Earlier this week, the Colorado Sun provided a valuable public service by keeping us updated on what’s going on at our favorite state regulator, the CDPHE, otherwise known as the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment, and our other favorite bête noire housed within it, the APCD, or the Air Pollution Control Division:

 Colorado’s air pollution permit backlog grows despite tens of millions of dollars in state

I sent a letter to Mr Booth about this (reproduced in full below), in which I thanked him for the fine article, but at the same time expressed my dissatisfaction with what was missing from his report…which we at the Larimer Alliance have been repeating since oh, at least, 2020.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…🙄

The newsworthy bit was the backlog for air emissions permit applications has grown, which happened because of the EPA downgrading of our air quality in  2022 from “serious” to “severe”. This downgrading of the air quality triggered a section of the regulations that states that more, and smaller scale, point sources of air pollution would need to file for emissions permits, and start reporting them.

Which raises the interesting question: does reporting the amount of emissions means that the pollution gets reduced? I have long wondered about this question; but never got around to actually asking it of the CDPHE/APCD…until now. If I get a reply from them, I will be sure to share the results here.

However, I’m not holding my breath, as I have lived with the equivocating language coming out of these agencies — in which they will avoid, evade and obfuscate the question beyond recognition in order to avoid their civic duty to actually protect the environment — that I do not expect any change in their behavior until there is a drastic change in the politics behind it…which is why this activism continues.

Rather than reporting the facts and figures of the article, which you do for yourself, I will point out that the $20 million additional state funds that the Polis administration extended to these agencies in 2022, in order to allow them to deal with the increase in pollution permits, is probably not going to help matters. These agencies are not likely to change their spots anytime until forced to do so by political change. They will continue to avoid, evade and obfuscate ad nauseum.

What they could have done to really start to reduce our air pollution is actually start measuring it. In order to do that, they need to actually build the air quality monitoring equipment that can do this. The existing monitoring stations are not anywhere near capable of doing this. The existing monitoring stations mostly exist to allow the state to say they are measuring ozone; they do not exist to measure the ozone precursors, which come from two primary sources: 1) oil and gas operations, and 2)  vehicular traffic.  A tiny fraction of the state monitors can detect some of these ozone precursors; but these have been installed only recently, it would seem, as an afterthought, and are certainly not the purpose for which the overall system was designed.

In my humble opinion, just part of that $20 million would have been much better spent by standing up three or four Bouder AIR monitoring stations (see bouldair.com)  and if and only if something would actually be done with the data — such as identifying where the precursors are coming from, identifying those point sources by combining regional monitoring with better on-site monitoring. Neither alone is sufficient for meaning pollution reduction. And none of this has any meaning or purpose unless the spirit of the law is enforced: by actually reducing our air pollution.

Even better would be to measure and transparently report how our environmental quality and health are improving — which is the real point of reducing our pollution, right?

In a word, simply informing the public how much we are getting polluted — and telling us to stay inside on bad pollution days — is not enough. We need hard data — quantitative and publicly transparent data — in order to believe our state agencies are actually helping to protect the environment and human health. Words are not enough.