There was a Zoom presentation made by Kate Merlin, staff attorney for the WildEarth Guardians, on July 11, 2025, to the Salon duc Tape, a long running local community discussion group, on the topic of “The Impact of Oil and Gas Production on Colorado’s Air Quality.” I thought it was stunning, and one of the most impactful Salon’s I had ever seen (and I’ve seen nearly all of them, since I’m the webmaster.)
Here is a photo of Kate starting her presentation:
Click the picture to go the 39 minute recording in the Salon duc Tape archives.
While you might think this would be a boring topic, what Kate presented was nothing less than a bombshell that exploded the myth that our state agencies are protecting our air quality. It was a deep and authoritative ripping apart of the last couple of decades of data about air pollution from the oil & gas (O&G) industry published by the state — for which they should be held to account.
My hat is off Kate for providing us with this information with which to confront these agencies about the inconsistencies in their annual data. With a J.D. from Vermont Law School, and an LLM in Natural Resources Law from the University of Colorado Boulder, a B.S. in environmental science from Northern Arizona University — plus doing a three month trek with the National Outdoor Leadership School, my old alma mater as well (go NOLS!) — she is eminently qualified to question these reports from the APCD (Air Pollution Control Division), and the ECMC (Energy and Carbon Management Commission).
While the content of the presentation is rather in the weeds, as it needs to be, none of it really requires much more than understanding what MMT CO2eq means: million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, a standard unit for comparing greenhouse gas emissions on a uniform basis. After doing the conversions so as to be able to compare one year to the next, what these agencies did was pretty simple in layman’s terms: they fudged the numbers. One cannot say that they lied exactly; but they did go back and change data from one year to next, so as to make themselves (and the Polis administration) look good in hindsight. Since these numbers are buried in reports that the public seldom reads, and only a few experts ever consult, they are unlikely to get noticed — until someone like Kate Merlin comes along.
Far from serving the public, and protecting our air quality, what these fudged numbers show is a consistent pattern of subtly misleading the public about the “improvements” in our air quality, while protecting the O&G industry from closer scrutiny — and keeping the relationship with the Polis administration in a rosy glow — no matter how much damage is being done to peoples’ lungs and brains who have had to breathe this increasingly polluted air for decades. As Kate reminded the audience at the outset, the area of Colorado north of Denver has been out of EPA compliance for summertime ozone since 2004; and the first state measurements about high ozone in this area were made as early as 1987. In other words, this has been a known problem for a long time; and precious little progress has been made, official Colorado announcements notwithstanding.
What this amounted to was making a baseline number lower as time progressed, so that in the later years, improvements in reducing emissions suddenly appeared; or, as Kate put it, these agencies “never miss a target, as long as they moved.” Another common phrase that describes this in sports language is “moving the goal posts.” The slide deck that accompanied her presentation is available at the same link as the presentation, which contains 33 slides, all full of exquisite detail that prove her points, except the first and last, opening and closing slides that show nice pictures — one from Alice in Wonderland, the last of, I assume, a Colorado river at sunset, both quite appropriate.
One final detail that I should note: Kate requested to the Salon if she could make this presentation in rebuttal to a Salon presented just a few weeks earlier by two staff members from the APCD & CDPHE. (See “Air Quality and Ground-Level Ozone in Colorado“, April 13, 2025), Ms Merlin refers to their presentation as more or less “propaganda”, and in light of her analysis, I’d say that’s about right.
But who am I to judge? Please take a look for yourself, and make up your own mind. We at the Larimer Alliance intend to use these data to make our case to our legislators: we need real data about what’s in our air, and we needed it about ten years ago.