Powering Forward: What Everyone Should Know About America's Energy Revolution
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Powering Forward: What Everyone Should Know About America's Energy Revolution
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781933108889 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 22 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Powering Forward
What Everyone Should Know About America's Energy Revolution
By Bill Ritter Jr.
Fulcrum Publishing
Copyright © 2016 Bill Ritter, Jr.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-933108-88-9
CHAPTER 1
The Colorado Promise
The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.
– Ross Perot
Colorado has not been exempt from the weather disasters that are increasing in frequency and intensity around the world. These events can be attributed to complicated causes, but their impacts are profoundly personal.
Few Coloradans will forget the Hayman forest fire that burned southwest of Denver in 2002. It was so large and intense, it created its own weather system. More than 5,300 people had to evacuate their homes. Or the record Waldo Canyon fire near Pikes Peak in 2012 that killed two people and destroyed 346 homes. Or the 2013 Black Forest fire near Colorado Springs that set another record, destroying 511 homes and killing two more people. Or the West Fork fire the same year, which forced the evacuation of the entire community of South Fork.
Then, in the fall of 2013, 100 miles to the north of the West Fork fire, eight days of rains produced epic flooding across 17 Colorado counties and nearly 2,400 square miles – a disaster ranked as a 1,000-year rainfall event. The floods changed the course of rivers and the future of riverside communities.
Between 2006 and 2013, Coloradans were hit with nearly $4 billion in property damages and 70 fatalities due to severe weather; only eight other states had higher levels of deaths and damages. State officials have tracked a temperature increase of approximately 2°F between 1977 and 2006, the blink of an eye in geophysical terms.
The rising temperatures have been accompanied by drought. In 2006, parts of Colorado were still recovering from a 2000–2003 drought that resulted in the driest conditions in the state's instrumented history. The Colorado River, a vital source of water to 30 million people in seven states, fell to its lowest level since monitoring began in 1885.
Water Worries
In the meantime, Shell Oil was buying water rights for use in future oil shale gas production, raising concerns that the oil and gas industry would compete with agriculture, cities, tourism, and other industries for Colorado's limited water supplies. We can expect the impacts of climate change to get much worse. In 2006, for example, Colorado College issued a study showing that the state's ski industry could disappear by mid-century unless global warming and its adverse effects on snowpack were reversed.
This was some of the backdrop when I contemplated running for governor in the 2006 election. Nevertheless, neither clean energy nor climate change were high on my list of interests. My personal history up to that point helps explain why. I was born in Denver and raised on a farm not far from the city, the middle child of twelve. At the age of 14, I began working summers in the construction industry to help support my family. I earned a bachelor's degree at Colorado State University and a law degree at the University of Colorado. The law, not environmental sciences, became my career path.
After college, I worked as a deputy district attorney for the City and County of Denver. Then in 1987, my wife Jeannie and I volunteered as lay missionaries in Zambia. This experience taught us a great deal about poverty, hunger, and aspiration in a less developed nation – the kind of nation, I would later understand, that has the most to lose from and the least ability to cope with climate change. When we returned to Denver three years later, I became a federal prosecutor. In 1993, then-governor Roy Romer appointed me as Denver's district attorney, and I served in that post for the next 12 years.
Deciding to Run
I began thinking about running for governor more than a year before the election. It is safe to say, I think, that most candidates who believe in public service are sincere in wanting to make their jurisdictions better places to live and work, and that was the case for me. In the relative quiet before the fray of a statewide political campaign, I studied the issues that seemed most important to the future of our state. They extended beyond my experience as an attorney, missionary, and prosecutor. Colorado deserved a better education system, better transportation, better health care, a better way to deal with immigration, plans to ensure ample and clean water supplies, and, of course, a strong economy and new jobs.
After I decided to run for the governorship and assembled a campaign team, we bundled these goals into a platform we called the Colorado Promise, and our pledge was to help Colorado reach its full potential. To be frank, the Colorado Promise was not only a statement of what my goals would be as governor, it was also an early campaign strategy to define myself as a candidate before my opponent could try to define me. A typical tactic for running against a former criminal prosecutor is to attack his or her record. In my case, the attacks would be about how my office used plea bargains rather than going to trial to prosecute criminals, and to resolve cases involving illegal immigrants. I would have no trouble defending myself against such attacks, but I wanted the campaign to be about bigger issues. The Promise theme put those issues on the table.
