El Paso County legislator wants to keep fossil fuels but has a kind of interesting bill this year
State Rep. Ken DeGraff, a Republican from El Paso County, continues to argue against carbon dioxide as a significant risk.
In the 2023 session, he sponsored a bill that proposed to designate carbon dioxide as a non-pollutant. It failed in its first committee hearing on an 8-3 party-line vote.
Ken DeGraaf
That same House Energy and Environment Committee this week will hear a somewhat more interesting proposal. The bill, HB24-1246, would require Public Utilities Commission to develop rules requiring utilities to:
- monitor National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration space-weather predictions in order to isolate large power transformers and power generation from the grid
- mechanically isolate critical components if or when the coronal mass ejection is likely to cause geomagnetically inducted currents.
- restrict or close fuel pipeline valves to mitigate damage in a sectional failure.
The bill would also move out existing carbon dioxide emission reduction goals for 2030 and 2050 by a decade and make those goals a lower priority than resiliency.
For background reading, see the Feb. 23 story in the New Yorker: “What a Major Solar Storm Could do to our Planet.”
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