Despite the howling from the deep-pocketed and largely non-Colorado based Malthusian Non Profit Industrial Complex1 with claims in bill testimonies ranging across the wide swath of well-debunked anti-nuclear hysteria, the bill said nothing about building nuclear power plants in the state.

This year, the legislature is back with moving the needle in that direction.

Just this week, HB26-1337 (Facilitating Nuclear Energy Development) made its way into the beginning of the sausage making process in Colorado legislature. It would do three simple but consequential things: centralize nuclear permitting within the state, encourage the state’s utilities to identify potential reactor sites and, most importantly allow investor-owned utilities to charge ratepayers for up to $20 million in early-stage development costs like feasibility studies and site analysis.

This is not a commitment to build a nuclear plant. And even if the State of Colorado paves the path for future nuclear plants, there’s still a lot at the federal level that needs to be addressed.

But back in Colorado, it’s something more foundational. HB26-1337 extends the existing energy financing model to a nuclear. Utilities would be, with PUC approval, allowed to begin spending—and recovering those costs from customers well before a plant is sited, funded, and built.

Naturally, this entire thing is rife with controversy, from the usual groups. The Colorado Sun has, given Sun standards, a decent article on the “controversy.”

The Sun, in their typical framing make it sound as if there’s a large swath of environmental groups in opposition but spends the majority of their article on the infamous GreenLatinos, an woke green (allegedly) Spanish-speaking NGO who once demanded media censorship of “climate change deniers.”

Here’s how the Sun’s article introduces this illustrious group:

“It’s so tone-deaf, it’s ridiculous,” said Colorado GreenLatinos’ Ean Tafoya, who said a broad environmental coalition is angry at bill sponsor Valdez, for a “betrayal” of environmental justice values in promoting nuclear development.

Xcel and some Pueblo economic development leaders have talked about siting a nuclear project on the grounds of the sprawling coal-powered Comanche Station as those fossil fuel units close over the next few years, Tafoya noted. Xcel doesn’t even serve the Pueblo area, he said.

“So the pollution stays in the community, and the power doesn’t power the localized community. So if you were to put one in Pueblo, it wouldn’t even lower the rates for the people who live there,” Tafoya said.

(Tafoya’s quip that “Xcel doesn’t even serve the Pueblo area,” is true in a sense that Xcel isn’t the electricity provider to Pueblo but it’s Xcel who currently operates Comanche. Utilities owning large power plants far from their service territory is nothing out of the ordinary. Comanche is hardly “sprawling” either at approximately 700 acres. The nearby Neptune Energy Center Hybrid, a solar farm with utility scale battery storage occupies nearly 3,500 acres.)

Mockery aside, Greenlatinos’ Tafoya eventually got to something resembling a point:

Far from opening up a freer market, Tafoya said, Colorado’s bill tilts the energy field toward one form of technology.

“Basically, what they’re saying is, let’s build a project on a fast pace, picking winners and losers, all at the same time we’re rolling back safety,” Tafoya said. “That should be very concerning for environmental justice communities.”

Tafoya is actually onto something here.

It goes like this:

• Ratepayers are being asked to assume risk for that is, at least in Colorado, speculative infrastructure. (For a deep dive in Colorado’s previous attempt at nuclear power, see here)

• Utilities are being allowed to socialize early-stage costs while retaining upside through regulated returns.

• And once the spending begins, there is a strong institutional incentive to continue spending. What starts as a $20 million “pilot” study can evolve into a much larger, harder-to-stop capital project.

In a state already struggling with rising electricity costs thanks to failing green promises, blackouts, and supply constraints, that concern is not irrational. It reflects a broader skepticism of how large infrastructure projects are financed under not just Colorado, but the general utility regulatory model.

But here’s where the argument begins to narrow in a way that deserves scrutiny. Because the mechanism embedded in this bill—early cost recovery, ratepayer-backed development, and policy-guided investment is not new. This is the same structure that has been used repeatedly to finance generation, transmission expansion, and other projects with virtually every electric utility across the country regardless of technology.

And in those cases, many of the same groups raising alarms here have supported, lobbied for, or at minimum accepted the underlying model provided it helped bring on board their preferred technology.

That doesn’t make their current concerns invalid but it does raise a more difficult question:

If it is problematic for utilities to charge ratepayers for “speculative” nuclear development, why is it acceptable to do so for other technologies?

Nuclear indeed has a history of cost overruns and long timelines and such are in many people’s opinions disqualifying risks never mind the significant and unnecessarily restrictive regulatory regime. But why are those risks treated as manageable, or even necessary, elsewhere?

Perhaps much of this due to the blatant propaganda which drowns out the legitimate concerns with “green” energy and the blatant and well debunked anti-nuclear hysteria.

But at some point, the distinction stops being about financial structure and starts being about preferred outcomes, which is what’s been happening time and time again with the replacement of reliable electrical sources with so-called renewable ones.

The same “green” organizations that raise alarms about ratepayer exposure (but only when it’s an icky “for profit” utility), cost overruns, and “picking winners and losers” in the context of nuclear has largely supported the exact same mechanisms when applied to wind, solar, transmission expansion, and electrification programs.

They’ve further demanded premature shutdowns of paid off existing assets over the hysteria these assets are somehow contributing to significant local air pollution or global climate change. These projects are routinely financed through the same structure: upfront capital, guaranteed recovery through utility rates, and risk ultimately borne by the public on top of massive subsidies from both the State and Federal governments.

Greenlatinos is making a bit of a point but cannot seemingly see the massive log in their own eyes.

These are serious operational constraints. They deserve serious reporting.

Instead, readers of the “independent” Colorado Sun last were treated to something else entirely: an uncritical amplification of a study commissioned by the Malthusian “Colorado chapter” of the Sierra Club claiming that keeping the Nixon coal plant open or exploring small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) would be “the most expensive options by far.”

The “journalist” Michael Booth whose tagged as a “subject specialist” presented these findings as fact, despite withholding even a link to the actual “study” from readers and failing to interrogate the assumptions that produced its conclusions.

If this sounds like advocacy masquerading as journalism, that’s because it is and this is what the Sun does best.

To add further red flags, as explained earlier, the “Colorado” chapter of the Sierra Club commissioned the “study” but the “study” was allegedly done by the Boston-based Applied Economics Clinic, whose website features a large text wall of virtue signaling as if they’re still stuck in the summer of 2020.

This “study” is nowhere on their website either.

At the bottom of the article, the Sun assures readers that its stories are “based on facts… verified from knowledgeable sources.” But there is no verification here. There is no link to the study, no methodological summary, no engagement with outside and legitimate expertise such as the folks at the Independence Institute.

And what is being repeated deserves far more scrutiny than the Booth is willing to apply.

The only analytic window readers are given is a screenshot of a cost comparison chart supposedly from the study that looks unmistakably like a Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) analysis.

LCOE is a metric widely used by fiat energy apologists because it produces the answers they prefer: that wind and solar are always cheapest, nuclear is always expensive, and traditional baseload plants are relics of the past. The problem is that LCOE is not designed to answer system-level questions, and even Lazard openly warns it should never be used as a planning or forecasting tool.

A recent technical critique by and , Cooking the Books 2: Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Estimates for Wind, explains exactly why as does a 2023 piece by

Lazard’s LCOE calculations exclude every major cost of integrating renewables into a real-world grid: transmission expansions, congestion, curtailment, weather variability, load balancing, overbuild requirements, and storage needs. As Lazard itself even concedes, these omissions “may have a significant effect on the results” and “this analysis is not a forecasting tool.” Yet forecasting is precisely how the Sierra Club “study” uses it, and precisely how the Booth “reports” it.

Worse still, LCOE depends on unrealistically generous assumptions for wind and solar. Lazard’s low-end wind cost, for example, is based on a 55 percent capacity factor — a performance level achieved by only 0.33 percent of U.S. wind turbines. The national fleet average is roughly 35 to 43 percent depending on vintage, and Colorado’s seasonal variability can push actual output far lower during critical winter peaks. If a model assumes output that wind turbines do not and cannot produce, it will, unsurprisingly, produce cost projections that are divorced from reality. And yet the Booth saw no need to report on whether the “study” relied on these same assumptions.

Also consider the way the Booth presents Colorado Springs Utilities’ current resource mix. We are told the utility has “175 MW of solar, 60 MW of wind, and 100 MW of battery storage.” These are nameplate capacities, not actual output - a common bait and switch tactic fiat energy apologists do. In Colorado’s climate, 175 MW of solar averages closer to a fraction of that figure of real energy over the year — and near zero on winter evenings when reliability risk is highest. Sixty megawatts of wind reduces to roughly 20–25 MW on an annual basis, with large multi-day lulls not captured in any average. A battery’s MW rating tells readers nothing without its energy duration either. 100 MW of storage may mean just one hour of output. Booth failed to give us those details.

Booth appears unaware that a megawatt of nuclear or gas is not remotely equivalent to a megawatt of solar or wind. LCOE treats them as interchangeable. The grid (and reality) cannot.

To Booth’s credit, he included a statement from someone at Colorado Springs Utilities who explicitly flagged these issues, noting that the so-called study “does not appear to account for weather variability, growing customer demand, high-load users such as data centers, regional transmission constraints, or reliability modeling.” In other words, the study ignores the factors that determine whether the lights stay on.

The Sun relegates this to a single paragraph.

Then the paper returns to quoting more activists.

The central claim of the Sierra Club’s analysis — that nuclear small modular reactors would be “the most expensive option by far” — rests almost entirely on the same flawed LCOE structure Orr and Rolling dissected: unrealistic capacity factors, optimistic asset lifetimes, misleading cost allocations, and the complete absence of grid-integration costs. But without access to the underlying study, readers cannot see whether these assumptions are present. But the clip of the chart, the rhetoric of the conclusions, and the reporter’s own presentation strongly suggest they are.

This is precisely why the Sun should have linked the study. It did not. And without that transparency, readers are left to take an advocacy group’s claims on faith — something the Sun’s ethics policy supposedly exists to prevent.

Colorado’s energy debates are too important for “news” outlets to act as message multipliers for political nonprofits. Utilities face a genuine challenge: meeting growing electric demand while maintaining reliability, complying with state mandates, and avoiding rate shocks. That conversation requires clarity, accuracy, and intellectual honesty. It requires distinguishing between nameplate capacity and real energy, between annual averages and seasonal peaks, between cost estimates on paper and performance in practice.

What it does not require is media laundering of an unlinked, methodologically suspect analysis.

“Journalists” often defend themselves as guardians against misinformation. If that is true, then the minimum obligation is to provide readers with the information necessary to evaluate a source — starting with a link to the study the entire article is built around.

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And whenever lobbying records are published, their name almost always appears.

The group bills itself as “the largest Colorado-based grassroots network” fighting the “climate crisis.”

But its constant presence in policymaking reveals something deeper: 350Colorado is less a spontaneous scrappy community uprising and far more a professional advocacy machine.

Its very name was imported from luxury belief coastal activists’ national-level group 350.org. Its leadership is dominated by out-of-state transplants. Its biggest checks come from private sources, “progressive” organizations, or Silicon Valley billionaires. And its agenda — from fracking bans to electrification mandates — is dictated by the national 350.org organization.

The consequences are not abstract. This machine has lobbied for policies that helped erase oil, gas, and coal jobs in communities from Craig to Greeley. It hired four separate lobbyists to try to defeat nuclear legislation (HB25-1040). And its green Malthusian wish list — from “green” building codes to renewable carve-outs — has helped drive Colorado’s energy costs sharply upward, making it more expensive to live, work, and do business in the state.

This is the paradox: a group that markets itself as “Colorado-based” and “grassroots” turns out to be neither.

They’re instead another organization full of largely outsiders using newly colonized Colorado as a stage for their ideology, while everyday Centennial Staters pay the price.

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The Myth of “350”

350 Colorado’s about page describes the number as, “climate safety: to preserve a livable planet, scientists tell us that 350 parts per million (ppm) is the safe upper limit of CO2 in the atmosphere. Currently we are at 415ppm and rising 2-3ppm every year.”

As, British economist Charles Goodhart famously said, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." The origin of 350 goes far beyond just a measure or target run amok.

The origin of the “350” began long before the establishment of 350 Colorado and closer to what activists said than what the scientific evidence shows. As climate scientist and professor Roger Pielke Jr. notes, there was “essentially no science behind it,” but the number caught on.

The Honest Broker

The 1.5 Degree Temperature Target is a Dead Man Walking

Since the early 1990s, climate policy has focused on a number of different metrics around which to set policy goals, including emissions cuts (Kyoto 1997), atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (Copenhagen 2009) and global average temperature change from pre-industrial times (Paris 2015). In an…

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3 years ago · 70 likes · 20 comments · Roger Pielke Jr.

In 2007, writer and climate activist Bill McKibben was preparing to launch a climate NGO. He considered calling it “450.org,” after the 450 ppm carbon dioxide (CO₂) target then circulating in UN policy circles. He asked NASA scientist and fellow climate hysteric James Hansen for advice. Hansen, working on a draft paper, suggested 350 ppm instead.

There was just one problem: by 2007, the world had already blown past 350 ppm. Atmospheric CO₂ stood at 383 ppm.

McKibben seized on the number anyway. With help from the Swedish Tällberg Forum, he branded the group as 350.org and launched it globally in 2008. They bought full-page ads in The New York Times and International Herald Tribune, gathered 150 signatories from political and business elites, and even secured a nod from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

By the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, “350” had morphed again, this time into shorthand for the aspirational 1.5°C warming target. What began as a back-of-the-envelope number became a global brand and eventually a “local” one.

The Two Non-Profits

Unlike the Southwest Energy Efficiency Program, 350 Colorado is the name for two non-profits, one that operates as a 501(c)(3) (EIN: 46-3355370) and their action fund, a 501(c)(4) (EIN: 82-2466390).

This already draws some red flags for the “grassroots” claim given that running a single non-profit successfully is already a difficult endeavor. The establishment of a 501(c)(4) also means they can do what a 501(c)(3) cannot which is directly endorse political candidates. This paradoxically is something they do not do much of compared to other “Colorado-based” 501(c)(4) behemoths such as the state’s Sierra Club Chapter or Conservation Colorado.

But their latest 501(c)(3) Form 990 shows something more revealing.

According to 350 Colorado’s most recent IRS Form 990, the group is running at a loss. In 2024, the organization reported $475,055 (down from $907,678 in 2023) in contributions and grants — almost all from private foundations and donors untraceable in the Form 990, with $26,896 coming from government grants. Its total expenses topped $709,696, leaving it with a deficit of $227,906 (down from positive $95,043 in 2023) and burning through nearly 40 percent of its assets in a single year.

Salaries, other compensations, and employee benefits alone totaled $513,778 - more than the group raised in contributions. Only one of their eleven board members received a salary - Executive Director Michah Parkin with just over $76,000 in salary and benefits. Their latest Form 990 also shows more than $104,000 of the “Colorado” nonprofit’s own spending in 2024 went straight back out the door as grants to other 350 affiliates — including 350 Vermont, 350 Wisconsin, 350 Seattle, and 350 San Diego.

Most striking is where the money comes from and where it goes when looking at their organization through the non-profit tracking site such as CauseIQ. The group’s revenue has been buoyed in other years by large foundation checks — a $250,000 grant from the Schmidt Family Foundation, $45,000 from The Denver Foundation, $43,000 from Colorado People’s Action (formerly called Rights for All People & Colorado Progressive Coalition), and smaller sums from Patagonia and the Maki Foundation.

So the picture that emerges is not of a lean, volunteer-driven grassroots outfit, but of a professionalized NGO with a payroll-heavy budget reliant on coastal (and often obscured private donors) and even redistributing Colorado-raised funds to out-of-state 350 affiliates. In other words: funded from the outside, lobbying on the inside, and exporting money elsewhere.

While the 501(c)(4) action fund does not endorse with the volume of larger green groups, it has dipped into Colorado politics since its creation.

