Gov. John Hickenlooper’s Colorado Climate Plan but it actually provides for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions than of eight years ago.
True, the plan doesn’t pledge to transform the state economy overnight by executive fiat or the power of wishful thinking. It is rooted instead in the real world, where collaboration is key to democratic progress. But the document is neither complacent nor short of ideas on how to proceed on a wide spectrum of fronts, from water to transportation.
Colorado couldn’t sit on its hands even if it wanted to. The largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions are power plants, and the state is plunging forward with an effort to meet the federal government’s Clean Power Plan mandate. As the climate plan notes, Colorado’s targets for 2030 “represent a 38 percent reduction in the rate of carbon dioxide emissions or a 31 percent reduction in the mass of emissions” from the baseline of 2012. Those are challenging goals and likely represent the single most significant climate initiative of the next decade and a half.
Another regulatory hurdle driving state action against a variety of emissions is the federal ozone standard, which was just lowered to a level that will keep regulators busy for a long time.
One of the challenges for a growing state like Colorado is that fairly impressive progress in such areas as renewable energy (which made up a trifling 0.54 percent of power in 2004 in Colorado and now accounts for 14.36 percent, with that figure steadily growing) can be offset by additional people and their activities. So, for example, even though the climate plan notes that “by 2030, [greenhouse] emissions per unit of Gross State Product will be reduced by nearly 37 percent over the 2005 baseline” — an impressive performance — a graph elsewhere in the document estimates that total greenhouse emissions in 2030 in Colorado will still exceed what they are today.
But that only underlines the immense challenge that transitioning out of fossil fuels entails, and why Colorado has no choice but to emphasize adaptation, too. Adaptation is particularly important since in a global context, even the most aggressive state plan would have very little impact on the overall rate of climate change.
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