Colorado ranks among the top 10 energy-producing states in the nation. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), it’s the fifth-largest crude oil-producing state and the eighth-largest natural gas-producing state, accounting for 4 percent of the United States’ total output for both.
It also has significant reserves thanks to the Denver-Julesburg Basin, and has more than doubled gas output from 2000 to 2022.
But Democrats in Colorado want to put a stop to that by 2030.
On Feb. 2, Colorado Sens. Sonya Jaquez Lewis and Kevin Priola, along with Colorado Reps. Andrew Boesenecker and Julia Marvin—all Democrats—introduced Senate Bill 24-159, “Mod to Energy & Carbon Management Processes,” in the Senate. It’s now under consideration by the Agriculture and Natural Resources committee.
If passed, Colorado will stop issuing all new oil and gas permits before Jan. 1, 2030, and will start to reduce the number of permits issued in 2028 and 2029. Moreover, the bill will require that all permits issued after July 1 start operating before December 31, 2032.
Considering it takes five to 10 years for an oil and gas field to come online, the measure could effectively halt most new oil and gas developments starting this year.
Colorado Republican Rep. Ken DeGraaf, who sits on the Energy and Environment Committee, called the bill “unsound” and “dangerous.”
“You can’t restrict something like that—the demand is ostensibly going to stay the same, at least in the near term—so you can’t restrict the supply without automatically increasing the cost,” he told The Epoch Times.
Colorado Republican Sen. Cleave Simpson, who sits on the Agricultural and Natural Resources Committee and is considering the bill, agreed.
“If passed, this just adds to the long list of policies over the last 15 years that continue to make life in Colorado less and less affordable,” he told The Epoch Times. “I assume the national impacts are calculable and problematic as well, I just haven’t considered them given the enormous impact the policy has just on Coloradans.”
The Epoch Times reached out to all of the bill’s sponsors for comment. None of them responded to the request.
Banning Energy
In addition to supplying domestically produced oil and gas to the United States, Colorado’s oil and gas industry significantly impacts Colorado’s economy.
Information for 2023 isn’t yet available, but in 2022, Oil Drilling and Gas Extraction contributed $37.4 billion to Colorado’s overall $371.3 billion in gross state product (GSP), according to IBIS World, an industry research firm. That made oil and gas extraction Colorado’s largest industry.
Similarly, in 2021, oil and gas resources accounted for over $48 billion of the state’s total $371.3 billion GSP.
And, thanks to a strict regulatory framework and state-of-the-art technology that reduces emissions, venting, leaks, and flaring, Colorado’s gas is considered “among the cleanest in the world,” the Colorado Oil and Gas Association says.
Despite that, Colorado Democrats want to limit Colorado’s fossil fuel production severely.
SB 159 states, “International reports and agreements reflect the need to end oil and gas expansion. For example, the twenty-eighth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change called unanimously for a transition away from fossil fuels, and the International Energy Agency states that an end to new fossil fuel development is needed for a 50 percent chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
US Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the COP28 United Nations climate summit in Dubai on Dec. 2, 2023. (Karim Sahib/AFP via Getty Images)
“Climate pollution from oil and gas wells in Colorado exacerbates climate change, which has been declared the greatest global threat to public health by two hundred medical journals, and has adverse impacts on Coloradans’ health and well-being as described in section 25-7-102, Colorado Revised Statutes.”
Mr. Simpson said about the effort, “The impacts to the people of Colorado are significant, and the outcomes are unconscionable; schools, fire districts, ambulance districts, water districts, the State Water Plan, and local government services all negatively impacted by the proposed legislation.
“I see NO benefits to Coloradans if the bill passes.”
Mr. DeGraaf said his office is looking into SB 159’s effect but said, “We don’t know what the overall impact is. They are keeping those numbers pretty well obscure.”
But speaking to the underlying assumption in the bill—that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant and must be minimized—Mr. DeGraaf said that Colorado legislators aren’t basing their legislation on science.
A Tangled Web
Mr. DeGraaf has submitted Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) requests for over a year and sought information from Colorado senators and representatives who are primarily responsible for pushing energy legislation. He specifically asked for “scientifically validated documentary materials that support the CO2 reduction goals” and “books, papers, maps, photographs, cards, tapes, recordings, or other documentary materials” that legislators based their legislation on, among other scientific material.
He’s further sought information from Colorado’s Energy Office Executive Director Will Toor regarding how the Energy Office set its emissions goals.
The Epoch Times reviewed the CORA results and resulting communications.
In response to Mr. DeGraaf’s CORA request to Colorado Sen. Dafna Michaelson-Jenet, Rep. Manny Rutinel, Rep. Stephanie Vigil, Rep. Mike Weissman, Rep. Tammy Story, Rep. Judy Amabile, and Rep. David Ortiz, he received the reply, “The Members have reviewed the records in their custody at the time of your CORA request and do not have any records that are responsive to your request.”
Door to the Senate at the Colorado State Capital during the special session on Nov. 17, 2023. (Katie Spence/The Epoch Times)
He sent separate CORA requests to Rep. Brianna Titone, and Mr. Priola—a sponsor of SB 159—and received the same response.
From the Colorado Energy Office, Mr. Toor told Mr. DeGraaf, “The Energy Office does not set emissions goals. The greenhouse gas emissions goals that our office is charged with meeting were set by the legislature through multiple pieces of legislation over the last five years.”
