Category Archives: Polis administration

MY REMARKS AT FRACK OF THE STATE, FRACK OF THE CLIMATE EVENT ON BEHALF OF THE LARIMER ALLIANCE, JANUARY 17, 2023

Good morning, people. My name is Ed Behan and I am with the Larimer Alliance for Health, Safety, & the Environment.

Yesterday there were many celebrations of the life and times of the late, great Martin Luther King, Jr, and his lifelong quest for social justice. And now here we are demanding environmental justice. This is sometimes dismissed as not being a related issue. However I don’t think I need to remind folks that the efforts of Cultivando, the community around the Bella Romero Academy, and tribal groups who resisted the Dakota Access Pipeline and other extractive incursions on native lands, only serve to demonstrate that the issues are intertwined and always have been.

Three years ago, with the passage of Senate Bill 19-181, this State made the remarkable first step of reordering the mission of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to prioritize the protection of our communities’ health, our safety, and our environment.

The Larimer Alliance has advocated for improved local regulation under the mandate of that legislation, as well as lobbied at the State level during rulemaking processes.

We are all here to mark progress made. . . but also to mark that the first step taken has been a stumbling one at best. While new rules have been enacted, and new monitoring standards have been crafted, it is clear that everything from bureaucratic inertia to outright discouragement of effective enforcement has hindered our progress. This legislature has the opportunity and the duty to correct that and keep us moving forward.

Today, as in his inaugural speech last week, the governor is supposed to reaffirm his commitment to Colorado achieving the goal of having its energy needs met by 100 % renewable sources by 2040. But you all have seen the figures, you know the reality of the thousands of oil and gas permits that have been approved since he took office in 2019, and the hundreds more in the permitting pipeline. I’ll take a leap here, give Mr. Polis the benefit of the doubt, and assume we achieve the goal of Colorado’s energy needs being carbon free by the goal date. . . but where is all this oil and gas that is being developed going? I assure you, if it is not being burned here in Colorado, it is being burned somewhere else. And my friends. . . THAT AIN’T CARBON NEUTRAL!

WE ALL KNOW WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE, AND WE NEED TO HOLD OUR LEADERS ACCOUNTABLE TO SEE THAT IT HAPPENS. THANK YOU.

Former State Senator Mike Foote Releases Report on Less Than Effective Implementation of SB19-181

Folks:

We received the communication below from our friends at the Sierra Club, and if you detect a note of sarcasm in the subject line of this message, it is intentional. Former State Senator Mike Foote was one of the principal authors of Senate Bill 19-181, which was to change the mission of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. The report he has issued is damning to say the least. We will attach the document to this note, and we will post it on our blog as well. This is not encouraging, but we are aware there are members of the State Legislature that are looking to improve this situation. The message from Sierra Club incudes a link to their press release and to the report document as well. We have work to do, people. . . 


Hi folks,

 As you might know, former Senator Mike Foote was a prime sponsor of SB19-181, which changed the mission of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from one of fostering production to protecting the health, safety, welfare of people and biological resources and the environment.   

Last week, Foote released a report that, in a thorough analysis of the COGCC’s activities during the last year, compares SB19-181’s original intent to its implementation.  He concludes that, so far, the agency’s actions are not consistent with the requirements of SB19-181 to protect health, safety, the environment, and wildlife.  

Please find the report, “COGCC One Year After Mission Change” attached, and Sierra Club’s press release.


 Thank you,

photo Alexis SchwartzPolitical OrganizerPronouns: She/Her/Hers1536 Wynkoop Street, Suite 200Denver, CO 80202850-766-6320 (c)alexis.schwartz@sierraclub.org
COGCC-One-Year-After-Mission-Change-1

Greenhouse gas intensity targets: the new greenwashing?

In a recent article in the Colorado Sun (A new rule to slash oil and gas emissions.., Sept 15, 2021), a new rule adopted by the Air Quality Control Commission (AQCC) is described by the Polis administration as a way to dramatically cut the GHG emissions by the oil & gas industry.

