NEW BILLS AND NEW BIRDS in Colorado's recent session

Out with the old and in with a new. Gone are the five feet of snow from April and May - and in with this sudden summer heat. The feeder and fountain in view from this keyboard are graced with migratory birds such as Evening Grosbeak, Spotted Towhee and one Ruby-Throated hummingbird that loved on that sugar water when all fragrant things were cloaked by heavy snow.

And in Denver, flown from the coop are all our state legislators from their tightly compressed legislative session. What have they gotten done?

“This has been an extraordinary legislature,” said a seasoned Democratic fundraiser in Denver, Sallyanne Ofner by Facebook message. The range of work was wide:

For civil unions came a meaningful redress of the wrong-headed vote of 2006 to limit marriage to one man and one woman. Now LGBT couples can commit for life and legally reap respect and due benefits.

Firearm safety has been enhanced with popular universal background checks on purchases plus size limits on high capacity magazines.

On behalf of rape victims, parental rights of attackers over the children they spawn have been severed, and sexual assault victims have access to a payment program for their medical needs.

One gripping disappointment was the failure to repeal the costly and conspicuously racist death penalty in Colorado.

Also disheartening: the failure to pass seven out of nine bills to regulate hydraulic fracturing. A notable failure was minimum fines for serious spills -- needed apparently because spills now don’t invoke the maximum fines allowed. The 30-hour spill that erupted in mid-February near Fort Collins still has not been fined, according to the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. The Governor has ordered a formal review of how fines are imposed.

Also targeted was a ban on energy industry employees from serving on the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to regulate their own companies - failed. Lawmakers also failed to require more frequent inspections at Colorado’s tens of thousands of wells, though they did secure budgeting for 11 more inspectors and a lower spill amount threshold at which companies must report. More health and water testing around fracking areas? Also failed.

Visiting The Camera this week, representatives from the Colorado Oil and Gas Association lamented the session as being polarized, and that legislators with no knowledge of industry surprised them with a slew of bills that COGA hadn’t seen much less collaborated on. This came off poorly as they and their 23 lobbyists certainly know that the session is compressed and filled with the slew of matters just mentioned.

Coming this fall is still more action on fracking, in a rule making session by the Air Quality Control Commission. Judging by the Governor’s oft-stated goal to see “zero” fugitive emissions from natural gas infrastructure, let’s hope the AQCC can screw some new regulations to the sticking point.

On the bright side for clean energy, Boulder’s own Will Toor is uniquely proud of a suite of successful bills for electric vehicles that led his agency, South West Energy Efficient Project, to launch Colorado to a leading grade of A- among six western states for EV’s. New bills included extended rebates for private purchases of EV’s and conversions of hybrids. For state and local governments to purchase EV’s, life cycle costs may now be considered as well as contracting through energy service companies to have EV’s paid for through fuel savings. PACE financing for commercial buildings and parking lots was expanded to cover charging stations. Also, apartment buildings and HOA’s will have to allow charging stations. And to address an old sore spot, a decal program will have EV owners pay a $50 tax per year for road maintenance and the construction of more public charging stations.

We will see more charging stations – this comes with nice timing as Consumer Reports just named the Tesla Model S the best car. And as Colorado’s electric power sector cleans its emissions, the use of EV’s will leverage reductions in emissions from transportation.

But that electric sector still has serious business leftover. Colorado has until June 7th to persuade the Governor to act on the gloriously debated SB 252 that would require rural electric providers to get 20 percent of their power from renewables. Since coal costs have about doubled over 10 years and Tri-States’ coal-rich power expenses have risen four times faster than sales, SB252 needs to pass for pocketbooks and to deal with that horrific new 400 ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere.

Lies, damned lies and politicians

Lies, damned lies and politicians

Anne B. Butterfield, October 7, 2012 (Boulder Daily Camera)

From the sparring at the first presidential debate, it's pretty sure that energy has become a divisive as well as a competitive issue. Both President Obama and Governor Romney want to be the triumphal producer of energy.

However Romney likes to smear climate change concerns and clean energy investments, as if all of them go like Solyndra, where a half a billion in loan guarantees went down with the company, as he crowed that 50 percent of clean energy investments supported by the stimulus bill had gone belly up. This was dubbed the "lie of the night" by Michael Grunwald, author of a book about the stimulus bill, citing that maybe one percent of government backed clean energy ventures failed.

