mansion this fall. Bennet seems to focus on the bigger strategic picture whereas Weiser is more tactical and specific.