Soviet-Style "Democracy" In Action
"Colorado's" Climate Clerics Want More Authoritarian Control of the State's Emissions Making it Difficult for Real Coloradans to Speak their Voice
A cadre of “Colorado’s” most devout climate crusaders has petitioned the state’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) with a wacky righteous demand: adopt the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) in all oil and gas cumulative impact analyses.
Hat tip to Cory Gaines, 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.
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.
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 Cory Gaines 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.
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.
Wow ! I’ve known for about a decade that liberal “CA migrants” had more than a toe-hold on Colorado state government and policy making. I wonder now if their off-spring generation is leading the way against common sense governance. Thanks for spreading the attached documents, which clearly show a totalitarian Soviet-Style mindset. Time for concerned “native” (ie boomer generation) CO citizens to step up, expose this nonsense and stop it dead in it’s tracks before this contagion spreads further.
Very impoprtant stuff!