Try getting that rate of safety in your investing. According to a new poll by Hart for the solar industry, voters seem to know that loan guarantees are a steadfast service of government and highly safe, as the Solyndra debacle was deemed unimportant by respondents. Ninety-two percent of registered voters found it important that solar be more widespread, with 70 percent believing that the federal government should be doing more to promote it with incentives (with 71 percent of swing voters feeling this way).

And, sigh, with tens of thousands of wind power jobs on the chopping block already, Mitt Romney opposes the renewal of the Production Tax Credit. This, even as red states need it renewed, putting him in the dog house with GOP politicians such as Senator Chuck Grassely of Iowa whose state produces 20 percent of its power from wind, and Governor Brownback of Kansas who has made vigorous pleas for the extension of the credit, due to expire this at the end of this year.

Didn't Romney get the memo? Republican governors are making hay with clean energy such as Haley Barbour and Chris Christie. To Mississippi, Barbour brought four solar sector firms to Mississippi along with two in biofuels plus a clean tech car venture with China. Christie made New Jersey a leading solar market in the nation, this year contending with California for first place.

But Romney and other high priests of the GOP act as though the only real energy is the type that can be burned, and somehow, Obama has nibbled at this hemlock by constantly touting his success with fracking and his openness to the XL pipeline.

A truly strange specter is that pipeline; it lets our heartland be used as a byway for tar sands products (which sink rather than float when spilled), so they can go straight to international markets. We get the downsides and none of the upsides -- even as the pipeline could increase gasoline prices in the Midwest, which would lose its existing access to tar sands products.

One plausible upside of the pipeline being routed through the United States (where it might be built quickly, as would not happen in the alternative route through western Canada) is that it could strengthen the hand of President Obama in his suite of sanctions against Iran, including a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil. Our recent frack-mania allows our nation to resume oil production levels not seen for 15 years and thus strengthens our hand. Three weeks ago Iran admitted having problems selling oil due to U.S. and European sanctions; now the nation's currency is in free fall.

One certainly hopes that tar sands will thrive mightily as a "psy-ops" against Iran and not as a chemical weapon against our climate, as Dr. James Hansen has sternly warned.

Never bounded by his prior convictions about the climate, Romney crows that he would authorize the pipeline on day one and build it himself if need be (as if he in his wingtips could "John Wayne" his way around an oil field). It's all such a sham he-man rodeo.

And no one mentioned the climate -- in spite of hundreds of thousands of petition signatures demanding the topic. Neither candidate pushed clean energy as the vote winner that poll after poll have shown it to be. Authors for DBL Investors in their study of green energy exclaim, "We all need to understand that green jobs are not the idle dreaming of a small group of partisan activists and insiders, but a source of livelihood for millions, literally in all parts of the country." The light shines in the darkness but the darkness of our politics has not understood it. Tweet

Colorado's Elegant Solution to Fracking

Colorado's Elegant Solution to Fracking Anne B. Butterfield, April 19, 2012 (Huffington Post)

Eventually those local moratoriums against fracking will expire in Boulder, Longmont and Erie. And residents will worry anew about toxic fracking operations inching up on schools and neighborhoods in pursuit of a product that goes "poof" the instant it's used. Nice value ~ not.

And it's timely that the University of Colorado at Denver School of Public Health just announced a study which finds that air pollution within a half mile of frack-ops have toxic emissions five times over federal safety standards, causing elevated life time cancer risks and respiratory and neurological effects for nearby residents. Rep. Diana DeGette is now urging the Environmental Protection Agency to consider Colorado's study as they finalize air standards for fracking.

It has also just come out that fracking is inching up on agriculture to compete for Colorado's water. Taking only .08 of a percent per year, it's a smidge for sure, but that water gets so polluted it must be disposed in a way that removes it from the hydrologic cycle. And that's not pretty when we're looking down the craw of a new drought kicked off with an historic climate change induced heat wave plus a horrifying wildfire this season.

Permanently voiding precious Colorado water out of the hydrologic cycle feels even worse in view the fact such water can be lost for naught when the depletion rate on fracking wells is 63-85 percent in the first year, according to Dave Hughes of the Geological Survey of Canada. This can mean fruitless water waste when drilling down the slippery slope of diminishing marginal returns.

