A "climate lever" to move your recalcitrant butt into action. Know who's spending your money (part 2). And, because it's Friday, let's travel to Flavor Country with MPF!
"Climate Levers" of all kinds.
The bills related to housing density and zoning are starting to come out. They seem to be related to last year's failed efforts at changing zoning and housing density by state control: this year's efforts are split up into more bills (divide and conquer right?), and they also feature less state control.
Note that I said "less", not "no" state control. As you can read in the Sun article linked first below about one bill, HB24-1313 (linked second), there are incentives offered to municipal governments to encourage what the governor and his merry band of progressives think will fix the affordable housing problem, but there are also some mandates.
Quite a big one actually. If you do not do what the state thinks you ought to do, they'll yank highway money. That's a huge thing to take away from a local government, and something that's not been done in the past.
I join Kevin Bommer, director of the Colorado Municipal League (a group made of and representing municipal governments), in his worry. Quoting him from the Sun article, "Once that door is opened, it just creates a bunch of opportunities for future mischief."
I.e. if you think that allowing even a tiny crack like this into local control will be the end of it, I think you're being naive. Let me illustrate to you why.
Recently the head of the Colorado Energy Office (Will Toor) tweeted out what you can see in the attached screenshot from his account.
Land use policy, not only in the sense of zoning/density but also in the sense of land use policy for renewables (see my earlier post linked third below for a rundown on that), is seen by people in the Polis administration as a "climate lever".
I see a couple things going on here, a couple ways to take Mr. Toor's (and Polis') rhetoric.
One, in order to help sell what will ultimately be a power grab and a huge change to how we've done things here since the state was, well, a state, the powers that be will be using the threat of climate change to get people on board.
I.e. if you're going to try and muster support for something that many find objectionable, you need to tie it to something they either want more or fear more.
Two, it is possible that there are some true believers out there, the same kind who think the only good in life is the environmental policy they want, who think we are not making enough progress on climate change.
They will be looking for a tool, any tool, that can be found to force the recalcitrant populace into compliance. And what better tool to move a heavy resistant object than a lever. Hence the diagram at the top of the post.
This is not a conspiracy, it's simple addition. Put together the desire to sell a statewide power grab as good climate policy and the Democrats repeatedly pushing laws to appease their fringe environmentalist base, and you get the reason why I said it would be naive to think that this will be the only intrusion into local control.
This strikes me as making a thin crack, the perfect place to jam in a lever and start prying
https://coloradosun.com/2024/02/20/transit-oriented-communities-bill/
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb24-1313
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/land-use-bill-for-renewables-you?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://rmi.org/why-state-land-use-reform-should-be-a-priority-climate-lever-for-america/
Know who's spending your money (part 2)
I posted earlier in the week about who is getting your tax money to give to renters. I'm back with another post (after another, different CORA request) with information about who is getting your money from the Office of Gun Violence Prevention (OGVP)
The screenshot attached is what I got back from OGVP and it lists the grantees and how much they got. If you are curious at what each grantee is and what they're using your money for, check out the link below.
It's a website hosted at OGVP that gives short bio's for the various organizations and (for some) links to those sites.
I have thus far not been able to get any public records as to audits for these organizations: no records exist yet is what I was told.
I intend to follow up, however. Not so much for organizations like, say, the Episcopal church which took a $7300 grant to distribute trigger locks, but more for the likes of the bigger things like $39K for Denver Health to make educational materials or Colorado Ceasefire (big time gun control advocates in Colorado Politics) which got $46K to "[educate] the public about Extreme Risk Protection Orders via news media, building communities on social media, and delivering in-person ERPO training events across the state."
While I await audits, I decided to go ahead and email out to some of the groups I was curious about. I sent emails to the Boulder DA, Colorado Ceasefire, and Denver Health.
As of this writing, I got a response back from the Boulder DA and Colorado Ceasefire, but nothing substantive from Denver Health. The press person there acknowledged the question and promised to get back to me, but didn't provide an answer by press time. When and if that changes, I'll update.