In 2018, 350 Colorado Action endorsed

• Levi Tillemann

• Joe Salazar

• Bernie Douthit

• Mark Williams

In 2019 it backed Boulder City Council candidates

• Junie Joseph

• Susan Peterson

By 2020, its “Stamp of Approval” went to

• Andrew Romanoff

• Lorena Garcia ‘s failed senate campaign - she was later appointed to the State House. (more on her here, here, and here.)

• Stephany Rose Spaulding

• Jonathan Singer

Perhaps that’s all a feature and not a bug, as it appears 350Colorado’s prime activity is appears to be lobbying.

Imported Urbanite Leadership

350 Colorado’s roster appears right out of the target market for the “Not a Native But I got here as fast as I could” bumper stickers and a random selection of attendees from the ultra-diverse “Hands Off” and “No Kings” rallies.

Staff (all but one receive a salary)

• Micah Parkin, Executive Director and Co-Founder — Moved from New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Alma mater: Tulane University (degree not specified). Lives in Boulder. Passions: climate justice, progressive social change.

• Chelsea Alexander, Movement Building & Volunteer Director — From Indiana, lived in Chicago before moving to Colorado. Alma mater: Indiana University (degree not specified). Lives in Denver. Passions: feminism, gender justice, grassroots organizing.

• Roberta “Bobbie” Mooney, Campaign Director & Staff Attorney — From Vermont, moved to Colorado “sight unseen” in 2011. Alma mater: Vermont Law School, J.D. Lives in Colorado Springs. Passions: environmental justice, legal advocacy.

• Brigit Stattelman-Scanlan, Development Director — Began climate activism with 350 Wisconsin in Madison. Alma mater: University of Wisconsin–Madison (degree not specified). Lives in Denver. Passions: climate activism, feminist perspectives.

• Heidi Leathwood, Climate Policy Analyst — Colorado origin unknown. Alma mater: Oberlin Conservatory of Music (degree not specified). Lives in Denver. Passions: climate justice, clean energy transition.

• Matt Gose, Promoting Climate Solutions Coordinator — Born and raised in Western Colorado. Alma mater: Colorado Mesa University (degree not specified). Lives in Colorado Springs. Passions: sustainable agriculture, rural climate solutions.

• Kim Nelson, Administrative Director — Originally from New York. Alma mater: Fordham University (degree not specified). Lives in Fort Collins. Passions: racial equity, nonprofit management.

• Steve Kuschner, Roaring Fork Team Coordinator — Born in New York City, raised on Long Island. Alma mater: Cornell University (degree not specified). Lives in Carbondale. Passions: sustainability, renewable energy.

Board of Directors

• Gail Nordheim, Chair — Moved to Denver from Madison, Wisconsin in 2023. Alma mater: University of Wisconsin–Madison (degree not specified). Lives in Denver. Passions: environmental justice.

• Katessia Robertson, Vice-Chair — From Indianapolis, Indiana; later moved to Denver. Alma maters: Indiana University (degree not specified); University of Denver (degree not specified). Lives in Denver. Passions: DEI, climate justice.

• Heron Lenz, Secretary — A Colorado native (Fort Collins). Alma mater: Northwestern University (degree not specified). Lives in Fort Collins. Passions: LGBTQ+ advocacy, social justice.

• Paul Culnan, Treasurer — Based in Boulder; origin unknown. Alma mater: not listed. Lives in Boulder. Passions: not listed.

• Patricia Garcia-Nelson — Born and raised in Northern Colorado. Alma mater: University of Northern Colorado (degree not specified). Lives in Greeley — the sole board member outside the Front Range “green bubble.” Passions: Latinx advocacy, clean air for children.

• Finn Jackson — From Cody, Wyoming, moved to Boulder in 2023. Alma mater: Colorado College (degree not specified). Lives in Boulder. Passions: youth climate activism.

• Angie Berktold — From Minnesota. Alma mater: University of Minnesota (degree not specified). Lives in Boulder. Passions: conservation, environmental education.

The leadership, as would say is dominated by transplants — Louisiana, Vermont, Wisconsin, Indiana, New York, Minnesota — with only three confirmed locals. Nearly all of them live in a tight cluster of Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, and Carbondale, with Greeley standing as the lone exception to cities not dominated by Malthusian ideologues.

In other words, 350 Colorado’s “grassroots” are concentrated in Colorado’s most Malthusian/green enclaves, not spread across the diverse communities they claim to represent. This geographic homogeneity further underscores the pattern of Progressive Colonialism: outside-trained activists staging their agenda in the state’s progressive hubs, while the working-class communities most affected by energy policy — Western Slope and Eastern Plains areas — are conspicuously absent from leadership.

For an organization branding itself as “Colorado-based,” this is revealing. The brains and bankrolls behind 350 Colorado mostly arrived from elsewhere, carrying with them national talking points and networks.

State-Wide Lobbying Activities

Despite branding itself as a grassroots citizens’ network, 350 Colorado’s Secretary of State filings show the behavior of a full-fledged professional lobbying operation.

In just the 2024 and 2025 Regular General Assembly sessions 350 Colorado lobbied on 59 different bills. (In both years, Colorado also had Special Sessions to address state budget woes but these aren’t included here.)

• 22 in 2024 (20 Supporting, 1 Opposing, 1 Amending)

• 37 in 2025 (25 Supporting, 11 Opposing, 1 Monitoring)

On 39 of these 59 bills, 350 Colorado deployed up to five multiple lobbyists indicating either strong support or opposition including Foote Environmental Law & Policy, Lacey A. Hays, Bailey Kramer, and Legacy Consulting Colorado, LLC.

Two of 350 Colorado’s own are registered lobbyists as well, the Executive Director herself, and the organization’s Climate Policy Director Heidi Leathwood.

This lobbying presence was visible in high-profile fights:

• SB24-159 sponsored by Priola (D), Jaquez Lewis (D), Boesenecker (D), and Marvin (D) to phase out new oil & gas permits by 2030. This bill died in Committee but 350 Colorado aggressively lobbied in support.

• SB24-039 and HB25-1040 sponsored by ‘24 by Liston (R) and in ‘25 by Valdez (D) public drunk Winter Winter (R), Liston, (R) and Roberts (D) to include nuclear energy in state statutes under the definition of clean energy. 350 Colorado opposed on multiple years. The 2024 bill died in committee on partisan grounds but the 2025 bill was signed into law by the Governor thanks to bipartisan support.

• HB24-1367 sponsored by KKKipp (D) and public drunk Winter (D) to repeal severance tax exemptions on stripper wells. 350 Colorado supported, signaling their willingness to further constrain the state’s oil and gas industry.

• HB25-1126 sponsored by Martinez (D), Winter (R), Pelton, B to reform the makeup of the Colorado PUC board. 350 Colorado used four lobbyists against this one and were adamant in public testimony that reforming the current board (stacked with Polis-approved Malthusians and green energy insiders) would hamper “Colorado’s” green ambitions. Covered here in Finding a Voice in Colorado's Electricity Sector.

And importantly, their lobbying often translated into actual law. In fact, 25 bills they supported were signed by the Governor, including:

• HB24-1338 – Cumulative Impacts & Environmental Justice

• HB24-1030 – Railroad Safety Requirements

• HB24-1152 – Accessory Dwelling Units

• HB24-1341 – State Vehicle Idling Standard

• HB24-1370 – Reduce Cost of Use of Natural Gas

• SB24-014 – Seal of Climate Literacy Diploma Endorsement (covered in Participation Ribbon for Delusion)

• SB24-032 – Methods to Increase the Use of Transit

• SB24-053 – Racial Equity Study

• SB24-184 – Support Surface Transportation Infrastructure Development

• HB25-1096 – Automated Permits for Clean Energy Technology

• HB25-1006 – School District Solar Garden Lease Term

• HB25-1059 – Food Waste Reduction in Public Schools

• HB25-1113 – Limit Turf in New Residential Development

• HB25-1161 – Labeling Gas-Fueled Stoves (a similar CA law covered in What's in a Warning?)

• HB25-1166 – Efforts to Reduce Food Waste

• HB25-1234 – Utility Consumer Protection

• HB25-1269 – Building Decarbonization Measures

• HB25-1280 – Advanced Leak Detection Technology Rules

• SB25-026 – Adjusting Certain Tax Expenditures

• SB25-030 – Increase Transportation Mode Choice Reduce Emissions

• SB25-037 Coal Transition Grants

• SB25-045 Health-Care Payment System Analysis

• SB25-055 Youth Involvement in Environmental Justice (covered in "Concerning Measures to Involve Youth in Environmental Justice")

• SB25-173 Revenue Classification Taxpayers Bill of Rights

• SB25-182 Embodied Carbon Reduction

Only two of the bills they supported were vetoed by the Governor:

• SB24-150 – Processing of Municipal Solid Waste

• SB25-005 – Worker Protection Collective Bargaining

And in a handful of cases, 350 Colorado opposed bills that still became law after the Governor signed them:

• HB25-1040 – Adding Nuclear Energy as a Clean Energy Resource

• SB25-039 – Agricultural Buildings Exempt from Energy Use Requirements

• HB25-1165 – Geologic Storage Enterprise & Geothermal Resources

• HB25-1177 – Utility Economic Development Rate Tariff Adjustments

• SB25-306 – Performance Audits of Certain State Agencies

Another law they lobbied in support of was HB25-1277, which would require an utterly silly warning label to be affixed to fuel pumps, covered in Turning a Trip to the Pump into an Act of Moral Reckoning. 350 Colorado stacked this one in support with five different lobbyists. It died in a Senate Committee.

Out of 59 bills lobbied across 2024 and 2025, 350 Colorado notched 25 clear wins (supported and signed into law), suffered 5 total losses (opposed but signed into law), and saw 2 of their supported wins vetoed. That works out to an 80% alignment with the Governor’s final signature decisions.

And the scale matters. Across 2024 and 2025, the General Assembly, which meets for only five months each year, introduced 1,376 bills (714 in 2024, 662 in 2025). Of those, 995 were signed into law.

350 Colorado chose to engage on just 59 bills — about 4.3% of the total introduced — yet managed to convert most into wins.

Colorado as a Performative Stage

350 Colorado calls itself “the largest Colorado-based grassroots network” tackling the climate crisis. That first part is highly debatable. Its brand was imported from East Coast activists. Its leadership is dominated by transplants who cluster in Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins. Its money comes from coastal foundations and billionaire philanthropists. Its lobbying machine has racked up an 80% success rate at the not by accident but through multiple paid lobbyists including two of their own in house lobbyists.

The costs of this masquerade fall on ordinary Coloradans, especially those in the poor and middle class and who own small businesses. It’s these folks who get nickel-and-dimed 350 Colorado’s successes.

The question is not whether 350 Colorado is effective. The record shows it is. The question is whether Coloradans will allow a group funded, led, and inspired from outside the state to keep writing the rules that determine how they live, work, and power their homes.

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But over the last twenty years, Colorado has undergone a massive political transformation.

Beginning in the early 2000s, a small group of wealthy progressives — Tim Gill, Pat Stryker, Rutt Bridges, and Jared Polis — devised what became known as the Blueprint. Their strategy, later chronicled in the book The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care) and the documentary Rocky Mountain Heist, was simple but devastatingly effective: pour tens of millions into a constellation of obscure and difficult to track nonprofits, issue-advocacy groups, and media outlets to permanently tilt Colorado’s politics to the far left.

Instead of competing head-to-head with centrists on either ass cheek of the uniparty on traditional terms, the Gang of Four built an NGO-industrial complex that could shape narratives, fund candidates indirectly, and flood the statehouse with policy shops and “experts.”

The result was a political landscape where progressive causes could flourish with little organized resistance.

And along with the partisan realignment came a new ideological package: a blend of green Malthusianism and luxury beliefs — moral stances that cost elites little but impose heavy burdens on ordinary people. This amounted to a form of Progressive Colonization: the importation of Yankee moral statism and Left Coast environmentalism into a state historically defined by Far Western individualism and El Norte traditions.

Climate policy became the flagship example. To the donor luxury belief class in their new Berkeley or Park Slope in the mountains homes, renewable mandates, natural gas bans, and “beneficial electrification” were badges of virtue.

To everyday Coloradans, they meant higher costs and fewer choices.

This is the context in which groups like the Boulder-based Southwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP) have thrived.

SWEEP can count on favorable coverage from “local” media and a sympathetic ear in the statehouse precisely because the Blueprint ecosystem cleared the way.

In today’s Colorado, NGOs aren’t just advocates — they are fourth-estate policy engines drafting bills, feeding testimony while the rest of us are at work, and shaping the very vocabulary of the debate.

Who and What Is SWEEP?

The Southwest Energy Efficiency Project was born in 2001, the brainchild of Howard Geller, a career efficiency advocate who cut his teeth at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy in Washington, D.C.

Colorado and its neighbors were laggards on the utility efficiency programs that grew out of the energy crisis in the 70s, and Geller spotted the opportunity: a nonprofit that could lobby legislatures, utilities, and regulators into scaling “demand-side management” across the Mountain West.

SWEEP also does work in Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada.

Within a decade, SWEEP was claiming credit for taking utility efficiency budgets from a paltry $20 million a year to nearly $400 million across six states. By its own telling, it helped “avoid” ten new power plants and prevent 80 million tons of CO₂ emissions. Those are the kinds of numbers donors and the Malthusians love — big, round, impossible to verify.

They sound impressive until you ask basic questions: What plants, where, at what cost?

And who, exactly, paid for these “savings”?

The answer is always the same: the every day Coloradan.

By the time Geller retired in 2021, SWEEP had expanded far beyond its efficiency niche. It was pushing new building codes, “beneficial electrification” mandates, and transportation initiatives — a policy wish list that just happened to align with the interests of its funders and utility allies. To lead this next phase, the board tapped Elise Jones, a Boulder County Commissioner whose politics were reliably green and reliably statist.

In other words, what began as an efficiency nonprofit morphed into a lobbying shop dressed in technical jargon. SWEEP is now less about lightbulbs and insulation than about power: the power to dictate how Coloradans heat their homes, cook their meals, and travel.

Who Pays SWEEP — and What They Get in Return

In 2023, SWEEP reported about $2.4 million in revenue, chump change in the NGO-industrial complex, and to their credit little to none of it was directly taxpayer funded.

But the publicly available donor list reads like a who’s who of green philanthropy and institutional players with single issue leftist/green causes.

• $31,500 from the Schwab Charitable Fund, one of the many donor-advised funds used to obscure their names from their donations.

• $120,000 each from the Hopewell Fund (a tentacle of Arabella Advisors) and the Colorado Gives Foundation.

• $45,000 from the Woman’s Foundation of Colorado

• $56,000 from the anti-nuclear Colorado Conservation Education Fund

• $806,000 from the United States Energy Foundation, a left leaning green “pass through” organization.

• The remaining coming from private sources.

It’s the same script has exposed again and again: deep pocketed individuals or foundations fund NGOs, NGOs push policies, utilities profit, and families pay the bill.

Robert Bryce

The Dark Money Behind The Gas Bans

Last Tuesday, Rewiring America announced that it has hired Georgia politician Stacey Abrams to help the group “launch and scale a national awareness campaign and a network of large and small communities working to help Americans go electric…

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3 years ago · 106 likes · 43 comments

Robert Bryce

RMI Led The Push To Ban Gas Stoves. Why Is It Getting Millions In Federal Funding?

Since 2020, the Rocky Mountain Institute has been hyping bogus claims about the alleged danger of natural gas stoves. That year, the Colorado-based group claimed that gas stoves “release toxic pollutants that can damage human health, but governments have done little to educate the public or accelerate the transition to all-electric cooking…

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a year ago · 273 likes · 55 comments

And what about the results?

As Frédéric Bastiat warned, the “seen” is paraded about — rebates, programs, “avoided” emissions. The “unseen” is quietly ignored — the higher bills, the lost savings, the family budgets drained to support somebody else’s vision of efficiency.

And SWEEP doesn’t just cash the checks — it spends them pushing laws. As a 501(c)(3), it can’t endorse candidates directly, but lobbying is very much on the menu.

SWEEP have testified on more than hundreds of bills across the region and hired professional lobbying firms like Siegel Long Public Affairs to shepherd “clean energy” legislation through the Colorado Capitol. They also send their people to hyper-local meeting such as city council or county board meetings.