But Colorado will need all the more gas, as the Clean Air Clean Jobs Act requires Xcel Eenrgy in Colorado to soon retire 900 megawatts of coal burning capacity. The act also requires that the natural gas used for recouping that coal-fired capacity comes from in state (see page 18 here). That puts upward pressure on fracking all over the state. This means more tangles between fracking and populated areas, and more permanent loss of precious Colorado water. It seems like Colorado may have backed itself into a box canyon, where residents are cornered with fracking risks to land, air, water and health.

But there's an elegant pathway to reducing Colorado's need for natural gas -- by using the sun in a familiar technology that is at least two times more efficient than solar photovoltaics. It's good old fashioned solar thermal - those rooftop panels that heat water.

Colorado could amend the CACJA to promote solar thermal as a jobs intensive domestic energy supply that works with natural gas to heat homes, buildings, water and industrial processes. This could free drilling companies to sell excess Colorado gas out of state for much higher prices (see page 8 here), possibly gaining crucial industry support for this intrusion of renewables into their market. Higher profitability, less contentious drilling and more renewable energy jobs is the hope.

In all of North American, Colorado is "ground zero" for the best conditions for producing huge benefits from solar thermal. It's the sunshine, cold ground water, high heating loads, renewables-savvy population and existing industry that can, if the state takes on robust targets, lead the nation in an industry that swaps jobs and skills in place of burning money. And burning money is what we do when we burn costly fuels that go poof the instant they're used.

A robust Colorado plan for solar thermal could put the clean air and clean jobs back into the so-called, gas-friendly Clean Air Clean Jobs Act.

And in case anyone has forgotten ~ there are huge economic risks with shale gas, a.k.a. the fracking boom, as the resource is almost certainly not as profitable, resourceful or as clean as hyped by industry. On deeper review, it's promising to be an economic bubble.

Fracking is supposedly going to make our nation 100 years of cheap gas, as, amnesiac members of Congress and the President are wont to say. But various geological experts such as the Potential Gas Committe have poured cold water all over that flaming hype, detailing how the supply could be as little as 21 or even 11 years. And Arthur Berman, a widely regarded petro-geologist has commented that the industry reminds him of the sub prime mortgage mess and wrote, "U.S. shale plays share many characteristics with the gold rushes.... Both phenomena result from extreme promotion. Anyone can join. Every participant believes that they will get rich. Great amounts of capital are destroyed as entrants try to get a position. The bonanza is exhausted sooner than most expected and few profit in the end."

So if you are one of the thousands of Coloradans who are waking up to the nightmare of fracking in your community - go online and read the Colorado Solar Thermal Roadmap. Then find every political leader you can to talk about it. Colorado would be wise to use its natural solar resources to hedge against an over-reliance on gas, one that shall expand as the CACJA requires. And coal with its rising prices is on the wane nationwide as well, which means the demand for gas will be a pressure cooker loaded with risk for our energy security, economy, and environment.

Shale Gas: From Geologic Bubble to Economic Bubble

Shale Gas: From Geologic Bubble to Economic Bubble
Anne Butterfield, March 16, 2012 (Huffngton Post via NewEnergyNews)

Fracking for natural gas is on Coloradans' minds. From landholders to policy makers, it's a pig pile of attention on the environmental effects, which are bad enough when real -- roads ruined by heavy trucks carting waste water, and waste water voided from the hydrologic cycle when stored in disposal wells, seeps from faulty linings of containment pits, methane leaks that make shale gas as climate intensive as coal, and air quality such as Erie's becomes more tainted with hydrocarbons than Houston and Los Angeles, to name just a few.

Unincorporated Boulder County has just entered a moratorium on fracking, plus Erie and the city of Longmont as well. Aurora is crafting its own regulations. It's a patchwork of regulations in the making, amounting to one big "Whoa, Nellie!" to the industry.

And as one driller told me, "involvement by local government is an expeditious way to curtail drilling." It's a big enough impediment to drilling that Rex Tillerson of Exxon Mobil hit the publicity trail last week to weigh in against layers of local regulation.

However, something else that's supportive of the idea to just slow down is an economic backdrop not discussed enough -- the mythical quality of the claim of 100 years of gas, a claim oft-stated by President Obama. On this fossil fuel gold rush we are in the midst of a new bubble, say many researchers and experts.

Imagine the nation creating another large economic bubble after all we've been through.

And that's just what fossil energy researchers such as Dave Hughes of Canada have been claiming about shale gas plays and fracking, pointing out in a 2011 report, "conventional gas wells decline by 25-40 percent in their first year of production, whereas shale gas wells decline at rates such as 63-85 percent."

