Decarbonizing Colorado's Buildings: Another Pathway to Nowhere

Cory Gaines

who write the Colorado Accountability Project today published a short piece encouraging readers to consider joining one of Colorado’s various grift boards — the Colorado Building Decarbonization Enterprise Board.

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

“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

Robert Bryce

noted, a significant recipient of dark NGO money and your taxpayer dollars.

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

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.