Rocky Mountain Institute rundown: their relationship with our state, and their relationship with lefty media.
Rocky Mountain Institute's relationship with our state.
**Edit: 4/23/2025 at 3PM. Due to a mistake in my use of the spreadsheet, I have my numbers wrong. I updated the amounts that went to RMI since 2017 and since 2019 (when Polis became governor).
I will occasionally get (and read) Substack articles by Robert Bryce. It's been a while in getting around to it, but I wanted to share the one linked first below with you.
I'll leave it to you to read up on, but the upshot is this: Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI--their site is linked second below) is a Colorado-based advocacy group that has, among other things, promulgated shoddy science in their effort to eliminate gas stoves, to accelerate a push by some for so-called beneficial electrification.
Quoting Bryce with links intact:
"In early 2023, RMI published a report that claimed that 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the US “can be linked to gas stove use. In some cases, that number is much higher.” That report got widespread news coverage. But just a day or two after those stories were published, the group walked back its claims, with one RMI official telling the Washington Examiner that the new study "does not assume or estimate a causal relationship" between childhood asthma and natural gas stoves. That RMI study conveniently ignored a definitive study published in Lancet Respiratory Medicine, which followed half a million schoolchildren in 47 countries over a multi-year period. The 2013 study concluded, 'We detected no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.'”
Bryce continues from there to describe how RMI has gotten money from corporations, leftist dark-money organizations, and the Federal government. Again, despite pushing junk science to further their agenda, our Federal government has given them gobs of money.
This led me to wonder about our state. Are giving, have we given, RMI money? This is interesting in its own right, but it also gives me a chance to share a state online tool that lets you search who our state is writing checks to.
The third link below is the online, electronic version of our state's checkbook register. It lets you search through who our state has given money to and for what (though there are some exceptions listed at the top of the page). As with all databases, there are multiple ways to parse the data.
I set it to search for RMI, for all fiscal years, and all departments. The computer spit out the data below which I told it to export as a spreadsheet. The result is linked fourth below.
I will leave it to you to go poke around in the spreadsheet and/or database, but I thought some toplines from the spreadsheet might be of interest.
--Our state has given RMI about $718K since 2017. $706K of which went since 2019 the year Governor Polis became governor.
--Perhaps not at all surprisingly, the money almost always comes from the governor's office (the Colorado Energy Office). Only the last two items, one for 32K and one for about 1K go to the Public Utilities Commission and CDPHE respectively.
--The source fund for the money is almost always the governor's discretionary money, rarely from the "Clean and Renewable Energy Fund"
Fair bit of money for advocates who can't really be trusted to be forthright about what "science" they're sharing. Makes one wonder what exactly we're getting for our money.
I reached out the media contact for the Colorado Energy Office to see. As of this writing, I've not heard back, but I will stay with it and update as I know more.
In the second post today, we'll look at CPR News' relationship with RMI.
https://rmi.org/
https://data.colorado.gov/stories/s/TOPS-Expenses/pqw4-6m8r
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1E8t7gd-eCZKJH48AlXp_vBrf0L0q7P3B/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=105405937749106967542&rtpof=true&sd=true
Rocky Mountain Institute's relationship with public media
The previous post today was about Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a nonprofit which has loose standards on the "science" which backs its advocacy, and how they've gotten lots of money from the Federal government, dark money groups, and corporations.
Oh, and they've also gotten some from you and I. The Colorado Energy Office (housed in the Polis' administration), has given them a fair bit too since Polis took office.
Go back and read the first post if you need the context.
In the second post today, I want to look at RMI's relationship with Colorado Public Radio.
To begin, I looked on CPR's site and didn't see any. I reached out to their fundraising director and she confirmed that they have no donation or grant history with RMI.
Relationship or no, RMI sure gets a fair bit of attention from CPR. The first link below is to a site search for instances of "Rocky Mountain Institute" appearing on CPR's page. To offer some contrast, I ran the same site search but instead looked for "Colorado Oil and Gas Association" (COGA, a trade group for oil and gas producers) and linked to that search second below.
As a quick aside, if you follow the links, you'll note that among the first search results are links to CPR's topics pages for these groups. They can sometimes be useful, but sometimes not. I like a fuller site search for a specific phrase to give a more thorough look.
I won't go point by point through each of the links, but I would point you to the difference in what is covered and the difference in the tone CPR uses with RMI vs COGA. Look, for example, at how COGA's comments in articles are often the usual quotes from "the other side" in response to government actions. This is in contrast with RMI's quotes and stories where the focus is more on actions they're taking or support they're offering Colorado and its residents.
I can offer another, clearer, example.
If you look through the results for COGA, you'll note one interview that CPR did with their president Dan Haley back in 2015. In order to find this interview, you have to go all the way to the backwoods of Google's page 2 (is that banjo music I hear?). If you're curious to listen to that interview, it's the third link below.
Not so for RMI. Right there on page 1 Google has two results that are clearly interviews. They're links 4 and 5 below if you're curious.
Now, neither RMI, CPR, nor COGA has any control over how Google arranges its search results, but, however the algorithm is arranging things, the space given to advocates on different sides of an issue, the opportunity to be humanized, to make one's case in CPR's forum, is almost certainly different for environmentalists than it is for industry.
I have read and seen a lot lately about (at the Federal level certainly), the cozy relationship between nonprofits and our government. The previous post today outlines that and looks in at the state level for RMI.
This post shows another cozy relationship, in this case between the same nonprofit from before and the news outlet CPR. Don't misunderstand me either, such cozy relationships also exist between trade groups and friendly outlets/reporters (see, for example, an earlier newsletter mentioning building developers' laments about state and Denver climate policy).
The point of the previous post was to show you how much our state is passing along to the nonprofit RMI. As a taxpayer, you should be alert to the love showered down upon nonprofits by your policymakers (it was also to show you how you could research on your own if you want).
The point of this post is similar, but not as specific to RMI or even to CPR. I wanted to make you aware that the non-monetary love can shower down upon those same nonprofits (and trade groups to be fair) by our media. It's incumbent upon you as the consumer to pay just as much attention in this arena. It's incumbent upon you to question and read critically, to ask how the other side of the issue is treated.
https://www.cpr.org/2015/07/30/q-a-cogas-new-leader-talks-about-colorados-oil-and-gas-industry/
https://www.cpr.org/2010/04/05/amory-lovins-25-years-of-rocky-mountain-institute/
https://www.cpr.org/2019/09/26/colorado-energy-think-tank-talks-oil-in-the-time-of-climate-summit/
Cozy relationships with non-profits and gov't = DANGER!!!