The crown jewel so far is HB22-1362. Touted as a building-code modernization bill, it actually handed sweeping authority to an unelected board that now requires all new systems to be “demand-response capable.” Translation: Xcel or another utility can shut off or throttle “smart” appliances whenever they declare a peak-demand event.

Here’s the kicker: it works beautifully for the utilities too. Minnesota-based Xcel, Colorado’s largest electric utility (and the same entity behind the controversial Pathway transmission line project) operates, like every other IOU, under a “cost-of-service” model that guarantees a fixed return on approved capital projects.

Every new mandate pushed by organizations such as SWEEP or the even more infamous Rocky Mountain Institute means more capital to build, and more guaranteed profit.

Since 2019, the average Colorado residential electric bill has jumped 38 percent while compadres in energy sanity such as the Independence Institute are sounding the alarm that Colorado’s electrical grid is heading for disaster.

And the small players? They get squeezed too. San Luis Valley REC for example scored $1.7 million in federal money for solar farms to help them comply with the state’s strict carbon emission reductions laws but shifting mandates, bureaucratic red tape, and the solar farms themselves is leaving it’s predominantly low-income members with higher bills.

Investor-owned monopoly, rural co-op, or even with municipals, the story is the same: SWEEP type organizations pushes the mandates, utilities build the capital, regulators bless the costs, and ratepayers are left holding the bag.

The Price Tag for Everyday Coloradans

Efficiency is supposed to save money. Or at least that’s the sales pitch.

But in practice, SWEEP’s agenda has made energy costlier for ordinary households.

Starting with the basics: the Department of Energy admits electricity costs 3.5 times more per BTU than natural gas, and heating with electricity costs 46 percent more than heating with gas.

Real-world stories confirm it too.

Denver’s Sexy Pizza swapped out gas ovens for a $55,000 electric unit. “Local” media celebrated the switch as climate heroism. Within weeks, the owner discovered the truth: the electric bill outpaced the old gas costs, subsidies and rebates notwithstanding.

Multiply that lesson across restaurants, small businesses, and households, and the so-called transition looks less like efficiency and more like forced inefficiency.

And the hidden costs pile up. Builders tack the expense of EV-ready wiring, fancy windows, green cult-approved appliances, and new code compliance into the building costs. Local governments get a larger cut in fees and require more code review time to approve building permits. Landlords roll retrofit costs into rent. Utilities slap program surcharges on monthly bills or beg to the regulators for yet another rate increase. For everyday Coloradans, it’s death by a thousand cuts — a dozen small fees that quietly drain household budgets while politicians and wealthy green elites congratulate themselves on “climate leadership.”

This is classic malinvestment: resources diverted into projects politicians prefer rather than what everyday Coloradans would freely choose.

The “climate payoff” is imperceptible too — Colorado produces less than a tenth of one percent of global emissions — but the household pain is undeniable.

SWEEP in the Bigger Picture

Zoom out, and SWEEP is just one cog in a much larger NGO-industrial machine. National outfits like RMI, Rewiring America, and the Climate Imperative Foundation pump out the slogans and white papers, bankrolled by billionaires like Bloomberg and Bezos. SWEEP’s job is local translation — showing up at the statehouse and city councils to turn donor-class talking points into mandates Coloradans have to live under.

One of SWEEP’s favorite buzzwords is “equity.” The rhetoric is that electrification and efficiency programs will lift up disadvantaged communities. The reality, as critics have shown, is often the opposite. In California, Jennifer Hernandez documented how that state’s progressive climate mandates created a kind of Green Jim Crow — raising housing and energy costs, shuttering unionized industries, and driving working-class Black and Latino families further from homeownership. In San Diego, upcoming restrictions on natural gas in buildings as argued here will disproportionately impacted the city’s vibrant Asian-American restaurant scene — stripping away wok hei in Chinese kitchens, Korean BBQ, and teppanyaki traditions that simply can’t be replicated with electric griddles.

The lesson travels out to to the Coastal Elite’s favorite interior colony - when Colorado NGOs like SWEEP push “beneficial electrification” as an “equity” policy, the real-world outcome often looks more like cultural erasure and higher costs for entrepreneurs.

“Equity” in SWEEP’s hands doesn’t mean respecting communities’ own choices. It means central planning in moral costume — a way for elites to launder luxury beliefs through the language of justice. In practice, it widens inequality while delivering negligible climate benefit.

Why It Matters

The story of SWEEP is not one of scandal but of structure: a nonprofit turned policy machine, advancing an agenda that raises costs while delivering negligible benefit.

For Coloradans, the stakes are clear. Every new mandate means higher costs of living. Every efficiency “target” adds a surcharge. Every electrification requirement chips away at choice.

Even the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), a constitutional amendment passed in the early 90s to require tax hikes be approved by voters and not through the legislature, has been neutered by endless “fees” — backdoor taxes in disguise — stacked on everything from utility bills to extras on vehicle registrations, fees on Uber rides, items shipped to one’s door via Amazon or other competitors. For working families, it’s death by a thousand cuts: a dollar here for “climate equity,” five there for “transportation electrification,” ten more hidden in an electric bill.

And now the mandates go beyond cost into loss of control. The Model Low Energy and Carbon Code requires demand-response appliances — meaning the utility, not you, decides when the AC runs or the water heater cycles.

That is the logical endpoint of the SWEEP vision: an affordability crisis wrapped in sustainability and degrowth jargon, enforced by people you never elected but want to micromanage every part of your life.

It all traces back to the Blueprint. The Gang of Four didn’t just flip a state; they imported a new worldview. Progressive Colonialism fused Yankee moralism with Left Coast dogma, turning Colorado into a showcase for luxury beliefs that flatter elites while hollowing out livability and affordability for everyone else. SWEEP is one cog in that larger machine.

So when you hear the soothing word “efficiency”, remember: it isn’t about efficiency for you. It’s efficiency for the machine — for consultants, utilities, and donor-class activists who turned a once-affordable state into their sandbox.

The only real question left is the one every regular Coloradan should ask when opening their next bill: efficient for whom?

And the answer, too often, is obvious: buzzwords such as “efficiency” and “equity” becomes the moral feel-good froth, while the substance underneath is just another luxury belief — a costless virtue signal for elites, and one more bill or fee for everyone else.

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First of all, if this poster is claiming what’s shown in the photo is “third world,” he or she has clearly never been to such a place. The lines in this photograph are a dream compared to just other parts of the United States and “third world” utility infrastructure.

It’s also an example of cherry picking.

One can go to different parts of the United States and find far worse lines or areas where all the infrastructure is completely underground or something in between. New developments in the United States tend to require underground construction anyways.

One can also go to the “third world” and find a complete rat’s nest in one area, but “first world” underground utilities in another. Both Japan and South Korea, considered “developed nations” have “third world” rat’s nests of overhead utilities even in their wealthy capital cities. It’s no different in Enlightened Europe.

But to not get too off-topic here - the key question here is - why don’t utilities just go underground?

Money Money Money

The primary barrier is money.

Undergrounding existing infrastructure is dramatically more expensive than overhead construction, especially for existing overhead infrastructure. For electric distribution lines—the wooden-pole systems that feed houses and small businesses, burying cables typically costs five to ten times more than stringing them overhead. For transmission lines—the large corridors that carry bulk electricity—costs can be ten to twenty times more at high voltages.

Now imagine applying those multipliers to an entire city or state’s infrastructure. A utility with 10,000 miles of distribution line could be looking at a price tag in the tens of billions.

Because utilities recover costs through customer bills, those billions would show up in monthly electric rates. In states where rates are already politically sensitive, regulators almost never approve undergrounding projects unless there’s a compelling reliability case. For most communities, paying three, five, or ten times more just to hide the wires and cables isn’t worth it.

For electric utilities owned by a government, such as a municipality, the costs must be passed down onto the citizens via either increased rates or the city taking on debt though bonds.

Pole Ownership and Attachments

Another overlooked issue: utility poles, especially at the low-voltage distribution level, don’t just carry electric power. They carry telephone, cable TV, fiber optic internet, and sometimes municipal or emergency services lines. The photograph in question at the beginning of the post shows this mixed ownership of the assets on the pole.

And they’re not all owned by electric utilities. In some cases, the power company owns the pole and leases space to telecom companies. In other cases, telecom companies own the pole, and the utility is the tenant. Some areas are even more complicated with the electric utility running on its own lines separate from the communication lines in two separate rights of way. In the United States, The Federal Communications Commission regulates these pole attachments and sets rules for access and cost-sharing.

Burying lines would require all parties—electric, telecom, cable, internet—to coordinate construction and share costs when they all share the same pole line. That’s far more complicated than one utility deciding to bury its own wires.

Disputes over right-of-way, ownership, billing, and liability can drag on for years, delaying projects. A common saying on the electric side is that “communication companies don’t communicate,” indicating the truism that communication companies run on their own schedules. We in the electrical world despise communications companies not just for that but for their blatant and repeated violations of safety code and tendency to abandon unused communications lines on the poles creating safety and aesthetic hazards. Communication companies often attach to electric lines without running any type of structural analysis to see if their lines overload the poles too. The electric utility may indeed get the green light to underground but they have to leave saw-ed off poles with the existing communications cables intact and it’s the responsibility of these communication companies to remove the pole stubs.

Other countries avoided much of this by centralizing electric and communications under state monopolies for decades. The U.S., with its fragmented ownership and regulatory structure, faces far more obstacles.

Europe sometimes gets held up as the model of underground utilities. But context matters. After World War II, many European countries rebuilt entire cities almost from scratch. When streets were already rubble, burying utilities was relatively easy to integrate into reconstruction. They also had state-owned monopolies for both power and telecom. In France, EDF could bury lines without negotiating with half a dozen private companies. In Spain, Telefónica and the state grid could coordinate trenching. Costs were often covered by taxpayers rather than passed directly to ratepayers.

The U.S. never had that reset moment. By the time suburban sprawl spread across the country in the mid-20th century, overhead poles were the fastest and cheapest way to electrify millions of homes. Scale mattered: America was building a continental grid, not rebuilding compact nations.

Rights-of-Way and Property Connections

Most utility poles sit on narrow strips of public easement along roads. To bury them, utilities must trench or bore directly under streets and sidewalks where there is often existing water, sewer, or gas lines. That means closing traffic lanes, tearing up pavement, and disrupting local life for months.

But the real sticking point is service drops—the individual connections from the pole to each home or business. Converting overhead drops to underground requires trenching across private property, cutting through lawns, driveways, and landscaping. Property owners may be on the hook for part of that work.

I’ve experienced this myself. A communications company recently ran underground fiber down my street. This locally-owned and operated fiber optic company offers high-speed broadband with speeds that blow the cable company (cough, Comcast) out of the water at a better price and with actual customer service.

I’d love to connect to it, but to finish the hookup I’d have to pay several hundred dollars out-of-pocket for them to trench into my yard. On top of that, I’m in my final year of renting. I’d need permission from the property owner and the HOA.

Material, Labor and Workforce Specialization

Overhead and underground materials are also two different animals. Overhead wires, switches, transformers, regulators, etc, are completely different animals from those used for underground infrastructure. Utilities have to keep extra stock of everything they use on their system and the industry is currently experiencing supply chain shortage issues. There’s also the issue of private utilities trying to squeeze the value out of their assets through depreciation on their balance sheets.

But cost isn’t just about materials—it’s also about people. Overhead and underground systems require different skill sets and crews.

Overhead lineworkers are trained to climb poles, operate bucket trucks, and splice aerial conductors while working “hot” on energized lines. Underground crews are trained in conduit systems, vaults, and high-voltage cable splicing in confined spaces. The protective gear, tools, and procedures are completely different. A lineman who can safely replace a transformer on a pole isn’t automatically qualified to diagnose a fault in a 13 kV cable in a manhole or vault.

For utilities, this means maintaining parallel workforces. If you serve an area with both overhead and underground infrastructure, you need two different teams, with two different training pipelines, and two different sets of specialized equipment. Underground labor is often slower and more expensive per mile because it involves excavation, confined space safety, and complex splicing procedures.

Reliability Trade-Offs

A common argument for undergrounding is reliability: no poles to fall, no trees to take out lines, no ice to weigh down conductors. And that’s partly true—underground systems are less vulnerable to weather.

But they have their own problems. Faults are harder to detect and repair. When an overhead line breaks, the cause is usually visible—a fallen tree, a broken pole, a snapped wire. Crews can locate it quickly and fix it in hours. Underground faults are invisible. Finding the problem often requires specialized testing, digging, or excavating along the line. Repairs can take days.

This is why utilities often prefer a hybrid model. Long feeder lines remain overhead for easier access, while underground laterals serve downtowns, new subdivisions, or high-value commercial areas. That way, reliability is balanced with maintainability.

It’s also why undergrounding isn’t a magic bullet for storm resilience. After hurricanes in Florida, utilities found that buried lines fared better against wind—but flooding created a new set of failures.

Overhead and underground each have vulnerabilities and trade offs.

So, why not just bury it?

When you add it all up—money, ownership, rights-of-way, labor, materials, and reliability—the answer becomes obvious. Undergrounding has its place, but it’s not a universal solution. It costs significantly more than overhead construction, requires parallel workforces and supply chains, creates property access headaches, and brings its own reliability issues.

So the next time someone looks at a neat set of poles in Pennsylvania and sneers about “third world” America, maybe they should ask themselves a few questions first:

• Do you really want your electric bill to triple just so the wires disappear from view?

• Are you ready to have your street torn up for months—and your front yard trenched—for aesthetics?

• Do you understand that even Tokyo and Seoul still live with “third world” tangles of wires in their wealthiest districts?

• And do you realize that the U.S. still runs the most reliable large-scale grid on earth, poles and all?

If the answers are no, then maybe the problem isn’t the poles, it’s the utopian, trade off-free mindset.

And, of course, the communication companies.

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Senator Hickenlooper didn’t elaborate further on the claimed threats either.

This incident wasn’t just a politician touting his résumé and demanding people respect his authority - it was a case study in Scientism—the misuse of scientific credentials as a political (pun not intended) trump card.

It also carried a tone of self-importance that says as much about the man as it does about his message.

Should people appeal to Hickenlooper’s authority?

Probably not.

John Hickenlooper was born in 1952 in PA, attended the elite The Haverford School and later earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Wesleyan University. By 1980, at the age of 27 or 28, he had completed his graduate degree in geology and entered the petroleum industry. There’s some irony there considering he’s now a climate change hysteric. Nothing on his résumé indicates he has any background in public health either.

His geology career was short-lived. He was laid off in 1986 during the oil bust, and by 1988 he had left geology for good. For nearly four decades since, Hickenlooper has been a businessman and politician: co-founding Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing Company, then serving as Denver mayor, Colorado governor, a brief presidential candidate (2019), and is now U.S. senator.

In other words, he’s now a career politician.

The last time he practiced geology, or for the matter anything remotely scientific Ronald Reagan was president and the Berlin Wall still stood. Yet in 2025, he presents himself not as a career politician with business roots, but as “the only scientist in the Senate.”

His phrasing reveals more than strategy—it reveals narcissism. By stressing that he is “the only scientist,” Hickenlooper casts himself as uniquely enlightened, uniquely qualified, uniquely indispensable.

His implicit message is: trust me, defer to me, because no one else is qualified.

This is not how good science works. Science thrives on replication and dissent, not solitary authorities. Hickenlooper’s boast is not humility before evidence but self-regard masquerading as expertise.

Does any of this mean that one should dismiss anything that Hickenlooper says? Probably not. But if he’s going to make bombastic claims, he better bring some evidence to the table.

It’s a line repeated both by Newsom and Newsom’s NPC cultist brown-nosers within the state as a counter whenever someone brings up the state’s failure to stop both the bleeding in businesses and people fleeing the state for places such as Texas, Florida, and Tennessee - all states with a far better business climate, less bureaucratic parasitism and lower costs of living.