Due to the costly inputs of capital, energy and water involved in fracking, shale gas is economic only in the most bountiful zones. And if capital was attracted to projects based on extrapolations from the best zones and early production rates, and if companies get caught up in land grabs hoping to profit (which has happened), then companies may need to "carpet bomb" areas with drill rigs to try to keep up production.

This is another kind of pig pile, also known in Hughes' exemplary vernacular as the exploration "treadmill" and "an exercise in creating greater complexity with lower and lower returns." (For a truly deep dive into energy return on energy invested check this out and feel your investor heart go ack!!.)

The Potential Gas Committee (an all-volunteer industry research group related to Colorado School of Mines) has assessments for gas indicating that while "resources" could suffice for 80 years of use, "reserves" may suffice for only about 23. Reserves are areas proven to have gas that can come up in economically and operationally effective ways. It's a difference of a bird in the pen versus several in the wind. It might be nice to have more than 23 firm years of gas now that coal plants are being retired all over the nation due to aging plants, depleting supplies of cheap coal and utilities gunning for supposedly cheap gas.

Ian Urbina of the New York Times has been drilling down through gas industry emails and documents to find an unexpectedly low level of confidence in the gas boom, saying, "There is undoubtedly a vast amount of gas in the formations. The question remains how affordably it can be extracted." His reporting refers to possibly deliberate overstatement of reserves by speculators and of federal and state lawmakers considering drastically increasing subsidies for drilling in the hopes of low-cost energy.

With this going on, any Colorado voter might ask with squinty-eyed suspicion what the heck Governor Hickenlooper was up to when he created and then defended radio ads for gas extraction paid for by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. It's a pie in the sky endorsement that should not come from one elected to represent the whole state who also happens to be a geologist who should know better. Environmental groups have erupted with push back stating that his proclamations of no leaks from fracking is not remotely accurate.

Meanwhile, let's recall that it's called "oil and gas" for a reason. In some formations oil brought up with gas can subsidize and prolong drilling and fatten state coffers. We like the state making revenues in these forlorn TABOR days, but pumping up financial bubbles has a tendency to blow up in everyones' faces -- with Colorado's land, water, climate and energy future in the balance. And as the bubble grows it depletes a resource so precious as a feedstock for chemicals that insiders compare it to gold.

We need to save that gas and slow down this pressure to frack it and burn it, so, let's push right back against the governor and Rex Tillerson and go for local control of fracking. Also, let's blunt our demand for gas by supporting solar thermal technology for heating buildings (see a video about Colorado becoming a global leader in solar thermal development).

Perhaps Colorado should launch a new renewable energy standard for solar thermal to loosen our enslavement to fossil fuels for heating. Lastly, we need to support a renewed push for property assessed clean energy financing (PACE) for retrofitting homes for efficient and clean energy, in a bill created to support the program now happening in Congress (see HR 2599) and by putting in comments with home mortgage regulators who shut down the PACE program.

Author's note: Want to support my work? Please "fan" me at Huffpost Denver, here (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-butterfield). Thanks.

Taken for granted no more

Taken for granted no more
Anne Butterfield, February 5, 2012 (Daily Camera)

It's been an explosive week for women's reproductive health with two events reaching new depths of outrageousness and a third prompting pundits to call on a silent voting bloc to defend its practices on contraception.

The biggest story of the week was the Susan G. Komen Foundation stripping Planned Parenthood of its grants for breast cancer screening on the stated reason of Planned Parenthood undergoing a Congressional investigation. Komen's new vice president, Karen Handel, is a known conservative political force who swore opposition to Planned Parenthood for its 3 percent of services going to abortion.

Yet, before week's end we who were outraged at Komen and vocal about it saw a reversal of the decision. Komen announced that their new policy will sanction only those facing "criminal and conclusive investigations."

If only Republicans advocating for smaller government would heed such pared down parameters. In five state houses Republicans have passed laws that should make critics of Obamacare blush: requirements for vaginal-probe sonograms on women on the day ahead of abortions. This is rationalized as an informed consent measure, though I for one have not seen this degree of intrusion before for my two lung surgeries, and a call to an abortion counselor (asking to be unnamed) revealed that the vast majority of abortions have no medical need of a vaginal ultrasound (as topical ultrasounds are routine). So this measure smacks of the long arm of the law reaching into a woman's most private place to deliver ideology, with the doctor also being used against medical tradition and practice. American women, ask: whose uterus do these small government folks think it is -- the woman's or the state's?