The result, Mr. DeGraaf said, is that the legislation driving emissions reduction requirements in Colorado doesn’t have any scientific basis.
“I would say there’s not just a lack of knowledge, or even a lack of curiosity into it—I‘d say there’s a staunch rejection of knowing,” Mr. DeGraaf said about the science surrounding CO2 and emissions. “When you say, ’Hey, what you’re doing is dangerous for Colorado,‘ you’d think that maybe they‘d say, ’Okay, maybe we should look at the data.’
“But they’re not interested in looking at the data and actively avoid it.”
Colorado Governor Jared Polis speaks at a news conference in Boulder, Colo., on Dec. 31, 2021. (Nathan Frandino/Reuters)
When Mr. DeGraaf asked Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, what he based his “climate goals” on, Mr. Polis’s office deferred to Mr. Toor.
“It’s a big circle,” Mr. DeGraaf said. “‘He’s responsible.’ ‘No, he’s responsible.’ I think that’s an interesting way for climate science to be done.
“We never really get the scientist in the room. They just defer to the scientists and say, ‘Well, we have to do this because of the science,’ and it’s like, ‘Well, where are the scientists?’ And they say, ‘Well, they’re too important and busy to answer the question.’
“Then when you challenge them scientifically, they say, ‘Well, I’m just doing what the scientists tell me.’ So then when you ask, ‘What is the actual science, or put me in contact with these people,’ they come up empty.”
Ideology Over Reality
In addition to not basing their climate legislation on science, Mr. DeGraaf said many Colorado legislators are pushing an ideological agenda with a real-world impact.
“Ranches in Colorado are less profitable, and ranchers are going bankrupt,” Mr. DeGraaf said, as an example. “All these taxes, and now wolves are fouling them up. And for beef, the profit has been cut in half.
“And then you look at [Democrats’] overall goals, they’ve got this big push to turn everybody into vegans. Well, what’s the best way to make everybody eat less meat? Increase the price of meat so people can’t afford it.
“So, I think you’ve got a lot of ideological agendas in Polis’s office, and you know, he’s just pushing them through one at a time by various means, and CO2 is one of them. And the nefarious thing is that they’re basically getting people to vote for it. They’re getting the people of Colorado to vote to cut their own throats.”
Mr. DeGraaf said that when he asks supporters of reducing CO2 how they plan to replace fossil fuel energy by 2030, he’s repeatedly told that, while they don’t have an actual plan per se, they believe technology will advance enough “by then” to make the transition to green energy viable.
Renewable Energy: Wind turbines spin behind a field of solar cell panels. In 2010, investments in renewable energy sources, including wind, solar, and ocean power, will soar to $5 billion. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
“It’s great to have goals, but they must be feasible,” he said, adding that the most concerning proposal he’s heard is about CO2 sequestration, which is essentially burying CO2.
“Even if you make something idiot-proof, the world will bring you a better idiot,” Mr. DeGraaf said. “The insanity of the CO2 superstitions continues to prove that you can neither appease tyranny nor insanity, and the Greeniacs epitomize both.
“CO2 experts testified in committee that they someday hope to reduce the cost of sequestration to $100 per ton, with a capacity to sequester 1 billion tons per year—literally pumping $100 billion straight into the ground.
“Strangely, they did not know how much CO2 exists in the atmosphere for a perspective on what sequestering 1 billion tons would mean. Well, from what I’ve been able to determine, there are over 3,200 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, so even if CO2 was a problem, $100 billion to ’solve' less than one-third of one-thousandth doesn’t sound like a good use of $100 billion each year. But that discussion or even consideration is not welcome in any way, shape, or form—tilting against CO2 is considered virtuous.”
‘Useful Idiots’
Mr. DeGraaf said the push to reduce CO2 both in Colorado and the broader United States does not benefit humanity.
“You’re trying to get rid of the foundational molecule of life and literally asking people to pump it into a hole in the ground,” he said.
“I don’t know how much of it is malevolence [in Colorado]. I think it’s malevolence at some level. But I'd say most of it is ignorance just from the sense that they’re promoting an agenda they don’t fully understand. You know, most of the people supporting it, pushing it, are just useful idiots.”
Thanks to two petroleum refineries near Denver, Colorado processes 103,000 barrels of crude oil per day, the EIA says.
Additionally, the Colorado oil and gas industry supports more than 303,000 jobs—or 7.7 percent of Colorado’s total employment—according to the American Petroleum Institute.
A worker works on a pipe at Pioneer Pipe, which supplies products to the oil and gas industry, in Marietta, Ohio, on Oct. 25, 2016. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
“The figures in this report are staggering and underscore the critical importance of Colorado’s natural gas and oil industry to the state’s broader economic health,” Colorado API Director Kait Schwartz, said.
“They are also timely in the wake of a deeply troublesome legislative session during which lawmakers introduced a bill that could have functionally ended new production in the state. Much more than our industry and affordable energy are at stake each time policymakers pursue radical undertakings handcrafted by special interests whose explicitly stated mission is to end oil and gas production.
“Coloradans of all political stripes should consider these economic figures in the context of the dangerous political games being played, because this industry remains an irreplaceable bedrock of our state’s economic vibrancy.”
The Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee is scheduled to hear arguments for and against SB 159 on March 14, at 1:30 pm.