While GDP measures are usually reserved for sovereign states, and not individual US states, the metric is incredibly misleading too. Earlier this year, the California’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) overtook that of Japan - a country plagued by its ageing population and rapid industrial competition with other regional powerhouses whose GDP is decreasing. Several European countries too have seen declines in their GDPs, likely from their suicidal energy “transition,” making California’s growth in context a matter of whose falling fastest to the bottom.

GDP simply adds up the value of final goods and services consumed in a year: personal spending, private investment, exports minus imports and perhaps the most controversial of all for this article, government spending. In this system of accounting, every dollar spent counts the same, whether it builds a successful business in the private sector, a functioning bridge built by the State, or funds a white-elephant project that never opens. Government spending shows up as a “positive contribution” even when it displaces more productive uses and inflationary money creation can boost GDP without producing a single real good or service.

GDP measures transactions, not sustainability. War, natural disasters, or failed public works can all increase GDP (and “jobs”) if they generate enough spending. It also ignores the health of the underlying capital stock, the efficiency of investment, and whether projects ever move from rendering to ribbon-cutting. Bastiat warned about this in his infamous Broken Window fallacy.

If you want to test whether a government is functioning, look at what it can actually deliver: how fast, for how much, and with what trade-offs of its projects. On that score, California’s signature megaproject the California High Speed Rail (HSR) has been a slow-motion embarrassment.

In the same span, Mexico, with far fewer resources, ranked nearly ten places below California in GDP, and deemed by critics as a “failed state” has built and opened two megaprojects: the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA) and the 1,554-kilometer almost high speed rail Tren Maya.

Neither are perfect, both are rife with controversy, but they exist, and are operating today.

California High-Speed Rail: A Case Study in Grift

Approved by voters in 2008, the California High Speed Rail was sold as a sleek San Francisco–to–Los Angeles connection in under three hours for about $33 billion. Boosters of the project believe the project when complete will compete with both motoring and commercial air travel between two of the state’s major economic hubs as well as help address the state’s carbon emissions. Sixteen years later, the cost range for the first phase is $89–$128 billion. The scope of the project in the foreseeable future with the funding available has shrunk dramatically. The only segment under construction runs 119 miles through the Central Valley, practically parallel to an existing yet slower (and heavily subsidized) Amtrak line and far from the major cities that justified the project politically.

There is visible work: viaducts, grade separations and bridges as Newsom and the CSR social media accounts are forthright to humblebrag.

But not a single paying passenger has boarded and won’t for years to come.

Timelines have slipped repeatedly, the cost keeps increasing. The Federal Railroad Administration recently outlined years of missed milestones, and the Trump Administration has moved to pull back nearly billions in grants from both the fiat money printer and the hard-working taxpayers in the other 49 states highlighting how fragile the project’s financing is all while Newsom - being Newsom - did what he does best - sociopathic projection.

If GDP growth were the measure of success, CSR would be a triumph if graded the way CA’s (also failing) Government Schools grade students.

But by any measure that matters such as delivering a functioning system on time, near budget, and as promised to the voters, it’s a warning sign.

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Mexico’s New Capital-Area Airport

Mexico City’s main airport, Benito Juárez, known locally as AICM is hemmed in between one of the largest cities in the world and what’s left of the Pre-Columbian era lake beds that filled the valley. For years AICM been plagued with capacity problems arguably holding back the region and arguably the country as a whole.

In 2014, the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN) began building a $13 billion replacement at Texcoco just a few kilometers from AICM out on what’s left of Lake Texcoco. The Nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional de México or NAICM would replace the ageing AICM with a massive single terminal reminiscent of Beijing’s Daxing International Airport. It was to be funded with a mix of public and private funds but ultimately to be operated by the Secretary of Communications and Transport (SCT), an agency within the Federal Government.

Then President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who came after EPN, canceled NAICM after a public “consultation” — a controversial decision that cost over $5 billion in penalties and bond buyouts. The remains of the project can be seen today from a portside window seat departing AICM and the government claims it will be turned into an ecological park.

In NAICM’s place, the AMLO government repurposed the Santa Lucía Air Force Base into Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA), built and operated by the Army. Critics said the location — roughly 45 kilometers from downtown was too far and unlike AICM had poor transit connections. The military’s control raised transparency concerns. (The SCT was kicked out of their role as administrators of AICM too and is now operated by the Navy - strange considering Mexico City sits well away from either coast.)

Construction of AIFA began in late 2019 and AIFA opened on March 21, 2022. The Army built miles of multilane freeways, a massive park, two new runways, a control tower and a large passenger terminal all during the COVID19 pandemic. Passenger traffic was light at first drawing criticism from inside Mexico for being an empty airport, but has grown steadily, helped by caps on flights by low-cost airlines at AICM and a shift of all dedicated cargo flights to AIFA. It’s now the 8th busiest airport by passenger count in Mexico - still a far cry from AICM or other large airports such as Cancun or Monterrey.

Perhaps one of the most stunning things about AIFA though is the natural gas and diesel co-generation power plant, covered in brutal honesty by an energy-literate Spanish news site with figures such as forecasted power produced annually.

The power plant will consist of a turbogenerator with an installed capacity of 14.4 megawatts, four motor generators with an installed capacity of 1.2 megawatts each, and a motor generator with an installed capacity of 1.5 megawatts," the public document states. It also specifies that the total installed generating capacity will be up to 20.7 megawatts, with an estimated gross annual electricity production of 160.68 GWh and an estimated annual consumption of 40.667 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 344.27 cubic meters of diesel.

While Mexico does its fair share of “green” energy virtue-signaling, this plant, which unlike “green” energy wind and solar facilities debilitating California’s grid churns out power 24/7 on just a few acres of land.

A rail link is now under construction too to in part address the AIFA’s distance from the city. Spanish company Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles (CAF), who currently owns and operates a commuter rail line from Mexico City was initially given the concession to build the rail line but it was instead transferred to the country’s equivalent of the Department of Defense.

The project was supposed to open this summer but is plagued by delays. Now the Claudia Sheinbaum administration is saying it will be open sometime by the end of 2025. Other public transportation such as the MexiBus BRT operates today and local governments plan to open tourist-specific bus services to places such as the archeological site of Teotihuacán.

The Contentious Tren Maya

If AIFA is about the capital, the Tren Maya is about the country’s foreign tourist mecca, the Yucatan Peninsula. Yucatan is no stranger to massive government projects. Cancun, for example, was developed in to the tourist mecca visited today by millions thanks to SERNATOUR, the Federal Goverment’s tourism agency. While visitors mainly stick to the high rises along the beach, the actual city of Cancun, which houses all the resort workers, was a planned city reminiscent of the layouts of Canberra, La Plata, or Brasilia.

Tren Maya was pitched as a way to connect tourist meccas, remote communities, boost tourism in lesser-visited areas of the country, and spur economic growth in one of Mexico’s poorest regions. The idea for such a train wasn’t new and politicians in Mexico have long dreamt of restoring the country’s former passenger rail network which closed in the mid 90s among privatization of the nation’s railroads and completion from the country’s airline and highway network.

But for the Tren Maya, it was rife with controversy from the start. Environmentalists warned of damage to delicate jungle ecosystems, underground rivers, and cenotes. Archaeologists cautioned that segments ran near — and sometimes over cultural heritage sites. Indigenous leaders, who the MORENA party love to pander towards, criticized the consultation process as rushed and inadequate. Like AIFA, it too was largely constructed by the country’s military which of course meant “jobs” for thousands of the country’s soldiers. Among all this controversy, the Federal Government under AMLO deemed the project a “national security” priority, allowing it to override some court injunctions and environmental reviews. Costs have risen from early estimates of $7 billion to more than $20 billion with no break even date in sight.

And yet: the first sections opened in December 2023, with more service phased in through 2024–25. Like AIFA, the criticism remains of both cost overruns and of low use.

But Which One Looks More Like a “Failed State”?

This is not an argument that Mexico’s governance model should be copied. Mexico is greatly misunderstood by outsiders yet the big picture criticism of a flaws and corrupt state typical of both developing nations and Latin American nation-states still stands.

The governance trade-offs of such large projects are real especially in a developing country with so many issues including energy, infrastructure, and social issues. Many of the communities surrounding AIFA lack running water, instead relying on costly truck-based water delivery to rooftop cisterns while AIFA has potable drinking fountains - something rare even in well-developed areas of the country. The Tijuana-San Diego metropolitan area’s famed beaches are plagued by sewage contamination due to an overworked wastewater treatment plant on the Mexico side and the dumping of raw untreated wastewater into the Tijuana river, sparking an international controversy.

Then there’s Mexico’s inability to maintain security in the areas dominated by narcotics and criminal gangs deemed by the current government of the United States as terrorist organizations. Both AMLO and Sheinbaum’s political party, MORENA, is rumored by critics to be infiltrated and even run by these organizations.

And Mexico’s attack on free speech thanks to Woke ideology.

Public

Gabriel Quadri: “Mexico is a totalitarian regime”

Imagine a nation where people are required “to apologize daily during one month” on X for thought crimes; where your name can be entered “in a public registry of people that are aggressive against women” for insisting upon the biological reality of sex; and where the state is implementing digital ID along with “facial recognition systems” and “a new law for regulation of social media…

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9 months ago · 209 likes · 36 comments · Michael Shellenberger

Both AIFA and the Tren Maya came with heavy-handed state intervention using the military - something even extreme statists on both the far left and far right in the US would balk at along with limited transparency, and significant environmental and social trade-offs.

But they were built. They opened. They are moving people.

California, with a massive tax base, world-class engineering talent, and a reputation for innovation left over from the pre-Newsom days, has yet to even produce a partial inland segment of a project that voters approved 16 years ago. By any commonsense measure of execution, that is a failure.

Germany and Japan, both with a smaller GDPs than California, have an extensive high-speed rail networks. China built a larger system that all of Japan and the EU combined since CA voters approved the CAHSR in 2008. Mexico, with far fewer resources, just delivered two major projects in under a decade. But California led by a sociopathic caudillo wannabe has the “fourth largest economy in the world” — and an unfinished strip of track in the Central Valley.

GDP brags are easy and delivering actual infrastructure even if grading on curve for typical government projects is hard.

But if we’re using “failed state” as shorthand for a government that cannot execute its own plans, California’s record on the CAHSR along with other problems plaguing the state such as reliable energy, smooth and effective surface highways, and fire mitigation or prevention efforts makes the label uncomfortably plausible.

For context, the CAHSR, slated to run between San Francisco and Los Angeles and eventually to San Diego, was originally proposed to CA voters in 2008 with a cost of $33 billion and for completion of the SF-LA portion by 2020. The funding was supposed to come from about 25% of in-state sources, mainly bonds, while the rest from Federal Government and private sources.

As typical with modern California projects, the costs have skyrocketed, and barely any miles of the track are completed. To add insult to injury, only a small portion of the total project is now being seriously considered for completion linking two major cities in the Central Valley by the end of this decade. Barely any miles of track are laid, something Newsom and other HSR apologists fail to mention.

The “California Way” approach to the CAHSR was such a dumpster fire that Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF), a French railway company who was helping consult the CAHSR left the project and instead focused their efforts on high speed rail in Morocco. SNCF believed Morocco was less politically dysfunctional, and managed to complete a rail project there in seven years.

And while Newsom loves to poo-poo on one of the states receiving an increasing amount of CA refugees (Texas), he completely ignores a relatively successful privately funded, own and operated HSR-lite project already running in another state that lives rent-free in his head - Florida. Also missing from Newsom’s tantrum is the Brightline West project, a privately-funded high speed rail proposed linking Las Vegas with the Los Angeles area.

But the important thing here is Newsom’s bizarre claim the Trump Administration’s “illegal” rescinding of money (the Biden Administration gave the project an influx of cash during the last months of his administration) from the rest of us (including millions in CA who aren’t Newsom’s useful idiots) somehow benefits China.

It’s not just on X where he or his minion who runs his accounts make such a claim.

The Governor’s propaganda office, not to be confused with the LA Times who is surprisingly against the CA HSR, even put out a press release with a testy statement from the hair gel imbecile himself:

Trump wants to hand China the future and abandon the Central Valley. We won’t let him. With projects like the Texas high-speed rail failing to take off, we are miles ahead of others. We’re now in the track-laying phase and building America’s only high-speed rail. California is putting all options on the table to fight this illegal action.

How exactly any of this is handing China any part of California’s future is not something Newsom or his bootlickers elaborate.

Furthermore, this entire stunt is a great opportunity for Newsom to cover up his many peccadillos - especially his coddling up with China over the years.

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In late 2023, Newsom received well-deserved flak for “cleaning up” parts of San Francisco prior to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit which included both visits by President Biden and Xi Jinping. All the sudden, many of parts of the city plagued by open air drug scenes and “unhoused” encampments were magically reversed. Both longtime SF residents and others were frustrated over years of the city’s decline and neglect and only got another slap in the face from the former SF mayor when he said, "I know folks say, 'Oh, they're just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town.' That's true because it's true." This was seen by many as Newsom coddling to Xi Jinping and to extension, the CCP. That may be the case but it only scratches the surface of Newsom’s genuine coddling to China.

Then there’s of course California’s crazed religious desire to be net zero incorporating the replacement of all hydrocarbon sources of energy with so-called renewable or green energy, something that cannot be done without a heavy reliance on China. China with far more lax labor and environmental laws, including record growth in coal use, is ground zero for both the rare earths processing and most of the world’s solar panels.

As recently wrote in Hoodwinked, China’s use of coal while other parts of the world dig deeper into the net zero and the decarbonization hysteria hole benefits nobody else but China itself and her greater geopolitical goals.

The scale and significance of China’s coal advantage are often underestimated by Western geopolitical analysts, especially those in the Washington establishment who perennially push for military confrontation. While the West argues over how many solar panels and wind turbines it should be forcing onto its own creaking grids (all made in China, no less), the CCP is busy building its manufacturing and military might, far surpassing what anyone could have imagined when the climate hysteria began 30 years ago. The numbers are staggering, to the point where they should give pause to those agitating for war in Asia.

California, which as Newsom continuously brags is now the fourth largest economy in the world, relies more and more on China and her “green energy” manufacturing.

This brings us back to what exactly in the hell is Newsom talking about?

Remember the infamous San Francisco poop map? Florida Governor Ron Desantis brought up in a debate between he and Newsom. Californians with functioning brains know about the map for years.

Well it turns out there is one place in CA with even more of the brown stuff, and it’s on Gavin Newsom’s own nose sourced.

Susan Crabtree and Peter Schweizer’s book Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All documents that much of Newsom’s entire political ascent has been oiled by business entanglements with Beijing going back to his days before he became dictator, er, governor of the state. (Crabtree and Schweizer also sat down to discuss her book with Michael Shellenberger over at Public.)

In the early 2000s, while serving as mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom laid the groundwork for a career marked by political deference and economic entanglement with the Chinese Communist Party. As a thank you to the Chinese community in SF, who helped elect him to the mayor position, his administration doubled down on San Francisco’s sister-city relationship with Shanghai, transforming what was once symbolic diplomacy into a channel for real CCP influence. Of course this was a continuation of similar relationships with the CCP including those by former Mayors Willie Brown and Diane Feinstein.

Newsom’s ally and fixer in Chinatown, Rose Pak, was not only a local power broker but also an active conduit for China’s United Front Work Department, an organization that reports directly to the CCP. Pak and the United Front Work Department played pivotal roles in mediating the city’s interactions with CCP-linked officials, often operating behind the scenes and without public oversight not just in SF, but in Silicon Valley.

By 2005, Newsom was leading trade delegations to China, touting investment opportunities in San Francisco while courting Chinese capital. These trips were widely celebrated in Chinese state media and positioned Newsom as a cooperative Western figure in the eyes of the CCP. Real estate and infrastructure partnerships soon followed, many brokered with state-owned enterprises and often with little transparency. Newsom also managed to get his wines sold in China, mainly as a high-end product to the CCP’s elites.

In 2008, Newsom’s China agenda took institutional form with the creation of ChinaSF, a publicly supported nonprofit embedded directly in the mayor’s office that brought billions in “economic development” to the City by the Bay.

Here’s how Crabtree and Schweizer describe ChinaSF in Fool’s Gold.

