As if we weren’t hearing enough bad news about the environment these days, the Air Pollution Control Division (APCD) announced through the proper channels of public obsfucation, the Regional Air Quality Council (RAQC — what, you never heard of them? Can’t imagine why that is..) that it wanted the EPA to take it easy on Colorado, and allow us a little more time to let us continue polluting our air at unhealthy levels because, well, we’re just not making any progress here.

Does that sound like a lame excuse to you? Sure does to me.

This was explained in this recent Colorado Sun article:

Colorado is giving up on near-term ozone improvements in favor of longer outlook

Though the details of what was being asked sound complicated, they’re not, really; these state offices basically asking for extensions on complying with the law on ozone air pollution.  Nothing new there.

So I won’t belabor the fact that Colorado has been out of ozone compliance for over 14 years, and that we have made precious little progress in that time.  But that’s not the only thing that bothered me about this article; what really bothers me is that the state still gets all of its data from oil and gas operators on pretty much the honor system from the O&G industry — which, I don’t know about you, does not inspire confidence in my belief in the data.

How do I know this? Because the article refers throughout to the “modeling” done by the state. As someone who had done his fair share of modeling in my time, the most crucial part of the models are their input data. And what are we modeling? The number of O&G wells and other O&G infrastructure.

Where does the state get their data? Well, from the O&G industry, of course. Do you think the O&G has any great incentive from the state to provide them with good data? Let me think about that….

Do you think the state has anywhere near sufficient inspectors to check on the timeliness and completeness of the data being supplied by the O&G industry?  That is a question I certainly do not have to think about; and can tell you with confidence that the answer is “No, they don’t.”

So, when the state says they are “modeling” the emissions from the O&G industry, don’t let that fool you into thinking the state is doing something that is independent from the industry, and which can be used as leverage to pressure them into doing anything differently. Not in the least…basically, the APCD and the O&G industry are playing an elaborate hoax on the public, and saying implicitly, “Just trust us!”

Do we have a choice?

Well, actually, we do: the state could be doing better air quality monitoring that would enable it to really verify what the O&G industry is saying it’s emitting.

But as long as we have a CDPHE that is captured by the industry — meaning it doesn’t want to do anything that the industry doesn’t doesn’t want to do — then nothing is going to change.

Which is why the Larimer Alliance is shifting its focus to what seems to be the real problem: it’s not the O&G industry as much as it is the CDPHE itself.

But what can we do about that? Well, stay tuned, boys and girls, because that’s another story for another time.