Gov. Bill Ritter has announced an ambitious set of goals for making Colorado environmentally greener over the next several decades.
Ritter’s climate action plan covers a wide range: A cleaner motor vehicle fleet. Reduced power plant emissions. More energy-efficient programs within state government itself. And, in what may be unique among the states that are actively working to get green, a major role for agriculture. “We’re the first state to elevate it to this level,” said Jim Martin, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
There also are suggestions on how everyone can get involved: break the one-person, one-car habit; drive a hybrid; replace incandescents with compact fluorescent bulbs; use low-flow toilets and showers; buy green power; reuse and recycle. Et cetera.
There’s no one single solution. It requires a change of attitude, and leadership by example.
The 35-page plan is, as Ritter repeatedly put it, a work in progress. It’s long on objectives, short on tactics. It sets lofty goals without micromanaging the details on how to achieve them.
That flexibility is smart, though. It allows for innovation, for adjusting to new technologies as the first of the deadlines — a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020 — approaches.
Colorado’s plan is comparatively modest when viewed next to some other states’ plans, at least in the early stages. But the longer-range goal, to reduce 2005 greenhouse gas levels 80 percent by 2050, is right up there with the most ambitious.
It was one of two actions Ritter took in recent days that have great appeal to two of his Democratic Party’s most important constituencies: environmentalists and labor. But climate change didn’t stir up anything approaching the storm of controversy surrounding the state’s new rules for employee unions.
And yet the climate plan could have long-lasting effects on all Coloradans — in higher utility costs, different driving habits and other lifestyle changes.
About the only outspoken challenge to the plan came from auto dealers, who contend that Ritter doesn’t understand the limits on what the state can do to control auto emissions. The auto dealers’ Tim Jackson says there’s no middle ground — the state either has to accept the federal standards for mileage or adopt California’s, the strictest in the country.
But that’s now. The saving virtue of the Ritter plan is its imprecision and adaptability. Who knows what the standards will be by 2020? Or, for that matter, who will be governor?
With this plan, the governor has focused attention on a problem that must be addressed. If in even a small way it helps ease or slow the effects of climate change, it’s worth getting started.