Over the years, media and government officials have described this “gateway” known as ChinaSF in countless ways. Sometimes, it’s referred to as a unique “public-private partnership between the Mayor’s Office and the San Francisco Center for Economic Development.” Others have called it a “quasi-government agency,” an “international business program,” or an “economic development organization.” It’s also been labeled as merely an “initiative,” a “collaboration,” a “project,” or a “platform.” Some Chinese business documents refer to ChinaSF as “the China Office of the City and County of San Francisco”—which is probably the most accurate description.

One of the businesses Newsom and ChinaSF helped woo to San Francisco was the solar panel company Suntech. Suntech was one of the businesses courted to a special economic zone in Downtown San Francisco. While normal California entrepreneurs face years in classic California red tape and endless fee regimes for even simple tasks, Newsom openly bragged in a Forbes interview on how he courted the Chinese solar company to the city:

First, we did tax incentives, so we had something to offer these companies the minute they came into San Francisco. We changed our zoning to support these green tech companies. So, we said: “We have the right zoning. We have public-private transaction teams, so that you have one person to meet, and you will never have to deal with the bureaucracy. We will carry your permits through the entire bureaucracy. We’ve got workforce incentives, payroll tax exemptions, and other enterprise support incentives from the state of California, and we’ll pull all of them together for you.”

Newsom’s buddies at PG&E bought Suntek’s panels for solar projects and even the US Department of Energy provided loans for projects using their solar panels. But Suntech eventually caved, like many fiat energy businesses, due to fraud. During the bankruptcy proceedings, the Chinese creditors were paid back first leaving state-side creditors in the dust. Suntek was one of several Chinese solar companies who used their CCP-subsidized products with a heavy dose of intellectual property theft to undermine the US solar industry. ReneSola was another Chinese solar firm wood to the Golden State by Newsom and China SF.

Doomberg had a front row seat to this carnage:

Having actively participated in the solar industry during this period, we are under no illusions about how China pulled off this “miracle.” They leveraged cheap labor, had minimal environmental restrictions at solar production factories, blatantly stole intellectual property developed by Western companies, poured tens of billions of illegal subsides into the industry to support domestic suppliers, and – ironically – used ready access to cheap coal to produce the energy-hungry inputs needed to make solar panels. None of this has anything to do with S-curves and innovation, nor is it particularly sustainable. In fact, China’s behavior has likely stunted the pace of innovation in the industry. Who wants to invest valuable R&D dollars only to watch China steal the work without recourse?

As Newsom moved from city government to statewide office, his China ties scaled accordingly. During his time as lieutenant governor and later as governor, California became an increasingly strategic destination for Chinese capital. Beijing’s long-term interests in “renewable energy,” surveillance infrastructure, and high-end real estate aligned perfectly with Sacramento’s policy priorities under Newsom’s “leadership.” He’s remained notably silent on the darker side of this relationship—ignoring China’s human rights abuses, its IP theft campaigns, and its growing geopolitical aggression.

One of the most egregious examples as explained by Crabtree and Schweizer came in 2020 during the peak of the COVID 19 pandemic, when Newsom bypassed competitive bidding and signed a billion-dollar mask contract with BYD, a Chinese EV firm flagged by federal authorities for CCP ties and substandard labor practices. The deal was rushed, the masks were faulty, and the public was kept in the dark - even Newsom’s buddies at the LA Times couldn’t cover for him.

The pattern continued into 2023, when Newsom visited China on a so-called climate diplomacy tour. He posed for photo ops with children, smiled for cameras in front of gleaming infrastructure, and signed empty memoranda of understanding with Chinese officials. He offered glowing praise for China’s “green investments” while conveniently omitting their skyrocketing coal use and complete disregard for environmental accountability. Once again, Newsom performed as the friendly face of California globalism. He was eager to project cooperation, continue his allergy to criticism, and be blind to the implications of coddling an authoritarian regime. Of course little to none of this was covered by Corporate Press hacks in the state’s major media sources.

And now, with no sense of irony, Newsom claims that Donald Trump is “helping China” by canceling funding for California’s failed high-speed rail.

This is the same Gavin Newsom who, for nearly two decades, has handed over access, capital, contracts, and credibility to the Chinese Communist Party. What was said here only scratches the surface of what was uncovered in Fool’s Gold.

So, who has really given up more of California, and thus the United States to China?

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Colorado Accountability Project

Time-sensitive: get involved and get on the Colorado Building Decarbonization Enterprise Board!

Not much prelude. Check out the webpage below, consider applying and/or forwarding to others you think would be a good fit…

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9 months ago · 3 likes · Cory Gaines

“Building decarbonization” follows a similar pattern to what was covered in Colorado’s Power Pathway to Nowhere yet Somewhere—in the Name of Climate. It offers speculative “climate benefit”, guaranteed economic harm, a bootleggers and baptists type relationship among special interest groups, and a virtue-signaling veneer marketed as a moral imperative.

“Colorado’s” climate planners want to eliminate carbon emissions from homes and businesses which includes outlawing natural gas in new construction, mandating heat pump retrofits, and rewriting building codes to enforce their preferred ideology.

They call it “decarbonizing the built environment,” nearly identical words taken out of “climate action plans” such as San Diego’s.

But just like the Power Pathway, this is another costly gesture that will do virtually nothing to impact global climate. Buildings account for about 20–28% of Colorado’s emissions, depending on which ideologically-bent source used. The former figure being NRDC, the latter is RMI.

“Boulder-based” RMI is as noted, a significant recipient of dark NGO money and your taxpayer dollars.

Robert Bryce

RMI Led The Push To Ban Gas Stoves. Why Is It Getting Millions In Federal Funding?

Since 2020, the Rocky Mountain Institute has been hyping bogus claims about the alleged danger of natural gas stoves. That year, the Colorado-based group claimed that gas stoves “release toxic pollutants that can damage human health, but governments have done little to educate the public or accelerate the transition to all-electric cooking…

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a year ago · 272 likes · 55 comments

But those emissions, which amount to a rounding error on a global scale, are mostly local, distributed, and tied to heating and cooling needs in the four season, high altitude state. Replacing efficient gas furnaces with electric heat pumps in old homes, often with inadequate insulation, means higher costs, reduced performance, and grid strain. Meanwhile, natural gas is still cheaper, more reliable, and readily available from in-state sources. It also means increased construction and remodeling costs in a state facing a housing affordability crisis.

This push is driven not by physics or economics, but by the same green-colonial mindset that fuels the Pathway transmission line boondoggle. “Building decarbonization” is a means of forcefully reshaping how Coloradans live, heat, cook, and spend. And like Pathway, it’s funded by fiat mandates, subsidized by inflationary spending, and rubber-stamped by a faceless bureaucrats and boards entirely insulated from those footing the bill.

If Colorado eliminated all building emissions overnight, the impact on global CO₂ levels would be statistically meaningless. But the impact on housing affordability, autonomy, and middle-class budgets would be painfully real.

Would getting non-ideological, sane people, on this board make a difference? Who knows. But it’s worth a try.

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The “article” contains the usual shibboleths from energy-ignorant pro-renewables fools such as the claim renewable energy is cheaper than hydrocarbons or nuclear and that big bad evil fossil fuel companies receive subsidies while ignoring the subsidies renewables receive.

But what really struck out was something embedded in the following:

On the Department of Energy website, Wright wrote, “wind and solar brings us the worst of two worlds: less reliable energy delivery and higher electric bills …If sources are truly economically viable, let’s allow them to stand on their own,” he wrote, ignoring that the fossil fuel industry gets annual subsidies of about $20 billion annually, according to estimates by Oil Change International, a nonprofit watchdog group.

But hundreds of studies show that renewable energy is much less expensive and, in a well-planned grid, can make energy supplies more secure.

“The proposed GOP tax on wind and solar is a danger to the United States,” Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford University renewable energy researcher who has authored numerous studies on wind and solar power, wrote via email.

The new tax provisions “lock in death and illness to up to 100,000 Americans every year due to fossil-fuel and bioenergy-fuel air pollution that wind and solar help to eliminate,” he said.

A click to that hundreds of studies show points to none other than Mark Jacobson’s personal website on the Stanford domain, and it’s not “hundreds” of studies or even all studies for that matter but is 107 of them. Of those 107, Jacobson, who apparently put the document together is either the primary author to co-author on 15 of them and is cited in several of the others.

Jacobson is no stranger to criticism here.

Furthermore, these aren’t even the entire studies, they’re the first pages of said studies which contain the titles, authors, and most importantly, the abstracts.

Jacobson, to his credit, is at least honest with the document title:

Abstracts of 107 Peer-Reviewed

Published Journal Articles From 45

Independent Research Groups With Over

260 Different Authors Supporting the

Result That Energy for Electricity,

Transportation, Building

Heating/Cooling, and/or Industry can be

Supplied Reliably

with 100% or Near-100% Renewable

Energy at Different Locations Worldwide

Do Berwyn or Jacobson not understand that in order to properly read and understand a scientific study, one has to actually read the entire thing? Not just the authors and abstracts but the introductions, literature reviews, methods, results, and author-designated limitations if present?

For all the blabbering about scientific evidence, the PDF is not a peer-reviewed synthesis, not a cost-benefit analysis, not even a systematic literature review. It’s a self-curated list of abstracts—many theoretical, most modeling-based, and none grounded in real-world implementation data.

This is not “what the science says.” This is what Jacobson says The Science™ says.

As might say interpreting such “studies” using this methodology is akin to stepping on a rake.

Holly’s Substack

How To Not Step On A Rake

Most of us want our deeply held beliefs confirmed. Why…

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a year ago · 128 likes · 30 comments · Holly MathNerd

Or in Jacobson’s likely case, it’s getting high off his own flatulence.

Berwyn has an interesting background of his own as supposedly an Austrian-based reporter with a “journalism” who worked or previously worked in one of Colorado’s “news” organizations, The Colorado Independent, which merged into the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab). of Colorado Accountability Project has lots to say about these types of “non-profit” news organizations and their narrative laundering. COLab are briefly mentioned in one of his dives into the non-profit goons Rose Foundation as recipients of their dark money but little else seems to be understood about them.

Colorado Accountability Project

Who is Rose Community Foundation? How much of your money do they get? Wolf depredation two ways. Diverging Diamond Interchanges.

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a year ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Cory Gaines

But the more sinister dimension isn’t just Jacobson’s self-referential citation game—it’s how media organs launder this pseudo-consensus into public gospel. Outlets like Ars Technica and Inside Climate News no longer practice journalism in the traditional sense. They do not interrogate claims. They do not cross-examine sources. They serve instead as clerks of the climate cathedral, transcribing the proclamations of its priesthood and affixing the “science says” seal to whatever political narrative is in vogue.

What we are witnessing is not science. It is Scientism—a performative, moralized simulation of science designed to assert authority, silence dissent, and compel obedience. Its defining feature is certainty without falsifiability, and its institutional enablers are no longer “labs” or journals but “nonprofit” newsrooms funded by stolen money.

Their role is not to inform, but to enforce the current thing narrative and not to ask questions, but to manufacture consensus.

What if, even such a best-case scenario, such infrastructure moved the state, national, and global climate needle by a fractions of a percent, but still raised electricity costs and fueled landowner backlash across rural communities?

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That’s the story of Xcel Energy’s Power Pathway Project or as they love to label Colorado’s Power Pathway Project because it’s apparently as one imbecile mayor from another climate hysteria mecca loves to say “for all of us.”

Pathway, for short, is a 550-mile, $1.7 billion double-circuit steel pole transmission project currently being built in Colorado’s eastern and mostly rural counties. It’s meant to connect a slew of not-yet-built renewables projects out of sight and out of mind of the urbanist Church of Carbon residents of the Front Range.

Pathway won’t reduce carbon emissions directly. In fact, with all the steel poles, thousands of miles of large diameter steel and aluminum wire and all the diesel-powered machinery required to install it all will likely be carbon negative for some time to come, but it will enable the possibility of decarbonization some day in the future. (Disclaimer, the author’s professional career squarely falls in utility line design. Sorry, can’t go into any juicy details.)

And even if everything goes exactly as planned—if wind and solar developers flood the eastern plains, and if those projects get built, and if they perform reliably to capacity—the impact on global carbon levels would still be negligible.

In other words: Colorado ratepayers are being asked to fund a symbolic gesture—one that comes with very real economic, environmental, and political costs.

Speculation, Mandates, and Carbon Napkin Math

Pathway, contrary to the marketing fluff, is not being built to serve existing demand or improve grid reliability.

It’s a speculative backbone, constructed in hopes that renewable developers with pockets full of freshly printed fiat money (now under threat in the current Presidential Administration) will come to help usher in a green utopia.

Yet, per Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection ,”Only ~20% of projects (14% of capacity),” which they note is roughly 95% wind and solar projects, “requesting interconnection from 2000-2018 reached commercial operations by the end of 2023.”

Colorado's legislature paved the way with laws like HB19-1261 and SB19-236, mandating drastic emissions cuts and utility compliance. Xcel's Clean Energy Plan relies on Pathway to meet those goals.

Colorado supposedly contributes ~135.6 million metric tons equivalent of CO₂ (MMT CO₂eq) annually per the state’s latest tally published in the Colorado Greenhouse Gas Metrics Dashboard.

The electric power sector consists of 21% of that or 29.688 MMT CO₂eq.

In that same year, 2020 a lower year than typical due to the economic downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US was estimated to have emitted 4,585 MMT CO₂eq, making Colorado’s share only 2.96% of the total, or for the state’s electricity sector alone only 0.22%.

On a global scale, it obviously gets even smaller.

According to the IEA, global CO₂ emissions in 2020 totaled approximately 34.8 billion metric tons. That makes Colorado’s electricity sector responsible for just 0.085% of global CO₂ emissions.

Even if Pathway helped eliminate all emissions from electricity, Colorado’s global share of CO₂ emissions would drop from roughly 0.085% to 0.0009%—less than one one-thousandth of a percent.

More realistically, Pathway might offset a fraction of that—perhaps a 0.01–0.015% global impact.

There are probably other ways to math this out with more or even less favorable figures. ( , perhaps you should take a stab at it.)

Who Pays, Who Profits

Xcel’s ratepayers fund Pathways directly, along with with non Xcel taxpayers via federal subsidies and state incentives. And inflationary monetary policy—money printing—makes it all appear affordable, though it isn’t.

Meanwhile a large part of Xcel’s profits, like with any other monopoly publicly regulated utility comes from the guaranteed rate of return on capital investment. Under cost-of-service regulation, the more it builds, the more it earns.

As (Meredith Angwin) wrote in her book Shorting the Grid:

“The utility is not rewarded for making the grid reliable. It is rewarded for spending money.”

Surrounding this are layers of consultants, NGOs, and green lobbyists or as calls, “the anti-industry industry” all benefit from mandates they helped craft. Groups like 350Colorado and Rocky Mountain Institute, and others write model legislation, submit regulatory comments, and shape public narratives—all while funding is channeled from philanthropic donors and federal grants.

Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC)—entirely appointed by Gov. Polis—rubber-stamps these plans. It offers little rural or working class urban representation, little engineering skepticism, and no ideological diversity.

PUC proceedings regardless of state are bureaucratic, opaque, and inaccessible to most citizens. They are conducted in legalistic jargon, weighed down with acronyms, and shaped by pre-approved stakeholders. As a result, public participation without turning it into one’s full time job, is symbolic at best.

This incentive structure turns utilities into infrastructure factories, not reliability or low-cost guarantors. Every mile of transmission line, every substation, every transformer—these become profit centers, regardless of whether they serve real demand or improve grid stability.

The result is a political economy where those who bear the costs—Colorado’s working families—have no meaningful seat at the table, while those who benefit—utilities, their shareholders, nonprofits, bureaucrats, and financiers—define the rules of the game.

Virtue Infrastructure and Green Colonialism

Pathway is more than a power line. It’s a cultural totem.

As Green Leap Forward favorite, Andy West recently wrote.

“Renewables & EVs are cultural icons more than they are power sources & useful vehicles… What matters is virtue-signaling on a grand scale.”