An important element in the Colorado Promise was to make the state a national leader in the use of clean energy. Energy was not my highest priority early in the campaign; it did not appear until page 24 in our 52-page booklet. It clearly was on the minds of Colorado's voters, however. In November 2004, after the state legislature rejected several consecutive proposals to establish a Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard (RPS) – a requirement that electric utilities generate a specific percentage of their power from renewable resources – citizens took matters into their own hands. Renewable energy advocates gathered enough signatures to put an RPS on the ballot of that year's election. Amendment 37 required the state's two investor-owned utilities to generate 10 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by 2015. It was approved with 54 percent of the vote. With that, Colorado became the seventeenth state in the nation to create an RPS, but it was the first and remains one of only a few to do so by citizen initiative.
My advisors and supporters made me aware that other states were attracting a new generation of energy industries, including businesses that manufactured wind turbines and solar energy systems. I knew that the key to attracting these industries was state policies that created long-term market certainty for clean energy technologies – policies such as the RPS. As I campaigned across the state, I found that people in all parts of Colorado were receptive to clean energy development. Urban residents appreciated how clean energy would improve air quality. Rural residents in the more conservative parts of the state appreciated how ranchers and farmers could earn new income by leasing land for wind turbines. Rural counties and communities liked the idea of earning new tax revenues. Our substantial population of rugged individualists liked the idea of greater energy independence.
The New Energy Economy
One day one of my campaign advisors, Melody Harris – the wife of my communications director – pointed out that we were no longer simply talking about making Colorado a clean energy leader; we were talking about creating a "new energy economy." That idea and that phrase became a signature phrase of our campaign.
There was some disagreement among my advisors about this new plank in my platform. As the election approached, the state was enjoying a boom in natural gas production. There were nearly 23,000 producing gas wells in Colorado at that time and production was increasing. At the US Department of Energy (DOE), analysts concluded that Colorado was part of a region that would become the major source of the nation's fossil fuels in the years ahead, largely because of our unconventional gas deposits and new methods to reach them.
Fossil energy production was ingrained in Colorado's history, so members of my team were concerned there would be political risks in promoting new energy resources that would compete with the old. Colorado companies had been producing coal, coke, oil, and natural gas since deposits were discovered in the 1800s.
We knew our state would not exhaust its fossil energy deposits for a very long time. The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that if only half of the oil could be recovered from the shale rock in the Green River Formation under Colorado and Utah, it would be "about equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves." Another key local deposit, the Piceance Basin, holds enough natural gas to fuel the nation for two full years.
But we also recognized the vulnerabilities for an economy that depends on fossil energy production. As the independent research organization Headwaters Economics put it, "The volatility of fossil fuel markets poses obstacles to the stability and long-term security of economic growth in energy-producing regions."
It also concerned me that unless oil and gas were produced responsibly, their extraction and use could be detrimental to Colorado's citizens and to its indispensable tourism industry. An estimated 12 percent of America's outdoor industry companies reside in Colorado, accounting for more than 100,000 jobs and $10 billion in economic activity. But air pollution was already limiting visibility in Rocky Mountain National Park. By 2007, the bark beetle infestation had spread across nearly half of the forested lands in the entire state, leaving millions of acres vulnerable to fire and leaving wildlife without habitat. In other words, the growing impacts of global warming were casting a shadow on the Colorado Promise. All things considered, clean energy production seemed to be entirely compatible with a state known worldwide for its natural beauty.
Wind Farms and Wheat Fields
I told my team that I wanted my first campaign commercial to be filmed at a location in rural Colorado where wind turbines were generating electricity in a farm field. The commercial, which became known as "Wind Farms in Wheat Fields" among the campaign staff, began airing on September 5, 2006, showing me standing in front of turbines turning the wind into a new cash crop. "In Colorado," I said, "the future is building wind farms ..." I believe that was the moment that separated me from my opponent. I never trailed in the race after the ad appeared. It was clear that clean energy development would be a top priority if I won the election.
I was elected on Tuesday, November 7, 2006. The next day, my staff and I began working on a transition plan. We created advisory teams to interview people for positions in my cabinet. I judged each candidate in part on whether he or she supported the goal of tying energy production and economic development to environmental sustainability. That criterion guided my selection of Colorado's new directors of Natural Resources, Labor, Local Affairs, Regulatory Affairs, Health and Environment, and the director of my Office of Energy Management and Conservation. My final appointment was Don Elliman as the director of Colorado's Office of Economic Development and International Trade – a person who understood the business community better than anyone I knew and who was clearly committed to a clean energy agenda.
