Activist legislators only see their particular passion, an interesting infographic, and is there a real difference between taking your gas-fired appliances and taking away your choice to have one?
Activist legislators, like rabid environmentalists, only see one thing: their passion. They do not see how their policy will affect people in this state.
This goes double for people living in rural areas.
Before we get to what I mean above, let me give you some context. This is based on what I read in the article below and is a quick and dirty run through on how funding works. If you want more detail, I'd recommend starting with the article linked first below.
1. A Federal law change in 1991 helped move transportation funding (we fund our roads with a combination of federal and state generated dollars) away from being tied strictly to population, enabling rural areas to get more. Rural areas often have more state roads and more miles driven on a per capita basis.
2. After that law change, Colorado set up a system which broke the state into districts (see screenshot 1). These districts each have a committee made up of local elected officials. A byzantine process of committee memberships and rules then determines how funding is doled out to these districts. More details are in the article, but it's similar to saying one group recommends to another which has members from the first group. This second group recommends, etc.
An amendment hidden in a bill (linked second below) on free bus rides during ozone season of all things would sneak in a great big change to this funding system.
Rural leaders are arguing a couple things:
1. That this amendment was put in without any notification or chance for discussion. I.e. that it was a surprise.
2. That it will change the current funding system to take money/influence from rural areas and shift it to urban areas.
To give you a sense of what I mean, take a look at screenshot 2 attached.
**For context's sake if you've not read the article, the STAC referenced is one of the groups in the middle of the byzantine process I mentioned above--it's one of the groups deciding how to dole out the money.
I think the argument that this will take influence away from rural areas (and thus money) is a reasonable one to make. After all reorganizing the committees on the basis of (quoting the article) " ... highway corridors, commuting patterns, transit-oriented development and 'levels of air pollutants' when adjusting the boundaries of the TPRs" tells you about all you need to know about where this is headed if you live in a rural area.
I myself would go further than the rural leaders quoted in the article (and there are several). I argue that this amendment will not only have the effect of disenfranchising rural Coloradans in terms of transportation dollars, I argue that it is yet another example of sneaking climate policy into transportation; it is an example of the "climatization" of every part of our government, the addition of environmentalists' climate policy to the very warp and woof of our state.
I argue too that the writer of the amendment, Senator Winter, is forcing this amendment because, to her, climate change trumps rural Coloradan's concerns and our ability to get around.
If you want a hint of what I mean, take a look at screenshots 3 and 4. Notice the first-person plural "we" in there? You'll pardon me, but every conversation I've had with rural people and with rural leaders has centered around the condition of the roads and not the climate. It's the pavement and not transit. Transit as the Front Range defines it has no meaning out here. The "we" Senator Winter references would mean everyone shares her agenda and vision. No we do not.
Still none of this matters. Not the lack of collaboration, not the loss of voice in what happens, not the insinuation of her agenda into places where it shouldn't be.
What matters to people like Senator Winter is that her idea of how things run is the only way they should run.
https://coloradosun.com/2023/03/08/rural-colorado-transportation-funding-change/
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb23-1101
An interesting infographic.
I got the infographic attached from a reader and found it interesting.
I will not verify its accuracy, but I don't doubt that there are wide gaps between what we think about others and what is true of others.
In other words, it's an interesting and quick read. It may or may not be true in the sense that, say, 3% of people are homosexual while the US population thinks it's 30% or that 89% of people graduated high school while we think it was only 65%, but it is true in the sense that the world as we think it is doesn't match reality.
To me this is a reminder that other humans are individuals and should be treated that way.
It's also a reminder to ask rather than assume something.
What does it remind you of? Please feel free to add to the comments.
Is there a difference (other than shifting when people are aware and start to complain) between taking natural gas fired equipment now and restricting you from having in the future?
Denver's Natural Gas ban on commercial and multi-family residential buildings (for now--I would not at all be surprised if it starts in single-family residential soon).
I put the three articles on the topic below in the order that I read them and wanted to include all three because I sense (given that the second two articles appeared in rapid succession after the first) that the regulators in Denver felt the first article wasn't fair to them. As I've said before, to consider yourself fully informed you should read widely.
A new building code in Denver will ban natural gas furnaces and water heaters in commercial and multi-family residential buildings starting in 2024. Three years later, all natural gas fired heating or cooling equipment will be banned. This applies to new construction only.
***Note that new construction includes the replacement of existing units that have failed. If, for example, the boiler in a condo building fails in 2027, that will have to be replaced with a boiler that doesn't use natural gas (or some other way of making hot water for individual units without either gas or a commercial-sized boiler will need to be found).
This raises some serious questions about the following:
What will this do to the cost of new construction?
Without the energy from combustion, we'll need energy from another source, i.e. electricity.
As far as the first question goes, take a look at screenshots 1 and 2 from the first article below. That's what various estimates (for similar policies) have shown and what an apartment building builder and manager say.
On the other hand, Denver has some money available to help the transition and exceptions are available (see screenshots 3, 4, and 5 from the first and second links respectively).
The money is nice, but I wonder how sustainable that is (and how freely the city will hand out hardship exemptions). I mean, $30 million is great, but that's chump change for a city the size of Denver and they'll burn through that no problem. What replaces that money?
As to the costs being "comparable", experience has shown me to be wary in the meaning of this phrase. Are we talking present costs? Future costs? Operating costs? Purchase costs? One common unstated thing in situations like these are that the lower cost refers to operating costs. They are comparable only if you consider that they may be cheaper to run and factor that in.
As far as the second question goes, both the City of Denver and Xcel say they have enough to meet the future needs. Their statements are detailed at length in the third article.
I don't know that I entirely disagree there. If the transition happens slowly (and not all at once), I think Xcel is prepared. They've been planning about this for a bit now. I think it's also important to note that during Winter we typically don't have the same electric demands as summer and thus we should have some extra capacity (unless we switch to renewables too quickly and lose our baseline generation).
Peak demand during summer when AC loads are competing with boilers/water heaters for domestic hot water? That's more of a question mark. I've not seen any estimates so I have no numbers to share that would be anything more than a wild-ass guess.
One las thing. In all three articles there are several caveats and statements by bureaucrats and etc. to make sure we're all aware that government is not coming in to tear out your gas-fired appliances or forcing people to update now.
That's good. That would be a big problem if they did. My question to you is this: what substantive differences are there between the government coming and telling you what to do NOW vs. reducing your choices in the FUTURE?
There is the time differential of course, but is it any more or less loss of freedom? I submit it isn't. It's just smeared out over time.
https://denvergazette.com/news/business/denver-imposes-natural-gas-ban-in-commercial-buildings-multi-family-housing/article_e8a5352c-b6f1-11ed-b6f5-2bbe6c6ff924.html
https://denvergazette.com/news/business/denver-defends-regulations-on-electrification-of-gas-heating-and-cooling-in-commercial-buildings/article_0628d01c-b7b6-11ed-bf2d-47193992351e.html
https://www.coloradopolitics.com/energy-and-environment/xcel-denver-insist-citys-power-grid-can-handle-higher-load-from-electrification/article_b76dd09b-7514-5bf5-a24c-80f69f34cc9a.html
***Related:
We'll soon be "showered" with incentives for everything from EV's to heat pumps if a new package of bills passes.
Left unanswered (at least as of this writing) by our media is the following:
Who pays for this largesse and how much?
Do these incentives actually make these things affordable by everyday people or are we going to simply subsidize rich people up in Boulder?
https://www.cpr.org/2023/03/08/colorado-clean-energy-incentives-proposal/