Cumulative effects rules for oil and gas as a backdoor end to the industry. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again. Heads up for school choice: watch your State Board of Ed vote!
And the regulations just continue to stack up.
The Colorado Oil and Gas... No. Wait, that's not it. It used to be that, but now it's the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission.
Anyway, the Commission has by this point likely decided on a series of rules to start defining and regulating the oil and gas industry in line with a "cumulative impacts" bill passed in 2023.
A Sum and Substance article giving the latest word in the debate is linked first below, along with that 2023 bill below it.
A natural question, if you are a layperson like yours truly, is what are cumulative impacts? What does this mean?
In brief, my answer would be that it's an attempt by the radical environmentalists, and the Progressive Democrats beholden to them, to have a backdoor into ending new oil and gas drilling in this state.
This has long been the goal of both groups, but it's a tough one to accomplish via direct, frontal assault. So, in my view at least, they are trying to do this via requiring new rules from the Commission.
Let me flesh this out a little by first talking about what cumulative impacts are. I put a Wikipedia article on it below (note that the article is titled cumulative effects and the two are effectively synonymous). It's a good starting point if you want to learn more.
Skipping a lot of detail, regulations on pollution** often focus on how much is emitted. Let's pretend that, for a certain chemical, the maximum amount of emissions by any factory per year was 100 units; if you emit more than 100 units of chemical per year, you're in violation of the law.
How that is measured, who does the measuring, these are still somewhat contested questions. Sometimes the individual companies can do the monitoring and reporting, sometimes a health dept like CDPHE will do it (and/or do audits), environmentalists have their own thoughts as to who ought to do it, but some way or another someone estimates, keeps track of or in some way monitors emissions.
In our town we have three factories: Factory A, B, and C. As you can see in screenshot 1 Factory C has exceeded their limit and now faces some sort of enforcement.
Skipping a lot of detail, in a rough sense, this is how things stand now. If rules around cumulative impacts are passed, the scope of measurement of emissions broadens anywhere from a little to a lot. Emissions now must be counted not just in the present and not just for a single company, but they must be counted for the past, the present, and any future plans. Sometimes, though not always, for industries as a whole.
Let's return to my simple town with the three factories. Let's say that the cumulative impacts rules passed say that over the last 5 years you can't have emitted more than 500 units of pollution, this year you can't emit more than 100 and going forward you cannot emit more than 300 in the coming 5 years and then no more than 300 for anything beyond 5 years.
So, over an 11 year period, the total emissions can't go higher than 900 units. Years 11 - 16 they can't go more than 300 more.
Let's go further. Let's say that our regulators then say that the total emissions in our town cannot go higher than 2700 units over that 11 years. That is, they've capped emissions across the entire industry.
Let's focus in one just one factory. In screenshot 2 I show you the time history for Factory A.
For that factory to hit the newer standard, the cap, they'll have to reduce emissions somehow. Maybe this means curtailing production (say by operating at full speed but not for the entire 5 years), or maybe this means spending money to retool, investing in pollution-capture technology to still run at the same output but emit less.
I.e. make less money or spend more to make the same amount of money. Either way it's a loss. And businesses don't sit on their losses, they get passed along.
There is one more thing to consider. What if Factory A wanted to expand? What if someone wanted to open up a Factory D, E, F?
Good luck. They will either have to invest heavily in stopping emissions or hope that another factory shuts down.
This is what those that voted for the bill linked below, along with the environmentalists driving them, want to have happen to oil and gas in this state.
They want to add rules to the point that operators have to cut back and to the point that expansion or new entry into the market becomes prohibitively expensive. That way they can shut the industry down without a politically costly frontal assault.
Regulation stifles economic activity AND IT DOES SO UNEVENLY, UNFAIRLY. Big companies can absorb regulations for a while. They can, for example, get the capital together to do some of the things the Commission is proposing in the article below: they can electrify some things, they can pay the ransom required to the communities their operations are next to, they can hire PR firms and signature gatherers to get community input.