Since this drama has reached Kafkaesque absurdity, state senator Janet Howell of Virginia attached a protest amendment to a sonogram bill moving through her state house, a measure requiring men also to undergo a bodily probe ahead of getting erectile dysfunction medication. Her amendment lost by an impressively small margin with 13 male senators in support.

All's fair in love and war, so social conservatives are also feeling the pain, due to the Obama Administration's Department of Health and Human Services having stated that Catholic institutions serving and employing the public must adhere equally to rules of the Affordable Care Act granting women equal access to birth control with no co-pays.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had asked for a conscience clause, complaining that they cannot be made to pay for birth control. Meanwhile 98 percent of sexually active Catholics are said by the Guttmacher Institute to use birth control, meaning that the laity and the clergy of the church have radically opposing views of how to populate a family and maintain women's health.

Catholic leaders doth protest too much in squawking on behalf of their religious freedom, suggests Jon O'Brien of Catholics for Choice -- whose stand is that the conscience of women rules. The church has failed to convince Catholics in the pews, so the clergy should own that failure rather than attempt to control distribution channels that impute extra costs to insured women who are often not even Catholic.

On the politics, Chris Matthews on "Hardball," said that Catholics like him are swing voters and Obama has blown his chance with them. However Jon O'Brien says his group and its allies "expended a huge amount of resources mobilizing the public on this pivotal issue" of no co-pay birth control. And with Joan Walsh of Salon advising fellow Catholics to "preach what they practice" and defend the president, we shall see if Catholics defend their widespread practices or remain hiding in the shadows.

Crises are times for taking action when comfortable practices can no longer be taken for granted. Planned Parenthood was gifted with nearly a million dollars in 24 hours of the Komen news, and also won a reversal -- good. More importantly we all need to see that protecting women's health where it intersects with reproductive freedom (not to mention a sound doctor-patient relationship) is no longer a spectator sport. We need to be activists, because as the right wing dreams of personhood amendments, flirts with banning birth control, and legislates body probes, we see that the American Taliban wears a prim sweater vest and expensive suits, with hopes to attract million-dollar super PAC's.

The Republican clown car circus

The Republican clown car circus
Anne B. Butterfield, January 6, 2012 (Huffington Post)

As backdrop to the Republican presidential primaries a brawl is erupting among GOP factions. And it's not just the philanderers and extremists who've been dubbed the clowns, it's also the right-wing media who've gone plumb too far in 2011.

The Wall Street Journal tossed a pot of hot rhetorical tar onto Congressional leaders for their tea party resistance to passing the payroll tax holiday, while the Journal itself is also falling into a circular firing squad. David Frum, a former editorialist for the Journal and speechwriter for George W. Bush, has opined on FrumForum that it's time to downgrade the Journal's editorial page, enumerating many instances of false and flip-flop arguments.

And seven studies conducted at universities and foundations have shown that viewers of fellow organization Fox News are least informed on a variety of hot-button subjects. So, a once-great newspaper falls into disrepute and millions of voters grow less informed on important matters, thanks to the rightward push of parent company News Corporation.

As Republican candidates and officials drink the News Corp. Kool-Aid, there is more circular firing going around. Former Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) was "disgusted" by his colleagues' conduct around the debt ceiling fiasco, and conservative columnist David Brooks penned the "Mother of all no brainers" about the GOP intransigence on the same matter. Former Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.) was "embarrassed" by the Republican presidential primary debates, and a Greek chorus of Republicans came out against Newt Gingrich running for president.

But topping the ship-is-burning-and-rats-are-leaping department came the Mike Lofgren essay, "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP operative who left the cult." This lengthy and literate indictment stressed that political "rottenness" is by far the art of the GOP. The goal behind the use of the Senate filibuster, he states, has been to destroy government effectiveness itself as a way to make the anti-government GOP look like the crew to clean up that mess.

And in hating government, what could be more hated than regulations to address climate change? On this, Republican candidates trot out all manner of fancy -- such as taking it as doctrine that climate change cannot come from a "naturally occurring gas" -- even if that gas would kill you in minutes if you tied a plastic bag around your head. Better to believe that scientists who earn ordinary salaries are crafting climate conspiracies for the money (in spite of several official exonerations on "Climategate"), while fossil fuel companies earning billions per quarter can't possibly be funding so called skeptics (they are). And so Congressional Republicans voted unanimously to keep up fossil fuel subsidies, and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) crowed our nation can't compete with China in clean tech. American exceptionalism be damned.