The rule is based on something that is interestingly called “intensity targets”, which apparently simply means making an effort to reduce your GHG emissions, and then reporting how much GHG your company emits…and hopefully it goes down over time. There are reduction targets for 2025, 2030 and 2050, which have been announced for all the various kinds of O&G activities, from fracking to drilling to transport.

The calculation of the emissions by the companies has been developed by the AQCC, and are intended to be an incentive-based, rather than command-and-control-based, kind of regulation. In other words, the regulator does not specifically instruct the polluter how they are doing to reduce their pollution by using a specific technology; but rather suggests a reduction target, and leaves it up the polluter to reduce their pollution by any means they want.

The proposal has, unsurprisingly, been welcomed by the O&G industry. The industry has always preferred to be self-regulating, which was largely the approach taken by the Colorado legislature in the past, up until the passage of SB-181 in April 2019. That historic legislation, which took away the industry’s ability to self-regulate by specifically instructing the COGCC to stop allowing it, was a watershed in the state approach to regulating the O&G industry.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise, at least to this writer, why the AQCC wants to reverse course, and restore self-regulation to the industry that is primarily complicit in causing global climate change. The proposed rules carry no penalties if a company fails to meet its target, and there are no enforceable measures in the new rule. The big assumption is that each individual O&G operator will do their level best to meet their “intensity target”, i.e. a lower level of GHG emissions.

Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

Also unsurprisingly, the environmental community (i.e. Wildearth Guardians, the EDF, at this point) has denounced the new rule as a mistake which will one day have to be corrected. They make the undeniable point that climate change is happening now, and we no longer have the time to try out untested regulatory policies that could take years to evaluate.

The one benefit of the program, from what I can tell, is that it is the first time that a regulation is taking a wholistic approach, and forcing O&G operators to consider their entire operation, from start to finish, to see where best they can best reduce their emissions to meet their reduction targets. The “intensity” aspect of the regulation comes from the required overall calculation of total CO2-equivalent produced per unit of product processed. (The units used will vary by type of company and what it is producing or processing.) As some O&G operations can involved a complex series of operations, the calculation of their overall “GHG intensity” will be a complex process in itself.

However, if history is any guide, the lack of specific enforceable actions, and especially the lack of any penalty for not meeting their targets, does not auger glad tidings for the outcome of this rule. As the saying goes, the road to hell is littered with good intentions — and while this rule may have the best of intentions, I’m afraid it will just be allowing the fossil fuel companies off the hook, once again, and pushing us all closer to a hellish world where the climate veers more and more out of any sort of equilibrium, creating more and more misery with each passing year.

My question for the O&G GHG Roadmap

The O&G GHG Roadmap is a major policy objective of the Polis administration, as explained at https://energyoffice.colorado.gov/climate-energy/ghg-pollution-reduction-roadmap.  However, some have questioned the intentions of the administration.  Nonetheless, the CDPHE is charged with soliciting public input  on the issues, as its part in this policy action, which will happen in two meetings, on August 16 and 31, 2021.
I registered to have some public input, and sent the message below as my questions for them.
You can still register to attend the August 31 meeting; see this link.
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Dear CDPHE:
One question I have as a concerned citizen is this: the current air quality monitors maintained by the CDPHE only detect the presence of ozone; but as we all know, ozone can be created from various constituent gasses.
The technology exists to measure not just ozone, but those constituent gasses as well, and it is my understanding that the technology used by BoulderAIR monitoring stations (see https://bouldair.com/) are capable of measuring these constituent gasses. This is especially important in order to determine how much of the ozone is being caused by vehicular traffic and how much is being caused by oil and gas operations.
There are five such stations already in place, operating in a coordinated fashion, providing a comprehensive picture of regional air quality in those areas, and building a legally defensible dataset of pollution sources. Would it not make sense to enlarge this network to cover the entire regions where ozone is a problem? Otherwise, how are you ever going to know the true source of this highly problematic pollution, and therefore manage the problem?
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Rick Casey
Fort Collins, CO