Support is strongest in luxury belief rich areas such Boulder, Denver area, Fort Collins and the mountain resort towns—places increasingly full of affluent, knowledge-class residents with solar panels, EVs, and the means to opt out of cost burdens. These are also contain a the most amount of citizens most likely to buy into the climate crisis narrative as a matter of moral duty and part of their secular religion, not empirical evaluation.

Lastly, the renewables and climate crisis mania is backed by regime media such as the state’s local Propaganda Public Radio outlets, the Denver Pest, and the Colorado Sun. (See ‘s Colorado Accountability Project for plenty of CO-specific media criticism.)

Opposition or skepticism does not necessarily mean rejection of human-caused climate change as ‘s HEATED or The Guardian’s truth commissars love to claim, it tends to come from the inquisitive, working class, rural landowners, and fixed-income families who bear the costs but see few benefits. For them, Pathway is just another intrusion—another elite project imposed from above. Pathway’s route and any of the land-hungry renewable projects it wood cuts through private farmland—not urban cores. It’s a modern form of extraction: low power density land use, compliance via green authoritarianism, and political silence in exchange for nothing tangible.

Green colonialism is real, and not just when it involves woke-defined sacred groups. It’s not about emissions, but control. Central planning, land-use mandates, and top-down energy transitions all reinforce the same power dynamic: elite visionaries imposing their values on communities with different priorities.

Or in other words per Decolonize Colorado - a colonized polity- one in which real Coloradans are managed by those who do not understand them.

From property rights to cultural identity, rural Coloradans are being displaced—not physically, but politically and economically—by a climate ideology they never voted for, implemented by a bureaucracy they cannot influence.

Facts and figures don’t matter in this framework. In what Andy West calls the climate religion, the narrative takes precedence over numbers, and virtue is valued more than verifiable outcomes. Whether the infrastructure reduces carbon or not is secondary—what matters is the act of believing, building, and signaling.

Real Stewardship Means Skepticism and Saying No

If climate change is as serious as the Experts™ insist it is, our response must be serious, measurable, and accountable.

Colorado’s Power Pathway fails that test—not just because it is ineffective, but because it is built upon assumptions that are rarely questioned.

We need skepticism, not just idealism.

It spends billions in pursuit of symbolic carbon reductions—reductions that rely on speculative follow-up projects and ideal grid behavior—while enriching insiders and burdening the politically voiceless. It builds nothing of lasting reliability, only financial return and narrative control.

It’s time to abandon virtue infrastructure—and build an energy future that serves people, not ideology.

Do be sure to read to the end, because there’s at least a photo of a cute (planet-killing) puppy.

HEATED

Fossil fuel billionaires are bankrolling the anti-trans movement

This story is a collaboration between HEATED and Atmos, a nonprofit media organization exploring climate and culture. Subscribe here…

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a year ago · 106 likes · 22 comments · Yessenia Funes

This article is a near-perfect illustration of the first three categories in the Woke Religion Taxonomy created by and Michael Shellenberger.

The HEATED piece insists that fossil fuel billionaires and conservative Christian organizations are not just opposed to climate regulation but are actively promoting anti-trans legislation as a distraction.

The evidence is speculative, the logic circular, and the emotional pitch intense.

It’s also incredibly one-sided, given the billions in dark NGO money both the climate catastrophist groups and the trans pharmaceutical industrial complex contribute.

Robert Bryce

The Billionaires Behind The Gas Bans

The Climate Imperative Foundation is the newest and richest anti-hydrocarbon, anti-natural gas group you’ve never heard of…

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3 years ago · 355 likes · 137 comments · Robert Bryce

Robert Bryce

RMI Led The Push To Ban Gas Stoves. Why Is It Getting Millions In Federal Funding?

Since 2020, the Rocky Mountain Institute has been hyping bogus claims about the alleged danger of natural gas stoves. That year, the Colorado-based group claimed that gas stoves “release toxic pollutants that can damage human health, but governments have done little to educate the public or accelerate the transition to all-electric cooking…

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a year ago · 270 likes · 55 comments

Given that much of their reporting focuses on Colorado (RMI is also “based” in Colorado), it’s further ironic they don’t mention the massive Progressive Colonist dark money takeover that’s turned that state upside-down.

Colorado is also ground zero for not just climate crisis hysteria, but also the transinsanity, interestingly enough funded by the same dark money groups.

The TERF Report

Colorado is Rocky Mountain High on Gender

April 6, 2025…

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a year ago · 41 likes · 24 comments · Kara Dansky

It further fuses climate catastrophism with trans and racial identity politics into one unified moral theology, with fossil fuels, gender binaries, and political “conservatism” as all agents of evil—and salvation comes only through ritualistic affirmation of progressive orthodoxy.

It also encapsulates much of what Andy West said in The Grip of Culture, which provides a social-psychological model for how cultural entities form, spread, and dominate rational discourse—especially in the climate domain.

West sees the same trends too in what he calls genderism.

Here are a few spicy highlights.

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Sacred Victimhood and the Canonization of Trans Identity

From the article:

The oil and gas industry uses its dirty money to harm trans folks, some of the people most vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Here, trans people are not only victims of discriminatory policy, but also elevated to the frontline victims of climate collapse.

This is not based on data or epidemiology, but on emotive assertion. The sanctification of trans identity is evident — it is no longer a civil rights issue but in Sowellian terms - a cosmic injustice- where harm against them resonates on a spiritual scale.

West explains that cultural entities often work by establishing a hierarchy of approval: some groups are cast as inherently virtuous victims whose suffering confers moral legitimacy, while others are branded as inherently suspect or evil.

Trans individuals, in this framework, become canonized saints of the new moral order — invulnerable to criticism and always righteous. The climate hysterics have moved The Holy Greta (عَلَيْهَا ٱلسَّلَام) aside and now focus on a new sacred victim.

Apocalyptic Eschatology

“Even if you were unmoved by the humanity, just at a purely tactical political level, the opposition to climate action is using anti-trans rhetoric to build its base,” said Philip Newell, the other researcher who is the communications working group co-chair for the Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition, which organizes against disinformation and misinformation on climate change. “If you want climate action, you’re going to have to fight back.”

That line, buried late in the article, contains the full emotional payload. This is not just about policy anymore. It’s a call to spiritual war with the State as their Supreme Diety. Climate action and trans affirmation are now co-dependent conditions for salvation.

If you don’t fight the right culture wars, you can’t save the planet.

In West’s analysis, this is a classic example of a "catastrophist narrative" — a story structure that invokes doom to mobilize belief. The emotional freight carried by climate collapse is now yoked to the “trans rights” movement, effectively uniting two disparate causes under a shared eschatology.

This strategy isn’t just emotionally potent; it’s strategically unfalsifiable.

If the world ends, they were right.

If it doesn’t, it’s because we didn’t believe hard enough.

Moral Dualism and Demonology

Keeping trans people in the margins is the whole point, though. The fossil fuel industry has a vested interest in maintaining the cultural status quo: the white-picket fence in the suburbs where the white wife stays home to take care of her white kids and her white husband drives to work in his gas-guzzling car.

Queer families, especially queer families of color, don’t fit this image.

In this framing, there is no room for good-faith disagreement against degrowth, unreliable energy, sterilizing children, unfair competition in women’s sports, etc, and they insert another canon of the Woke Religion into the fire - race.

The Koch brothers, Phil Anschutz, and other “conservative Christian” donors aren’t just wrong (and of course racist)—they are agents of moral corruption, funding hate to protect their planetary destruction racket. The HEATED “journalists” of course leave out the masses who disagree with their cult - regular working class people of all origins of life and thought.

The Free Press

Earth to Democrats: Americans Still Love Fossil Fuels

It may be starting to dawn on at least some Democrats that their heavy bet on renewable energy and “net-zero” emissions has been a huge political loser…

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a year ago · 145 likes · 280 comments · Ruy Teixeira

Andy West explains that cultural narratives polarize their participants into heroes and villains, removing nuance. This is what makes cultural belief systems so difficult to debate: anyone outside the belief system is morally tainted.

The fossil fuel industry isn’t just profit-seeking; it is a demonic institution working to enforce transphobia, patriarchy, white supremacy, and climate collapse all in one breath.

Gnostic Revelation and Hidden Truth

The fossil fuel industry has a real interest in funding panic over transgender people: It distracts the public from the very real and ongoing risks that climate change creates.

This is the classic gnostic claim: there is a hidden order behind the chaos, and only the enlightened few can see it. The HEATED article positions its authors and sources as those who have uncovered the web of deception Q-Anon/Blue-Anon-style linking fossil fuel money and anti-trans rhetoric.

This isn’t journalism.

It’s revelation.

And like all revelation, it’s not subject to empirical challenge. Such belief systems gain traction not through scientific inquiry, or philosophical arguments, but by providing compelling emotional narratives that reward believers with exclusive access to moral truth.

Intersectionality as Totalizing Theology

If we care about climate, we’re going to have to care about trans rights.

This is perhaps the most revealing line in the article. It’s not a plea for alliance or empathy—it’s a doctrinal requirement based on the woke tenant of intersectionality. The intersectional worldview doesn’t allow for modular belief. You can’t just be a climate advocate; you must also affirm every tenet of gender ideology, racial equity, land acknowledgment, and so forth.

This is the fusion strategy of cultural entities, where movements blend their causes into a single, emotionally coherent narrative. The result seeks not to broaden coalitions, which one would think need be necessary to solve a global issue, but instead it mandates orthodoxy.

Either you affirm it all, or you're part of the problem.

Final Benediction

What the HEATED article ultimately reveals is that we’re not dealing with policy or persuasion, but dogma and denunciation. This isn’t a conversation; it’s a confessional booth—except only one of us is allowed to talk, and the other must self-flagellate with a combination of pronouns in bio, composting, and with a daily two-minutes hate against the cis-white-petroarchy.

The sacramental elements have been served: one part fossil fuel demonology, one part trans sanctification, all sprinkled liberally with apocalyptic urgency and the blood of carbon-spewing infidels.

Andy West’s warning was apt: when cultural belief systems mimic religion but deny they are religions, they wield the fervor of crusades without the self-awareness of catechism. The result is a deeply irrational moral monoculture that asks not for your ideas, but for your repentance.

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Oh, Greta climbed aboard with a furrowed brow,

(Hoist the sail and brace her now!)

To Gaza she sails on a yacht somehow,

(Though it runs on diesel power!)

Oh, burn that fuel and chant your theme,

(Ay! Ho!)

Fight the world with a climate meme.

(Ay! Ho!)

She’s sailing green in a carbon stream—

It’s Greta and the diesel-powered dream!

She once blocked roads with righteous rage,

(Traffic jams are all the rage!)

Now she’s starring on the front-page stage,

(With a yacht that drinks like a warship!)

Oh, virtue sails with a CO₂ plume,

(Ay! Ho!)

No power from sun, no wind to groom.

(Ay! Ho!)

Just fumes and tweets and a bold costume—

It’s Greta and the diesel-powered dream!

No maps, no plan, no clue who’s near,

(Just slogans, stares, and bottled cheer!)

She’ll fix the world with a stickered pier,

(And a sail that’s barely used!)

Oh, roll the press and spin the tale,

(Ay! Ho!)

She’s saving Gaza with no detail.

(Ay! Ho!)

When facts get tough, she’ll just set sail—

It’s Greta and the diesel-powered dream!

Now cargo runs from coast to coast,

And fuel tanks drain for every post.

The mission’s loud, the outcome thin—

But bless her heart, she means to win…

So stoke the tank and fire the beam,

(Ay! Ho!)

It’s green if labeled by the team!

(Ay! Ho!)

She’ll change the world with a trending stream—

It’s Greta and the diesel-powered dream!

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Hat tip to , author of the Colorado Accountability Substack for “discovering,” this via the super democratic method of having been on the correct obscure government agency mailing list.

Colorado Accountability Project

Environmental groups are wanting to add the "social cost of carbon" to state rules. A mismatch between what CPR tells the public vs. corporate sponsors? RTD and a free hour on records requests.

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a year ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Cory Gaines

The petition—filed by a choir of Malthusian activist groups including WildEarth Guardians, 350 Colorado, Womxn from the Mountain, Sierra Club Colorado, The Larimer Alliance for Health, Safety and Environment, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) Colorado, Greenlatinos, Earthworks, Citizens for a Healthy Community and the Black Parents United Foundation—reads less like policy proposal and more like a climate encyclical.

2025 05 16 May Notice Of Hearing

149KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

2025 05 06 May Wildearth Guardians Rm Petition

1.03MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

At the heart of their plea is a familiar refrain: the current system of emissions reporting (via ECMC’s Cumulative Impacts Data Evaluation Repository (CIDER) database) is insufficient. Nothing’s “enough” or “goes far enough,” in the mind of the Wokified greenie.

It currently collects data, yes—but it fails to issue judgment.

And that, they say, is unacceptable.

This, in itself violates the obligation of the Commission to quantify emissions of greenhouse gases that occur from sources that are controlled or owned by the energy and carbon management operator and from reasonably foreseeable truck traffic from proposed operations. The second major problem is with data quality. Although poor quality of the data supplied by operators has been an issue raised repeatedly to the Commission, the cumulative-impacts data even today remains inscrutable, unscrutinized, and often wildly incredible.

Their solution?

Sanctify Colorado’s permitting process by hardwiring the SCC into law using the backdoor.

Instead of using their captured legislature and the “Libertarian” Governor’s signature or the ballot box to bring about the rule changes, they instead want to do it under the mask of the state’s web of bureaucratic rulemaking.

They want a floating, politically and ideologically massaged dollar value assigned to each ton of carbon dioxide emitted.

As explained in his publicly available letter (at the bottom of his post):

Stripped of the jargon in their request, what you're asked to do is to fix a price on something. This will be a price that will have social and economic consequences. Said another way, you're being asked to do something that will affect lives and livelihoods in Colorado.

Prices for things, their value, is normally set by the aggregation of many, many single decisions made by distinct individuals. Not so here if you do as the requesting parties ask.

If any of you are old enough to remember the Soviet Union, I'm sure you remember how well things worked when prices and values were set by central bodies. Do you think you'll be able to do better?

Further, I would like to point you to the fact that unlike other negative externalities that we might fix a price to, the social cost of carbon is ill-defined. There is no way around this. It is a number that someone made up, and is thus a product of their assumptions, their perspectives, their time.

How are you to fairly say that one person's number, then, has more truth to it than another's? How can you fairly claim to know the price?

As Gaines also notes, in a different article, many of these same groups are behind nuisance climate lawsuits in the state.

This figure, they argue, must be used to evaluate and potentially prohibit energy development, regardless of actual local impact, technological feasibility, or economic tradeoffs.

The Social Cost of Carbon is one such solution to improve the accuracy and credibility of emissions data. The SCC is an estimate of the total damage caused by the emission of one additional ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, taking into account the long-term impacts of climate change like sea level rise, extreme weather events, and agricultural losses. The SCC essentially puts a price on the environmental harm caused by carbon emissions. The social cost of the emission of one ton of CO2 is currently valued at $89 in Colorado, while the social cost of CH4 and N2O are currently set at $2,500 per ton and $33,000 per ton, respectively (at least within CDPHE). 5 CCR 1001-31 Part A II.B.

But this isn’t really about emissions, it’s about top-down central control.

This is the next phase of Colorado's transformation from laboratory of freedom and prosperity to Cathedral of Climate Cultism.

On January 14, 2019 the Colorado Supreme Court held in COGCC v. Martinez that the duty of the then-called Oil and Gas Conservation Commission was: (1) to foster the development of oil and gas resources, protecting and enforcing the rights of owners and producers, and (2) in doing so, to prevent and mitigate significant adverse environmental impacts to the extent necessary to protect public health, safety, and welfare, but only after taking into consideration cost-effectiveness and technical feasibility. 433 P.3d 22, 25 (Colo. 2019). Less than three months later the state enacted Senate Bill 19-181, completely upending the previous version of the Act. SB 19-181 directs the Commission to prioritize protecting public health, safety, welfare, the environment, and wildlife, including addressing cumulative impacts. C.R.S. § 34-60-106(2.5)(a).