In a refreshing win for reality, the GOP attack on the Environmental Protection Agency has drawn resistance. A Journal editorial about reduced electric reliability stemming from new EPA mercury rules brought letters from utility executives to blast the Journal's assertions and defend the rules. David Brooks and others have shredded the Republican argument that regulations crush jobs. Manufacturers of appliances and light bulbs in line for higher efficiency regulations have squawked at Congress to be sure the regulations stay on track.

Frum's frame about the GOP being mired with too many dinosaurs is working, as the party's reply to polls seems to be "polls schmolls." In a Colorado College study, 71 percent of respondents from the tea party say that environmental regulations can coexist with a strong economy, and a League of Conservation Voters poll conducted by a Republican company also revealed that 71 percent support EPA regulation of carbon dioxide, including majority support among Republicans.

At Halloween, the planet slid into the frightening fact of having 7 billion human mouths to feed as food prices are hitting record highs and fresh water supplies are in decline. In response, Republicans in the United States, where the earth's resources are devoured at unethical proportions, have attacked Planned Parenthood. Thankfully on this we also see glimmers of pushback in ultra conservative bastions such as Mississippi, which trounced by a wide margin a personhood amendment like the one defeated twice here in Colorado.

Those who are conservationist Republicans, Independents, moderates, progressives, liberals and greens should make it their cause to turn the tables in the next election on this clown car party which seems intent on stuffing the nation into a cannon and shooting it into oblivion. The only ones belonging in the cannon are the clowns themselves.

Occupy, Xcel, And the Mother of All Cliffs
Anne B. Butterfield, October 27, 2011 (Huffington Post)

While the nation salivates -- or trembles -- at the thought of how the Occupy Wall Street movement will affect elections for years to come (and bankers on Wall Street are already furious that Democratic politicians have murmured sweet support for the Occupy movement), an Occupy-style ballot initiative is being voted on as I type. It will be decided on November 1, up in Boulder.

It's all about transferring the keys to a centrally controlled function in our economy from the hands of a distant, multi-state, investor-owned monopoly that makes money mostly by burning coal, and putting those keys into the hands of locally elected people who can be approached from city hall to the hardware store, in a non-profit business model that lowers overhead costs, maximizes rate payer value and aims for local, distributed generation of clean energy.

2B and 2C call on the voters to allow the city to pursue, with teeth, the question of pulling away from Xcel Energy. If a favorable financial picture emerges through the inquiry, then forming a local and transparent municipal utility based on clean energy is permitted though not required, so this election is often termed a "next step" not a final step. "Munis," as they are called, give affordable, reliable service in thousands of communities in the nation, but Boulder's muni would bear the brand of clean energy as lived out by the city's many hundreds of clean energy entrepreneurs and experts. (The campaign site is here and the city's issue guide is here.)

But underneath the flair roils the same fundamental concerns felt by the so-called "99%" of Occupy Wall Street. Concerns like whether it's tolerable that decisions made by monopolies are made chiefly for shareholder profit when deadly costs are being externalized. Or whether it's tolerable that decisions made repetitively by "too big to fail" organizations are made with complacent blindness to risks that are obvious to outsiders. And, whether it's tolerable that the risky investments that do go bad are paid off by the masses while the few proceed to profit.

These worries are at the core of the Occupy movement, which Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has called "socialized losses and privatized gains." And it turns out that the silent, hulking company behind folks' power oulet has often proven to be an agent of huge social risk and and private gain.

Big utilities are the "too big to fail" entities at the end of your power cord, being monopolies that are insulated from the risks of their undertakings, be they the chanciness of a big nuclear plant investment (think of the Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Plant that ran briefly and badly and was still paid off by rate payers), or the systemic risk of spewing fossil-fuel emissions for over a century resulting in the recent uptick in unprecedented deadly storms, or the straight-up investment risk of relying on coal supplies that are nowhere near as stout as proclaimed.

Actually, our nation's coal reliance is proving to be a ticking time bomb of risk, says leading Boulder energy advocate Leslie Glustrom, whose research revealing the work of the United States Geological Survey has shown that the U.S. has maybe 20 more years of affordable coal. And the subject has been getting attention for a few years (for example here or here). Think about that -- 20 more years of the "cheap" coal that runs about 45 percent our nation's grid.




