Using the race card to push environmental policy. When it comes to CO environmentalists, it's their way or the highway. And, because it's Friday, a queen bee tooting.
Using the race card to drive environmental policy.
I cannot tell you the number of times I have sat in on hearings and, while waiting to testify, I hear again and again the same litany about how the boogeyman under consideration (a source of pollution, a gas stove, traffic, what have you) is harmful to one race over another and how this racial injustice needs correction. The speeches are so similar that a listener can easily walk away with the impression that these folks were handed a script and told to call in.
Don't get me wrong. Race based injustice is wrong and we should call it out when we see it. Still, I disagree that the location of things that pollute or make noise has been or is now racially motivated. I do believe that it's class related (which often correlates with race), but not purely or necessarily race related.
Let's be honest with each other here: they will not, ever, be building anything objectionable in or around Boulder (though Boulderites will continue their tradition of being some of the highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters and thus consumers) or Cherry Creek in Denver.
People with money have a knack for making sure things like powerlines don't run past their houses or mess up their pristine sightlines. It is, therefore, easy to conclude that siting things that are objectionable DOES INDEED depend on your income and socioeconomic status. Fair or no, that's the way its been done since there were rich and poor. Rich people have money enough to move away from things they don't like and poorer people don't.
Care must be taking in not confusing this dynamic with intentional, outright racism. That's because by and large minorities tend to earn less and so these things are put in or around minority neighborhoods.
Interestingly, you also get this pattern by the choices of people of lesser means. Those that are starting out or that don't have high paying jobs want homes not apartments. The homes they can afford are the ones like those in Green Valley Ranch under the flight path of planes into DIA, or the houses that surround the Suncor refinery. They buy into those neighborhoods out of a desire to get a freestanding home, some land, and to get their families on the first rung of the ladder (with the hopes that their children will get up on the second).
This is shown handily by a quote from the op ed linked below: "Claiming a refinery built in 1930 on farmland settled by European migrants now occupied by a community of color and calling it environmental racism; ... [is] shameful."
Denver, just as it did with DIA, moved out to where these places were located, not the other way 'round; other waves of immigrants moved in as the Europeans moved out for the same reason it was settled in the first place. Barring successful attempts to shut down Suncor, I imagine that if you fast-forward another couple generations, you'll see the same dynamic.
You'll have to pardon some cynicism on my part, but the conclusion, to me, is obvious. Some of the people in the environmental movement are using the current state of things and a racial disparity (again, current not since forever) to help push their agenda.
Reporters, sympathetic to both environmentalists and minorities, are not doing their job in vetting claims made by either group (how hard would it be to check on the history of the Suncor refinery?). They do not take the 5 minutes to question a proposition, and try to check its veracity.
I think talking about the distribution of either real or potential environmental threats as a function of locations and real estate values is a good one to have. I think the discussion of who benefits vs. who gets to live with the noises, smells, nuisances, and hazards is a good one to have.
When we do, however, we need to keep in mind that the way we see things now may not be the way they always were and that there are multiple dynamics that drive the patterns of our economy.
'And, no, despite what advocates say (and tell others to say), it's not necessarily racism.
**p.s. the whole op ed below is worth a read. If you didn't already, give it a look. Nice counterpoint to multiple claims of racism written by a gentleman who lived through overt, explicit racism.
https://www.coloradopolitics.com/opinion/a-shameful-use-of-the-race-card-opinion/article_41f4b45c-e89f-11ed-9caf-afab3e672dee.html
It's my way or the highway, and this applies whether or not I end up hurting myself and others in the process.
There is a lot going on in the article linked first below (and the four bills** it mentions linked in the same order they appear in the article below it). I do not have time to go through the whole thing, but there is an important and concerning dynamic going on in this state that I do want to highlight.
Radical environmentalists in this state, and the legislators that they elect, have adopted an all-o-nothing attitude with regard to greenhouse gases and the oil and gas industry. Let me illustrate with some quotes from the article:
"Carbon capture is a growing technology where instruments can pull in carbon, usually from the primary emissions sources at factories, and pump it into oil wells in a way that boosts recovery of fuels locked underground and then stores the carbon in underground pores. Not only does it take carbon out of the atmosphere, but the process of enhanced oil recovery produces less carbon-intensive oil and gas, which in turn emits fewer greenhouse gas emissions. HB 1210 specifically bars any grant money from going to enhanced oil recovery."