The term “minimize adverse impacts” was amended to remove the words “wherever reasonably practicable” and replace it with “to the extent necessary and reasonable to protect public health, safety, and welfare, the environment, and wildlife resources, to: (a) Avoid adverse impacts from oil and gas operations; on wildlife resources; and (b) Minimize and mitigate the extent and severity of those impacts that cannot be avoided.” Therefore, the first operative word in (2.5)(a) is “protect” and the first operative word in the definition of ‘minimize’ is “avoid.” SB 19-181 requires the Commission to adopt rules to evaluate and address cumulative impacts. C.R.S. § 34-60-106(11)(c)(II).

The Church of Climate Catastrophism

As Andy West writes in The Grip of Culture, climate catastrophism has evolved beyond policy debate. It is now a full-blown cultural entity —what West characterizes as a secular religion. Its structure is familiar: sacred narratives, ritual performances, prophets and sinners, salvation and damnation.

Instead of heaven, we are promised a Net Zero utopia.

Instead of hell, a burning Earth.

Instead of scripture, the SCC.

This petition is a case study in this shift from empirical governance to spiritual governance. It is driven not by new science, but by an old impulse: to morally sanctify certain modes of life and condemn others. This petition, much like a catechism, insists that we are not merely managing emissions—we are atoning for them.

The key tool for atonement is the SCC, a pseudo-econometric invention that purports to translate climate “harm” into dollar terms. In practice, it is little more than a moral talisman—used not to inform sane cost-benefit analysis, but to justify prohibitions and punishments against productive Coloradans and their industries. It’s a rolling indulgence fee—a way for captured regulatory bodies to enforce doctrinal purity under the guise of technocratic neutrality.

The Malthusian Rootstock

To truly understand the animating force behind this movement, we must look deeper—not just to policy, but to philosophy. And for that, we turn to Malthusian Malarkey, a sobering analysis by the anonymous but razor-sharp team at .

Doomberg

Malthusian Malarkey

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu…

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4 years ago · 564 likes · 142 comments · Doomberg

Doomberg traces the core origins of environmentalist anti-growth sentiment to Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British economist who believed that population growth would inevitably outstrip resource production, leading to famine and collapse. But Malthus wasn’t just wrong—he was catastrophically wrong. He failed to imagine the power of human innovation. And yet his dark vision lives on, repackaged by modern environmentalists who no longer speak of overpopulation directly—but now whisper of “climate justice,” “limits to growth,” and “managed decline.”

The climate cult movement and the anti-nuclear sentiment that permeates groups like the Sierra Club is no accident. Influential figures like Paul Ehrlich explicitly rejected energy abundance, calling it dangerous. In Ehrlich’s infamous words, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be equivalent to giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

These are not policies born of care for anything but the stolen money laundered into these “non-profits,” and for narcissistic control of Colorado by Progressive Colonist invaders. They are the offspring of despair. Behind the WildEarth petition lies the same fear: that if energy becomes too cheap, too available, and too empowering, the wrong people—ordinary people—might use it.

Bureaucracy as Sacrament & Climate Compliance as Class Warfare

What’s alarming is not just that this ideology exists, but that it has thoroughly captured institutions like the ECMC. Instead of serving as neutral stewards of resource regulation, they are being transformed into theological enforcers. The WildEarth petition essentially demands that the Commission elevate climate modeling from informative context to divine revelation.

As Andy West outlines, this is a core behavior of entrenched cultural entities. They don't just propagate belief—they restructure institutions to enforce it. The SCC becomes more than a number. It becomes a confession. To permit oil and gas development without invoking the SCC is not just bad policy—it is heresy.

Even the form of the petition reflects this: appeals to vague emotional harms, invocations of “disproportionately impacted communities,” and urgent calls to “decolonize” regulatory tools like CIDER.

Let’s not ignore the class implications here. Imposing SCC-based restrictions and carbon accounting rituals will have little impact on the nonprofits that file these petitions. They will still fly to climate conferences, still get their grants funded off the backs of hard working people, still post virtue-signaling videos from behind MacBooks.

But for working real Coloradans? It’s more permitting delays, more inflated costs, fewer jobs, and—if we’re being honest—fewer people “allowed” to live normal, affordable lives.

When access to ample energy shrinks, so does the freedom.

Doomberg rightly notes that many of these policies are only palatable because they affect “expendable” people—those in distant geographies, lower income brackets, or politically incorrect industries.

In Colorado, the expendable people are closer - they’re the real working families who originally called the state their home.

A New Clerisy for a New Age

The WildEarth petition is not a one-off. It is a signal flare of a deeper trend: the transformation of democratic policymaking into religious ritual. In the guise of carbon arithmetic, we are watching the rise of a new clerisy—one that replaces elected governance with unelected moralism.

If we don’t push back, the future of energy in Colorado—and across the country—will be decided not by engineers or economists, but by mystics with spreadsheets and consultants with rosaries made of carbon credits.

There is still time to resist this. But it requires courage: to speak plainly, to defend energy abundance, and to reject the quiet authoritarianism of climate faith posing as policy.

Because this is not about carbon.

It’s about control.

The ECMC’s public comment deadline is June 6, 2025.

Unfortunately the link in Gaine’s post doesn’t work, so as soon as I get the correct link, I’ll edit this page.

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And yet, here we are, watching Michael E. Mann, the ever-pugilistic climate scientist, publicly insisting it’s time to invoke “Second Amendment territory” in response to Donald Trump, well, being Donald Trump.

It’s strange because per Mann’s narrative, the world will practically end due to apocalyptic climate change. Wouldn’t that be worth raising arms? Apparently not.

This from a man who has spent years portraying firearm ownership as a barbaric relic of a less enlightened age comparing the so-called gUn LoBbY with cLiMaTe DeNiErs and Big Tobacco.

Mann’s latest BlueCry isn’t just hypocritical—it’s an accidental satire of his own garbage legacy.

Here’s a man who spent over a decade litigating his hurt feelings from a blog post, who recently won a symbolic $2 in compensatory damages but over a million dollars in punitive damages in a defamation suit—only to have the court later sanction him and his lawyers for misconduct “extraordinary in its scope, extent, and intent.”

Let’s not forget what that trial revealed. Mann presented misleading evidence about supposedly lost grant funding, dragged minor bloggers through years of litigation, and was ultimately found by the court to have knowingly participated in falsehoods. The judge didn’t mince words: Mann and his lawyers acted in bad faith by presenting erroneous claims to the jury. That alone would be enough for most public figures to lay low for a while.

But not Mann.

Instead, he reemerges—like the ghost of “Climategate Past”—waving around the Second Amendment like a toddler who just discovered a lightsaber. His rationale? Trump wants to eliminate the failing Department of Education, and of course Trump in his usual Trump fashion isn’t always a fan of checks and balances. Apparently, bureaucratic reshuffling now justifies the use of a constitutional provision meant to preserve liberty from actual tyranny.

Let’s be clear: the Second Amendment wasn’t written for partisan cosplay by manchildren. It wasn’t meant to be trotted out by activists who previously likened gun owners to terrorists. For years, Mann lambasted the now largely irrelevant NRA as a front for “Putin-funded” terror, decried gun culture as lethal insanity, and positioned himself as a defender of The Science™ against the armed and ignorant masses. But now, with Orange Himmler looming, he wants to weaponize the very liberty he’s long sought to restrict.

This isn’t an ideological conversion. It’s opportunism dressed in constitutional drag.

Honestly, it all sounds a bit like an insurrection.

Here were his thoughts on the last one:

In his defamation case, Mann’s legal team positioned the trial not as a dispute over reputational damage, but as a referendum on climate denial and Trumpism. The jury was asked to send a message—not to vindicate truth, but to punish the ideological enemy. Even as Mann and his corporate press bootlickers at The Guardian claimed vindication the court’s later ruling made clear: the integrity he demanded from others was sorely lacking in his own conduct. Of course, both Mann and The Guardian haven’t got the chance to provide any updates.

So when Michael Mann tweets about using “Second Amendment territory,” what he really means is: I still hate guns, but I love power. Like so many ideological zealots, he’s only interested in rights when they serve his tribe.

The irony is staggering. A man who has fought to silence critics now invokes a right grounded in dissent. A man sanctioned for dishonesty in court now claims moral high ground. A man who ridicules constitutional originalism now weaponizes the Constitution for his BlueCry tantrums.

If Mann wants to march into Second Amendment territory, perhaps he should first try understanding it. It’s not a toy. It’s not a meme. It’s not a rhetorical nuke to drop when the bureaucrats you like are threatened. It is, and always has been, a bulwark against tyranny—regardless of who holds power.

And that includes you, Mr. Mann.

Let’s be honest: Trump’s rumored dismantling of the Department of Education isn’t tyranny—it’s overdue maintenance. This bloated bureaucracy has failed students, centralized power, and turned education into an ideological tug-of-war between federal technocrats and local communities. It produces no education of its own, yet devours billions while helping facilitate everything from Common Core to DEI credentialing schemes and promoting overpaid childless karens over real parents interested in the success of their children.

Abolishing it would be not a coup but a constitutional restoration of decentralized, accountable schooling.

So yes, “Professor” Mann, and to be honest Donald Trump as well, the Department of Education deserves to be demolished—but not with belligerent calls to insurrection involving the flawed leftist projection of Second Amendment. It deserves to be dismantled through the very republican means our system was designed to empower: elections, debate, federalism, and the rejection of progressive overreach masquerading as policy.

To invoke the right to bear arms for the sake of defending a bloated federal bureaucracy that’s nothing more than a glorified theft scheme on hard-working Americans is not just a misreading of the Constitution—it’s a parody of it. And Michael Mann, for all his bluster, seems to have confused the Minutemen of Lexington with the mid-level staffers of the Department of Education.

Let’s save the Second Amendment for when liberty is truly under siege—not when someone’s favorite agency is up for budget cuts.

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Move over, fossil fuels; there’s a new villain in town for climate hystericism.

He (because, yes, it’s always a he) fresh off a rat-infested ship wearing a funky hat, tunic, tights, and shoes that most likely cause the worst of blisters.

In a stunning revelation revealed by The Guardian’s not insufferable climate crisis journalist, Damien Gayle that’s sure to make your compost heap tremble, a new book titled Dark Laboratory On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by “Dr.” Tao Leigh Goffe, an “award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist“ has bravely uncovered the true mastermind behind the climate crisis: none other than Christopher Columbus.

Yes, the white man who famously sailed the ocean blue in 1492 didn’t just discover stumble upon completely ruin the harmony of the “Americas” —he apparently kickstarted a global warming apocalypse with a side of monocrop agriculture and a dash of colonial swagger.

According to The Guardian’s glowing coverage of this "groundbreaking" tome, Goffe argues that Columbus’s arrival in the Americas was less a discovery and more the opening act of an environmental horror show. Forget (temporarily) the industrial smokestacks or SUVs Nazi Cybertrucks or gluing one’s self to highways, the real catastrophe began when Columbus and his crew decided to turn the Caribbean into their personal science fair project.

Monocrop agriculture? Check.

Deforestation? You bet.

Racial categorizations scribbled on parchment? Of course, as the word race didn’t come until later and from guess where?

After all, everyone knows this thanks to notable historian and scholar Neil Young:

Hate was just a legend
And war was never known
The people worked together
And they lifted many stones

Oh wait, that was about a different evil white guy from across the pond.

But nothing says "ecological disaster" like a guy with a quill pen and a superiority complex - the OG of it all - Columbus.

“Dr.” Goffe’s thesis, as breathlessly recounted by The Guardian’s not middle aged-white male Gayle, is that the climate crisis is the "mutant offspring" of European scientific racism and colonialism.

In fact it as sparked by Colonization. Get it? Sparked!

And isn’t just meant to be that Columbus’ Spanishized name Colón is awfully close to colony?

It’s a bold claim, one that imagines Columbus twirling his mustache with one hand, and the Che voui gesture with the other, while cackling, "Let's-a see how many ecosystems we can-a ruin before-a lunch, eh!"

Apparently, his experiments in the "dark laboratory" of the Caribbean—chopping down forests, planting endless rows of sugarcane, and sorting wildlife like a medieval Linnaeus—set the stage for today’s melting ice caps and sweaty summers and, of course ruined childhoods.

Who knew that the guy who got lost looking for India was secretly the architect of Category 5 hurricanes? Is it of any coincidence these ships more or less followed the trajectory of hurricanes?

The satire writes itself when you picture the scene: Columbus, standing on a pristine beach, muttering, “This sand is nice, but it’d look better with a strip mall/mine and a coal plant.” Meanwhile, his crew is busy clear-cutting mangroves to make room for the world’s first all-you-can-eat buffet of ecological destruction. According to Goffe, these acts weren’t just random colonial flexes—they were the blueprint for capitalism’s "slash and burn" ethos of which no indigenous groups ever did before. Forget the steam engine; the real industrial revolution started with a guy in tights yelling, “More sugar and spice, less trees!”

The Guardian swoons over Goffe’s visits to the Maroons and Indigenous Kalinaga people, where she reportedly unearthed "ecological understandings" that could save us all from the mess Columbus started. One can only imagine her scribbling furiously as a wise elder whispers, “The secret to fighting climate change? Plantains and good vibes.” It’s a charming image—less charming is the idea that we’re supposed to pin the last 500 years of atmospheric CO2 on a sailor who didn’t even know where he was half the time.

Let’s not kid ourselves: if Columbus were alive today, he’d probably be baffled by this rap sheet. “Climate crisis? I just wanted some gold and a shortcut to Asia!” he’d protest, before accidentally sailing his floating Cybertruck into Florida.

But no, Dark Laboratory insists he’s the original sin of our overheating planet, a one-man wrecking crew who turned paradise into a petri dish of doom. Never mind the intervening centuries of coal mines, oil rigs, and rush-hour traffic—apparently, it all traces back to that fateful October day in 1492 when Chris decided to drop anchor and doom us all.

In fairness, the book’s ambition is admirable. Why settle for mundane culprits like industrialization when you can point the finger at a historical figure already loathed by half the population? It’s a masterstroke of narrative convenience, like blaming the internet on Gutenberg or fast food on the guy who invented fire. And The Guardian laps it up, hailing Dark Laboratory as a radical reimagining of history—because nothing says "radical" like retroactively saddling a dead explorer with every modern woe.

So, the next time you’re sweating through a heatwave or dodging a wildfire, spare a thought for Christopher Columbus: the man who, according to this book, didn’t just colonize land—he colonized the thermostat.

Forget carbon taxes or renewable energy; the real solution might just be a time machine and a sternly worded letter to the Santa Maria. “Dear Chris please stick to piracy and leave the planet alone.” Or perhaps to Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, “Dear Queen and King, please don’t fund this crazy dude’s voyage into the sea monster-filled abyss. #STOPMUSLIMHATE”

Esteemed scholars Rage Against the Machine were perhaps onto something.

For it's the end of history
Its caged and frozen still
There is no other pill to take
So swallow the one
That made you ill
The Nina The Pinta The Santa Maria
The noose and the rapist
The fields overseer
The agents of orange
The priests of Hiroshima
The cost of my desire
Sleep now in the fire

If only history—and satire—were that simple.

If you buy the book, make sure to maybe or maybe not purchase the book on Amazon and leave a stunning review.

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POP describe themselves on their website as , “a youth-led mass movement for climate justice,” and, “We fight for a livable future by taking on the fossil fuel industry, the hoarding of wealth and the racial capitalist system.”

Their direct action tactics such as protests and disruptions include the arrest of their members once found either impeding the freedom of movement of the public, trespassing onto private property or even damaging private or public property.

Such an approach coined misleadingly as “non-violent” aligns with the principles outlined in the Professional Protest Class’s favorite resource, Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox For Revolutionaries.

If this sounds all sounds familiar, that’s because it is:

By targeting influential corporations and financial institutions that are often perceived as the sources of climate crisis, racial, ethnic, or sex inequality, or simply behind “profits,” POP aims to expose and challenge the omnipotent structures that allegedly contribute to these “crisis.“ Such a goal resonates with Andy West’s The Grip of Culture, which examines how cultural narratives shape collective responses to climate change with upmost moral urgency. Their strategy also aligns with ‘s analysis1 of how emotional appeals based on trait empathization and mass movement psychopathology mobilizes such individuals toward activism.