The response from the Boulder DA's office was:
"Our office applied for a grant through the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. We were awarded the entirety of the $20,000 on gun safes. The office was able to purchase 200 home safes and 200 car safes with the money. Those safes/locks are being distributed to Boulder County residents at public events. At the same time, our office has been providing information and community outreach on Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPO). We did not use any of these grant funds for it, but the grant funds for the safes/locks allowed us to dedicate time and other funds to the ERPO work, as well. It is our hope that the state will continue to support these types of efforts. We have shared the success of the gun safe/lock giveaways with other jurisdictions and there is a lot of interest."
And the response from Colorado Ceasefire was:
"The OGVP grant funds allowed us to develop and host trainings on ERPO and Safe Storage for Colorado's general public, students, educators, and medical providers. We also used the funds to table at community events to distribute free ERPO/Safe Storage-related materials, including gun locks. OGVP required regular invoices and evaluation reports throughout the grant cycle."
https://cdphe.colorado.gov/office-of-gun-violence-prevention/grant-program
MPF: Multi Purpose Food
Well, it's that time of the week again and you know what that means. A curiosity, something for fun, not related to current politics. Also this will be it til Sunday.
I have mentioned before that I'm a Cold War/Nuclear History buff. It's hard for me to believe, but I'm close to the end of my self-created Cold War bibliography. As I read more and more I would note interesting things to add to my list of books. It felt like that list was growing without bound because in the beginning the list grew by at least one book for every one I read, if not more.
One of the books on that list was "Live: A Handbook of Survival in Nuclear Attack" by Cannell. Just finished it. The book is mostly about fallout shelters: how to set one up (ahead of time or at the moment), how to manage your time inside (food, waste, first aid). It is, as the title suggests, a quick little book outlining in rough strokes how to live through a nuclear attack. If you're interested, go to your local library and ask for it as an interlibrary loan. That's how I got it; there are copies around the state.
Putting aside the vagaries and waffling in our history of national civil defense, putting aside the issue of the feasibility of living two weeks under a pile of sandbags put over a makeshift frame of doors and bedframes in your basement, and putting aside the questions of whether you'd emerge to a world that you'd want to continue living in (good things to consider all), something in this book caught my eye that I thought would be fun to share. It's also just about the right size for a Friday.
It's General Mills Multi Purpose Food. Yes indeedy, and in case you wondered, it seems to me to be about as exciting and enticing a food as the name would suggest.
This resonated for me because it struck me as an example of nothing new under the sun. Probably because I am tangentially related to a niche of people who are interested in both canning and growing food, I frequently get ads for emergency food supplies; I fit in a demographic that emergency food vendors find to be receptive to their wares, although I do not buy any myself.
Prepping and preppers are not a modern phenomenon though. During the depths of the Cold War many individuals and our government were in the business of preparing fallout shelters. Part of that process was stocking said shelters with nutrient-dense foods that would store without refrigeration. See the first link below for a little extra history on such food stores. They often came as kit, sized by the number of people they would support.** Just like the ones today.
Into this void jumped General Mills with their MPF. Not originally meant for shelters, If I understand correctly MPF was invented to nourish the bombed out parts of post WWII Europe, MPF found new life in shelter food kits.
If you look at the attached pictures of the MPF can and read the labels, you'll understand why I joked earlier about it being enticing. My mouth got dry just thinking about trying to choke down what must have been basically human dog food. In a can. Honestly, I look at it and it seems as though they were engineering it to have no flavor whatsoever.
But needs must as the devil drives, so if I were in a shelter, I'd probably be lined up, fork in hand and bib tied around neck to get my portion. This would be what I would have to look forward to in between high energy bouts of laying down to conserve energy, oxygen, and prevent adding extra heat to the shelter.
Frankly, this sort of thing makes me half glad to be living within just a few miles of a bunch of silos.
And on that happy note, let's call it a day. I hope you have a good afternoon and get to enjoy something with flavor in it. Back at it Sunday!
**There were other kits I've seen and read about. Especially for the communal shelters planned for things like civic building basements. For more on those, see the second link below.
https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/civil-defense-food-kit/10155
http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/cdmuseum2/supply/sankits.html