Months before, while campaigning on Colorado's Western Slope and speaking to the Colorado Water Conservation Board – a conservative organization – I announced that if elected, I would create a cabinet-level position to work specifically on issues related to global warming. Some of the people on my campaign team were not enthused because of the political risk involved in making climate change a priority in a state with a great history of fossil fuel production. Nevertheless, I made sure that one of my first hires was a member of my staff dedicated to developing a state climate action plan.
In my inaugural address on January 9, 2007, I returned to the theme that had resonated so strongly with Colorado's voters. "The Colorado Promise is simple," I said. "It's about making a better future. A better future for our children and our grandchildren. It's about hope. It's about finding the common ground for the common good."
"Let's start," I said, "by being bolder than any other state when it comes to renewable energy. Let's commit right now to making Colorado a national leader ... a world leader ... in renewable energy. Let's create a New Energy Economy right here in Colorado."
Weeks later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its finding that global warming was unequivocal, and its principal cause was the burning of fossil fuels.
CHAPTER 2From Promises to Policies
Keep every promise you make and only make promises you can keep.
— Real estate executive Anthony Hitt
Within 48 hours of my election in 2006, I met with leaders of the Colorado House and Senate, who agreed that the new energy economy would be a priority in the upcoming session. First up was an expansion of the Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard (RPS) that citizens approved by referendum in 2004. It became apparent immediately that the politics of clean energy had changed dramatically since the referendum. By 2007, the two investor-owned utilities that were required by Amendment 37 to generate 10 percent of their electricity with renewable resources found they would meet the requirement more than five years before their 2015 deadline. Our biggest utility, Xcel Energy, turned from one of the most formidable opponents of the RPS to an advocate for its expansion.
My office worked with the legislature to increase the RPS for large utilities to 20 percent of their electric generation by 2020, double the requirement of Amendment 37, and to expand the RPS to the state's rural electric associations. The political impact of Amendment 37 became clear as the new RPS made its way through the legislature. From 2002 to 2004, before citizens took control, the legislature failed several times to approve an RPS. Now, the bill to double the requirement moved without strong debate through both houses of the legislature, with support from both Republicans and Democrats.
After the doubling of the RPS came bills to develop new transmission lines that would accommodate large-scale wind and solar projects, and to create a task force to map the state's solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable energy resources. Another bill failed to pass the legislature the first year, but succeeded in the second. It created statewide net metering, a policy in which utilities give customers credit for electricity they produce with rooftop solar systems or wind turbines. (Investor-owned utilities already offered these credits as a result of the 2004 ballot initiative.) Yet another new law required electric and gas utilities to engage in demand-side management, also known as energy efficiency, by providing more incentives for customers to improve their equipment and buildings. These were all essential foundation blocks for the new energy economy, and I signed them into law during my first year in office.
I also took early action on Colorado's oil and gas production. Although I became an advocate of sustainable energy during my campaign, I never undervalued the importance of fossil energy production to Colorado's economy or to the nation. I believed then and still do that natural gas, the cleanest of the fossil fuels, will be a valuable part of the nation's energy mix that includes high percentages of low-carbon inexhaustible resources combined with very high levels of energy efficiency.
But to maintain what the industry calls its "social license to operate," natural gas must be produced responsibly. Responsibly means using a wide variety of management practices that protect nearby communities and environmental quality (see Chapter 15).
Responsible production was a growing concern in 2006 and 2007, with Colorado experiencing a boom in natural gas production. By 2007, the number of drilling applications submitted to state regulators grew to 6,400, double the number in 2004. One of my first decisions – and one of the most politically risky – was to reconstitute the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), the panel that oversees the regulation of oil and gas production in the state. In Colorado, the operative statute required the majority of COGCC members be from the oil and gas industry. This law ensured that representatives of the industry had long dominated the commission, which, as you might imagine, resulted in regulations that did not keep pace with dramatic technological improvements, primarily hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling.
During the 2007 legislative session, I advocated, and our legislators approved, two bills to reform the COGCC. One expanded it from seven to nine members so that we could add people who represented environmental and social issues related to oil and gas extraction. The other required the commission to give greater attention to how production affected wildlife, land, water, air quality, and communities.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Powering Forward by Bill Ritter Jr.. Copyright © 2016 Bill Ritter, Jr.. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
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