The secret to success with POP and other groups is their savior-like focus on the injustices faced by vulnerable populations which taps into psychological drivers such as empathy and moral outrage along with their use of the youth, also mentioned extensively in West’s work. Their performative, Cluster-B driven theatrical protests are fueled by their heightened neuroticism, social media amplification, and the dominance of emotional reasoning over logic.

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“Like what you see? We are building a movement against fascism and oligarchs - join us,” tweets the X account of Planet Over Profit under a short video showing protesters getting arrested in New York City, er excuse me, Lenapehoking.

This of course comes after Planet Over Profit stunt where (in their words) hundreds of New Yorkers swarmed a Manhattan Tesla store as part of a series nationwide protests against Elon Musk and his varying businesses. Such “mostly peaceful protests” include the installation of bombs at some Tesla store locations, and even the vandalism of privately owned Tesla vehicles.

Planet Over Profit pushed a fine propaganda video on the X feed and even took the time to add closed captioning for “Frankie,” one of those arrested. The video, below, initially shows several of the participants being pulled out of the store with a shattered glass door in display along with a few of those arrested trying to bask in their moment of performative and petulant narcissism.

Rest assured, they will try to spin “occupying the showroom” into an act of police brutality or some other nonsensical claim. One can see in another post two stills with “Frankie” as the prime subject of the photograph - this is blatant propaganda meant to imply she’s a victim and not a criminal.

However, these idiots were trespassing onto private property, perhaps causing destruction of said property. They were likely asked nicely by the employees of the Tesla store to leave, then politely asked by the NYPD before everything shown in the Planet Over Profit propaganda video occurred. NY has plenty of other things going on far more serious than idiot children’s tantrums, thus placing a burden on the city’s public resources. Those are, of course, inconvenient facts to their martyr narrative left out of their video and subsequent posts.

Planet Over Profit are far more interesting than their website implies especially when trying to follow their non-profit money trail.

A donation being made using the link on their website funnels donations to the New York Communities Organizing Fund, Inc (EIN: 27-2332649) using ActBlue, a common fundraising passthrough entity mainly used left-leaning organizations and the Democratic Party.

The New York Communities Organizing Fund, Inc (NYCOFI) turns out to be a rabbit hole of its own claiming to be, “part of a family of organizations that includes New York Communities for Change (NYCC).” Donations made on their website claim to go to the Jon Kest Legacy Fund in honor of one of Bill DeBlasio’s “grassroots” organizers. No EIN is provided on the donor page for Jon Kest Legacy Fund despite their claim such are tax deductible and this fund isn’t found anywhere on ProPublica’s Non-Profit Explorer.

NYCOFI, per Propublica, operate under the EIN 27-2332649 with a revenue from last year amounting to $3.8 million. The mission statement on their latest Form 990 says they, “EMPOWER LOW AND MODERATE INCOME NEW YORKERS TO HELP THEMSELVES THROUGH PUBLIC EDUCATION, ADVOCACY, RESEARCH, AND DIRECT SERVICES.”

NYCOFI gave out a sizable grant of $860k to “Climate Organizing Hub,” (EIN: 92-1210995) which strangely enough shares the same mailing address as NYCOFI.

Is this the money that will be used to bail out the petulant POP brats?

Or does it come from somewhere else?

It’s worth noting the donation page on Climate Organizing Hub uses EveryAction, a different passthrough entity.

And back to POP, a donation made via the POPs in their X profile goes somewhere else entirely, specifically to a donation page for not just a different organization but one with an entirely different goal: The Hack Foundation.

The Hack Foundation (81-2908499) are based on the opposite coast, 10x’d their revenue over the past decade.

Depending on the source, their Form 990s or their website, The Hack Foundation’s purpose is either to, “INSTRUCTS OR TRAINS TEENAGERS FOR THE PURPOSE OF IMPROVING THEIR CAPABILITIES IN CODING AND STEM. IT ALSO SERVES AS A FISCAL SPONSOR OF A WIDE VARIETY OF CHARITABLE AND EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS, WITH A SIGNIFICANT FOCUS ON STUDENT-LED PROJECTS,” or as another pass through organization for non-profits.

Lastly, their latest Form 990s, unlike the previous organizations give no useful information on where their money goes. Hack Organization’s page for POP however does display a modest account balance with recent donations after the POP stunt in Manhattan and $20k from NYCOF.

But this is likely to be insufficient to cover the legal expenses of even one arrested POP brat.

To be clear, there is no evidence here of any illegal activities by any of the parties involved although it’s not a stretch to argue that endorsing the illegal activities by POP themselves is indeed an issue.

The greater point here is that non-profits’ activities and books are supposed to be open to the public, something some of us are increasingly discovering is more of a fantasy per investigations by (edit: see link here) and PirateWires, and here for example.

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Chthonian (adj): concerning, belonging to, or inhabiting the underworld. “a chthonic deity…

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The effectiveness of such tactics, as West notes, does not lie in their scientific accuracy but in their ability to shape social norms. Once embedded in law and everyday behavior, these actions seek to establish and impose a cultural consensus, making alternative perspectives (such as the reality of energy trade-offs, economic necessities, or technological solutions outside of carbon reduction) increasingly unthinkable.

One recent example of this was California’s proposed warning on gas stoves.

Such warnings affixed to new gas stoves, and even on the websites where one can purchase one, amount to nothing more than a mandated act of environmental guilt This echoes religious traditions in which reminders of sin and virtue are woven into daily routines—prayers before meals, confession of sins, ritual fasting.

Now in Colorado, seemingly participating in some sort of imaginary Olympics to out-California the failing state of California, has a bill to add a massive warning to gasoline and diesel pumps, certain containers, and even online sales of similar products under HB25-1277 Increasing Transparency Impact of Fuel Products with inclusion of the warning:

"Combustion of this product releases greenhouse gases known by the state of Colorado to be linked to global heating and significant health impacts."

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Under the comments for What’s in a Warning, wrote, “When everything has a warning label, they no longer carry any meaning. The true intent of these regulations, in my humble opinion, is to create an avenue for lawsuits and fines.”

Lund is right and per this bill if it were to become law, the failure of retailers to display this warning would be in violation of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). The CCPA covers the state’s deceptive trade practice laws of knowingly or recklessly make a false representation in the sales or marketing of a consumer product. Violations of the CCPA cover both civil and criminal domains of the law.

The bill passed the House Committee on Energy & Environment yesterday, the same committee that heard the PUC bill. This bill passed and will be referred to the full House at a later date on mostly a partisan vote.

Once again, supporter and lobbying-wise, the usual suspects are at play - 350Colorado, Colorado Communities for Climate Action (or whatever they want to be called these days), The Sierra Club, Conservation Colorado, and Earthjustice.

HB25-1277 amounts to nothing more than performative virtue signaling masquerading as consumer protection policy from a handful of out of touch activists absorbed in their own eco-narcissism and inflated self-righteousness.

Just how, exactly is one more silly warning is going to inform the consumer in any meaningful way or encourage a behavior change?

That’s a question those in support will never have to answer but it’s the every day business owner and purchaser of the products who will pay the cost, and that cost won’t be increased global heating or health decline.

Without clear, actionable information, consumers are unlikely to adjust their habits to make the green authoritarians happy, rendering such warnings completely impractical.

But then again practicality or genuine consumer protection isn’t the point here.

Colorado doesn’t have a unified grid. Instead it’s divided into two major interconnections: the Eastern Interconnection, which spans most of the state and connects to the Northeast and Kansas, and the Western Interconnection, which covers parts of western Colorado and connects to utilities in Utah, Wyoming, and California.

This geographical division complicates the state’s grid management, as coordination between these two interconnections is limited. This lack of coordination affects both the reliability and cost of the grid especially as the state mandates require the state go go full steam ahead with the whims of the Church of Carbon, a term attributed to the great .

Some of the state’s utilities, most notably Xcel Energy operates under the traditional vertically integrated monopoly, while others operate in full RTO membership or partial RTO membership.

Full RTO participation is with the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) but several utilities including municipal ones are exposed to SPP in somewhat of a hybrid form with their participation in SPP’s Western Energy Imbalance Service (WEIS) Market including Colorado Springs Utilities and the Platte River Power, the generation provider for the cities of Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont, and Estes Park. In other words, customers of these local utilities are also exposed to the RTO mentions in Shorting the Grid and they likely don’t even know it. (I did not)

The lack of a unified RTO presence creates inconsistencies in how electricity is priced, dispatched, and transmitted across the state. While full RTO membership offers some benefits in cost management and regional planning, it can also expose ratepayers to price spikes and loss of local control. Partial participation, as seen with the WEIS market, provides some grid efficiency benefits but lacks the comprehensive oversight of a full RTO.

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is responsible for regulating the state’s investor-owned utilities, including Xcel Energy, ensuring that electricity remains reliable and affordable. However, the PUC’s authority is limited in areas already under full RTO participation, where market-driven mechanisms dictate pricing and resource allocation. In these regions, the PUC has less direct control over transmission planning and energy procurement, as those functions fall under the governance of SPP.

In contrast, in areas outside of full RTO participation—such as those served by Xcel Energy—the PUC has greater influence over resource planning, rate approvals, and infrastructure investments. This creates a regulatory imbalance, where utilities operating outside an RTO are subject to stricter state oversight, while those in an RTO follow broader market-driven policies.

The Role of a PUC

Electric utilities are natural monopolies, meaning that it is generally inefficient to have multiple companies building competing electricity grids in the same geographic area. Instead of allowing competition, states (theoretically) regulate these monopolies through their Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) or similar bodies to ensure fair prices, service reliability, and public accountability. PUC decisions impact electricity rates, energy sources, grid reliability, and infrastructure investments for those under their regulatory control.

From the Customer/Ratepayer’s Perspective, PUCs are supposed to protect consumers by regulating electricity rates and ensuring service reliability. They approve expenditures, set fair rates, and oversee new energy infrastructure projects. However, their effectiveness in representing customer/ratepayer interests varies by state. Some legislatures direct PUCs to prioritize affordability, while others focus on broader goals like reducing greenhouse gas emissions or integrating renewable energy.

,in Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, argues that customers often have limited influence in PUC decisions, especially in Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) areas where insider-driven governance can make the system less transparent. She points out that ratepayer representatives often hold only a small fraction of the voting power in key decision-making committees, meaning large utilities and industry players dominate the regulatory process. This, as she explains in her book leads to higher costs and a less reliable grid.

Additionally, despite being called “customers,” most ratepayers in regulated states and RTO areas have no real choice in their electricity provider. They are bound to the rates and policies determined by PUCs and utility companies, limiting their ability to shop for better service or prices.

From the Electric Utility’s perspective, PUCs act as both gatekeepers and business enablers. They approve infrastructure projects, set rates, and enforce regulatory compliance. In vertically integrated markets (where utilities own both generation and distribution), PUCs historically allowed utilities to earn a regulated rate of return on their capital expenditures (new lines, substations, generating stations, etc..), incentivizing them to build more infrastructure—even beyond what was necessary—because it increased their profits. This same regulated rate of return is in large part today why electric utilities are so obsessed with renewable energy rollouts.

Utilities also develop close relationships with PUCs, leading to regulatory capture, where commissions favor the interests of utilities over ratepayers. As explained in Shorting the Grid:

A state regulatory agency had to approve the expenditure. Depending on the state, this agency was usually called the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) or the Public Service Board (PSB). At the state level, utilities tended to get a little cozy with their regulators (“regulatory capture”). Overbuilding and overcharging customers was often the result. On the other hand, the utility had incentives for building a very reliable grid.

In deregulated RTO areas, utilities have different incentives, as they must compete in energy auctions rather than simply passing costs onto consumers through a regulated rate structure. These auctions often benefit insiders and do not always result in a more reliable or cost-effective grid.

PUC commissioners, who lead these regulatory bodies, are either appointed by governors or elected by voters, depending on the state. Their backgrounds and selection processes influence their regulatory approach. Some states require commissioners to have specific expertise in energy, law, or economics, while others allow for more politically driven appointments. The philosophy of a commission—whether it leans toward market deregulation, environmental goals, or consumer protection—shapes the policies utilities must follow.

The nuances of how each state runs and appoints their PUC is explained in this in-depth article “Utility Commissioners: How They’re Selected, What They Do, and How They Impact Daily Life” by Emily Apadula, but here we’re going to focus on Colorado.

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Colorado’s PUC: Filled with High Priests for the Church of Carbon

Colorado’s current PUC governance structure consists of three Commissioners, all appointed by the Governor and approved by the State Senate. One caveat is that no more than two of these commissioners can be from the same political party from theoretically dominating the agendas of the PUC. But this setup still makes the PUC highly susceptible to political influence, often favoring policies aligned with the governor’s energy agenda rather than prioritizing reliability and cost-efficiency for ratepayers.

The current commissioners, all appointed by current Colorado Governor Jared Polis, have professional backgrounds heavily focused on renewable energy and environmental policy:

• Chairman Eric Blank (Denver): Appointed in 2020, as the co-founder of and former president of Community Energy Solar along with former executive VP of Iberdrola Renewables, Charman Blank has experience in renewable energy and clean power markets. His focus on decarbonization aligns with state policy goals but this raises concerns about prioritizing sustainability over affordability and reliability.

  

• Commissioner Megan Gilman (Edwards/Vail): Serving since 2020, Gilman has a background in mechanical engineering and energy efficiency consulting. While technically knowledgeable and the only one with a background in rural needs with her former participation with the Colorado Rural Electric Utilities Association, her focus has been on clean energy transitions rather than balancing grid reliability.

  

• Tom Plant (Boulder): Appointed in 2023, Plant has a history in environmental advocacy and renewable energy policy. His appointment further solidifies the state’s Luxury Belief/Church of Carbon commitment to aggressive renewable expansion, even at the potential expense of grid stability or affordable prices. Plant is the one nominally non-partisan member but served in the past in the Colorado House as a Democrat. He also worked under former CO Governor Bill Ritter and prior to his appointment worked under Ritter again at Colorado State University’s Center for the New Energy Economy.

The PUC’s current structure in other words lacks ideological and geographical diversity, with all commissioners aligned toward aggressive decarbonization rather than a balanced approach that includes affordability and grid security.

It also lacks geographical diversity with two of individuals being from either the Denver Metro area and the other from the resortified and gentrified Vail.

Further, it lacks someone with a background in energy sanity and/or consumer advocacy which are both domains a PUC really needs. Each of these Commissioners arguably have huge conflicts of interests in their professional lives and in their professional networks.

Potential Reform

Even without these facts or under a different leadership and ideology, a three-person Commissioner setup appears inadequate to represent the diverse interests of the people of Colorado.

This is where HB25-1126 Public Utilities Commission Membership Geographic Representation comes in, scheduled to be heard tomorrow afternoon in the House Energy and Environment Committee.

HB25-1126, much like the state’s past nuclear energy bills is a bipartisan effort. If passed, and it has a long way to go until reaching the Governor’s desk, it would increase the size of the PUC’s Commissioners to five still maintaining the partisan requirement but this time expanded to only three of the same party. The expansion in the representation would need to be geographical based too with one from the Western Slope, another from the Eastern Plains, and a third representing the Denver/Front Range Metro area.

The hearing is likely to be attended by electric power industry, green non-profits, and lobbyists for both groups and few, if no every day Coloradan.

As shown by the Colorado Capitol Watch, who sources their data from the Secretary of State, all of the registered lobbyists in opposition are Church of Carbon groups making it evident should this bill pass, their unequal influence on with the Colorado PUC will be curbed.

It’s important that individuals with professional dog in the fight speak up - especially those who live in the territories served by the two major IOUs that serve the state, Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy as they’ve been the ones seeing the brunt of the increases in their electric rates.

A link on how to testify is here and Colorado residents can find out who represents them here.

is fond of saying, “I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican. I’m Disgusted,” and roughly half of Colorado’s registered voters are registered as unaffiliated likely resonate with Bryce’s perspective. And as wrote in the closing chapter of Shorting the Grid, “local control of the local grid works best.”

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