“..Our time frame for moving beyond coal is much closer to 20 years than the 200 years we've been told so often.
Once again our government has gotten it just plain wrong -- we might realize the government has just plain gotten it wrong in a number of areas (laughing) lately, and in this case the Energy Information Administration has been telling people we have 250 years of coal, but they have never analyzed that assessment for how much is actually accessible in any sort of economic or reasonable fashion.
When you look at the geologic studies that have been done by the United States Geological Survey you realize that way under 20 percent of this nation's coal is going to be economic accessible (3:48)...

(4:20) And then [if you] actually look at the coal mines, you realize that whether you look at the state level or mine specific level in Wyoming, where 40% of our country's coal comes from, you realize these coal mines are facing unbelievably serious constraints. Those are already incredibly apparent to anybody who is looking, but the problem is that no one is looking because everyone assumes we have over 200 years of coal. But if you start looking you realize the costs of coal are mounting quickly, you realize coal is not showing up at coal plants even though the coal plant has contracts; you realize like my utility in Colorado that the price they expect to pay for coal (next year) in 2010 is the price that last year they predicted they'd be paying in 2042.

So the folks who are in charge are just completely using the wrong frame for looking at coal because my utility is off by three decades. And when we asked them about their long term coal supply you get the answer back repeatedly in writing in these very legal formats, "We've no analysis of long term coal supply; we have no such thing." And so it's very important that our country come to understand that because if we drive over that cliff the way we've driven over the cliff with investment banking and the real estate industry and the big three and on and on, this is a cliff [that] is the mother of them all. Because our country doesn't understand how to function without electricity. (5:46)” From nextagenda via YouTube

The "my utility" she's referring to is Xcel, the same one Boulder is voting to separate from, the same utility that decided to complete construction of a 750 megawatt coal plant in Pueblo, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided that carbon dioxide was a hazard to human health -- also after Ms. Glustrom had been pelting the utility with questions about long term coal supplies to which they had no answers (for example, see the document called Total Amount of Coal Under Contract by Xcel 2008-2015: here).

Now we know, thanks to Glustrom, that Xcel's modeling assumed that coal costs will rise less than 2 percent a year even though between 2004 and 2009 Xcel's coal costs went up about 10 percent a year. On that she concluded, "With a [Colorado] system that's 60 percent coal, give or take, the cost of coal has an impact."

click to enlarge

Though coal constraints are felt here in Colorado, they are no small bore regional issue, being felt nationally and globally. This summer utilities of China faced $2 billion in losses due to coal price spikes, and India is facing weather-related coal shortages to 85 gigawatts of installed coal-burning capacity. Xcel in Colorado and all coal-reliant utilities in the U.S. are playing with a deck stacked against them as they increasingly buy from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, the motherlode coal supply of the U.S., which is headed into a brick wall -- or the cliff that's mother of them all (see pages 48-58 here).

And thus Boulder's quest was formed in leery concern about coal costs as well as for the need to sharply reduce planet-heating emissions, in a gesture that will serve as a warning to all coal based utilities and display an attractive business model to other cities for keeping more energy revenues at home. As affluent as Boulder is, it can feel the injustice of being bullied into continuing to let $114 million of its annual economic activity be owned by a multi-state corporation operating in an inherently destructive paradigm.

click to enlarge

Xcel just this month moved to have Glustrom ousted from her traditional standing as a citizen intervenor in a docket at the Public Utilities Commission, where her presence gives a patina of public involvement at the regulatory body. Xcel also just threatened to cut off Boulder's access to clean energy programs if 2B and 2C pass, a threat that appears to be a sham. It was done on the logic that rate payers of Colorado should not foot the bill for Boulder's use of program monies while it is seceding, though earlier, Xcel sought repayment from Colorado ratepayers for its excess expenses on Boulder's Smart Grid City. This gambit is not about logic to benefit ratepayers, it's about hardball to benefit shareholders.

These examples show one utility acting in a nasty way during an election season, since as we know power never gives up without a fight. But the larger point is that big, centrally powerful utilities are risk factories on par with the big banks that gambled with our economy at tax payers' expense. But the utilities are gambling with our energy supply as well as our planet. And Boulder is doing something about it.

This column was written in honor of Boulder activist Dan Friedlander.