"Meanwhile, hydrogen advocates are worried that a similar overly burdensome safeguard on HB 1281 could halt investment in that industry just as the state seeks to rev it up through a potential clean-hydrogen-hub designation. An amendment added by sponsoring Democratic Reps. Brianna Titone of Arvada and Stephanie Vigil of Colorado Springs requires that any hydrogen that qualifies for state grants be produced through a method known as “hourly matching.” That means that it could be made only during hours when the electrolyzers turning water into hydrogen energy are using solar or wind power, which will ensure the fuel source does not increase greenhouse gas emissions."
To put it simply, environmentalists and some in the Assembly feel that oil companies should not in any way benefit from carbon capture. They also feel that if we are to use hydrogen in place of natural gas it must be made now and forever using only renewables to ensure its moral purity, regardless of cost.
You do it my way, you do it with "moral purity", or you don't do it.
As I have written about before, many in our Assembly seem to forget that markets are a multiplayer game, and the other players always have the option of leaving the table. These kinds of all-or-nothing gambits have the unfortunate effect of giving us just that: little to nothing.
Companies that have the means to do this on large scales will not want to invest here if the regulations are onerous and the price to come here is too high. They'll go elsewhere. They'll take their investment, their jobs, and the economic boost with them.
I guess we'll still have the warm snuggly feeling of being superior to tuck us in at night though.
We will, repeat will, need to have everyone on board with us if we're to move away from fossil fuels. Do these people not realize that we have potential allies in the fossil fuel industry? Experience, capital, and etc. to help us figure out ways to make the bridge from fossil fuels to renewables a reality?
Continuing to use cleaner fossil fuels and figuring out ways to capture carbon is a perfectly reasonable strategy to employ in the near term to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without too much harm to our standard of living.
Starting now and getting the experience and infrastructure for a switch from natural gas to hydrogen (or at least a mix--as I've written about before, I'm not sold that a switch like this is feasible or the best idea) is a reasonable thing to try.
To cause dislocation and difficulty out of a desire to be “pure” in some environmental/moral sense is not.
**The first thing I did after reading was to check up on the bills and to see whether or not they'd passed. By my reading all of them had. If you note the screenshot attached, from SB23-16, you'll note that this bill (along with SB23-285) I believe cleared both the House and Senate, but only AFTER a conference committee to iron out the differences in the two versions.
https://tsscolorado.com/could-colorado-bills-stifle-the-new-energy-sources-they-seek-to-promote/
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb23-016
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb23-285
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/HB23-1210
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/HB23-1281
A queen bee tooting her own horn.
Last one of the day and you know what that means: a curiosity not related to politics.
I have a colleague who is a member of a group that does beekeeping and she recently had a bunch of new queens on her desk.
Apparently, you can get these sorts of things by mail. I guess I should have known: you can get plants by mail why not bees?
The queens came in a little box made of wood whose sides are screens. The bees are put in their little wire cages with a dampened bit of fluff for water and some sugar to sustain them, shipped rush delivery, and then you can start off a new colony.
This particular order was a big one as my colleague did a bulk order for herself and her group.
Similar to betas (the fish), queens being near each other causes some heartburn and fussing. They are separated into cages and can't literally fight it out, but they do the bee version of saber rattling: a series of sounds that go by the fanciful names of tooting (as in tooting your own horn), quacking, and etc.
I got to listen to them and sent my students to listen too.
I found a video online with some of the sounds in case you were curious to hear too. It's linked first below.
Couple other little bee tidbits that popped up while I wrote this.
The first is the word "apiary", the bee version of "aviary". See more about the word at the second link below.
The second is the word "bee" in Spanish. It's abeja (ah - bay - ha). The word forms a linguistic pair called a diphthong when put with the definite article in Spanish. La abeja means "the bee" but you do not pronounce the pause between the words in Spanish. I.e. it's not La (pause) abeja. It's pronounced closer to "labeja" with the two "ah" sounds merging.
Well, now you know up to three things about bees you didn't before. Not bad for a Friday. Have a good finish to the workweek!