Smaller companies cannot. End of story.
And the things outlined above, the steps the Commission wants to ask, are just the beginning. There is more rulemaking yet to do.
Oh, and the environmentalists are already signaling that they're not happy with the current effort. They'll be pushing on their pet legislators to do yet more.
Polis isn't right. The oil and gas wars aren't over in this state. They've just gone underground and to regulation instead of legislation.
**Here you can consider pollution in the most general sense possible. Maybe it's a chemical, maybe it's a gas, maybe it's even (as some want to have it) greenhouse gasses.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb23-1294
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_effects_(environment
Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again.
You may or may not have picked it up, but I have lately been reading (just finished actually) the book The Blueprint by Schrager and Witwer.
If you've not yet read it, do. There is lots in there worth knowing.
I wanted to share a quote with you from the very last page of the edition I was reading. The last few pages were a series of quotes by various personalities from the book.
This one is from Josh Penry, Former Colorado State Senate minority leader (R). I found it quite stirring. To give you some background on this quote, The Blueprint details how from about 2004 to 2008 a group of savvy and wealthy Democrats helped turn this state from reliably red to blue. Demographics have played the role of a self-reinforcing feedback loop, but the kernel is the effort by monied liberals which trounced Republicans in this state.
Another note: this quote is a block, but I chopped it into pieces and labeled each with a capital letter because there are some additional things to note, which I will do after the quote.
A
"Either we can sit around and whine about the fact that a couple hyper-rich, supersmart people have been throwing us around like the political equivalent of a rag doll, or we can dust ourselves off, raise the level of our game, and get back in the fight."
B
"That means first modernizing those time-tested, traditional messages so that our voice breaks through the noise and the smear and the distortions--its' the message of Reagan. It's a message that affirms the goodness of this country, the greatness of the American Dream. I mean, since when did rugged individualism become uncool? When did high taxes and a nanny state that micromanages your life come back into fashion? The answer is they didn't."
C
"Republicans have become wimps--we don't make the case with courage or conviction. And we just have to. I always ask young people if they like [New York] Governor [David] Patterson's plan to tax iPad downloads. Here's the summary of their opinion: absolutely not, now way, not ever. At which point the wisdom of Reagan settles in on that young person. So the message matters most and we've got to sharpen it."
The point here is clear, and the quote above is just as relevant NOW as it was after the initial blue wave. There is nothing inevitable about Democrat supermajority control of this state.
Section A: this should be a call to arms for you. If you've sat things out, stop. Get involved in what ways you can. You will be needed to help turn this state back to the center. Want ideas? Let's email.
Section B: I heartily agree here. Even in Blue Colorado, there is still room for some centrism and conservative principles. There are a couple things necessary for success, however. First, we need to be humble enough to recognize that the Democrats that took this state knew what they were doing and follow suit. We need to start local and build up the kind of infrastructure that they created. That means that we need people who are willing to work for little to no money or recognition. I think Colorado is worth this kind of sacrifice. I hope you do too.
Second, we need to get back to basics. Gender politics and other culture war things are important, yes, but focusing on that is like arguing over what color to paint a car that doesn't have a working engine that is sitting on concrete blocks. Focus on the fundamentals. That is what will draw in the people who conservatives and Republicans need to start winning elections.
Section C: See "fundamentals" directly above. Again, the situation is not hopeless, but getting out of it requires work and discipline. It requires speaking up at every level in this state. It requires time. As I say above, I think Colorado is worth it and this is what drives me to do what I do here. Please join me and get involved.
Oh, and if you're a Republican (I'm a lifelong Libertarian, but I am conservative and see the Republicans as my current best bet to return sanity to this state), please clean house. None of the above can happen while the second major party in this state is in such disarray.
The choices you make on your ballot matter!
The article below details an important aspect of one of the Colorado State Board of Education Races.
These seemingly little offices matter. They matter greatly, and in this particular case you have a choice between one candidate who supports school choice and one who does not.
Choose carefully!