The day that Joe Biden toured NREL

Ed Perlmutter tells about having to lay down the law to the vice president. Aviator glasses wouldn’t cut it. Not if wanted to see the renewable energy experiments.

by Allen Best

Listening to Ed Perlmutter tell stories in public about his time in the U.S. House of Representatives makes you wish you could have private time for others.

On Tuesday evening Perlmutter, who represented Colorado’s 7^th Congressional District from 2007 to 2023, told three stories at a fundraiser for New Energy Colorado. The group puts on the green home tours in the Denver metro area and now Salida, too, during the first week of October each year.

One of the stories was about Joe Biden when he was vice president. For the occasion, Perlmutter brought a couple props, a photo and aviator glasses, which he called “bomber glasses.”

Biden was to take a tour of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, as it was then called. Laboratories have their rules. People must wear safety glasses. Sen. Michael Bennet and U.S. Rep. Diane DeGette were on the tour. They had agreed to wear the safety glasses.

Dan Arvizu was the lab director, and in Perlmutter’s telling, Arvizu was frantic when they arrived.

“And I asked, ‘What’s the problem,’” said Perlmutter.

“He says, ‘I don’t know about the vice president.’”

“I said, ‘What do you mean you don’t know about the vice president?””

“He says, ‘The vice president won’t wear safety glasses. He’s only going to wear his bomber glasses.’”

“I said, ‘No. you’ve got to be kidding me.’”

In Perlmutter’s telling, it was his job to persuade the vice president that he had to wear safety glasses, which he did.

“He goes, “I hate those things. I’m not wearing those things.’”

“I said, ‘If you don’t put on the safety glasses, you’re not going into the lab. Period. You stay out here.”

“And he looks at me, and he’s about ready to cuss me out. Says, ‘You mean I’ll have to stand out here while you guys are touring the lab if I don’t wear those safety glasses?’ He says, ‘I hate those things.’ I said, ‘That’s the deal.’ He says, all right, I’m not going to stand in here all day. I’m going to put on the safety glasses.’”

And with that, Perlmutter shared a photo to be passed around among his 60 to 80 people at the fundraiser held at the Retreat at Solterra in Lakewood.

Perlmutter told two other stories from his days in Congress from 2007 to 2023, both with the little details of an experienced storyteller. They included the names of Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner and other members of Congress familiar to followers of current affairs of the last 20 years.

One of them was when he was a freshman member of Congress and he needed to help secure funding for NREL. To do so, Perlmutter said he needed to approach a bewhiskered committee chair “who looks like a mean old sea captain” and who habitually had “something like 10 pencils in his pocket.” That same story involved Rahm Emanuel, then a U.S. representative from Chicago. “Some of you may remember that this guy couldn’t say a sentence without cussing.”

Perlmutter’s story ended with him — in this case working with U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar — bringing home the bacon for NRE, the funding needed for staff expansion. “Long story short, what was 600 employees at NREL when I started, when I left was 3200 employees.”

Perlmutter’s association with the laboratory goes back to his farther, Leonard Perlmutter, a real estate developer, who had been a trustee of the lab when it was called the Solar Energy Research Institute in the 1980s. The younger Perlmutter, first in the Colorado Senate for eight years and then in Congress for 16, was a reliable booster of renewable energy work and energy efficiency.

In speaking to New Energy Colorado supporters, Perlmutter filled a spot originally slotted for Tim Wirth, the former U.S. senator famous for his efforts to call attention to the reality of global warming science in the 1980s. Wirth had an illness that precluded his speech.

What might Wirth have said about the current predicament, a president who refuses to acknowledge climate change? Federal agencies even seem to have scrubbed the two words from their materials.

Perlmutter, who was in Congress during the first Trump term, said the “second one is 100 times worse.”

Do not be discouraged, Perlmutter, a Democrat, told his audience. “I know this is not a Democratic forum, but I think Democrats are going to do very well” (in the mid-term election this November).

“I think there is a real mood in the nation — despite rulings by the Supreme Court, despite efforts by the Congress and despite efforts by Texas and the Florida’s and the Missouri’s of the world to make it tough — I think there really is going to be a changing of the guard in Congress.”

Trump will remain in the White House for two years, he acknowledged, “but you ‘re able to maybe get some things done and to minimize things that you just don’t like” once Trump loses his command of Congress.