Too many climate activists mope around like Joe Btfsplk, the character in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner that walks around with a permanent dark cloud over his head. Yes, the outlook is bleak with all the heat domes and waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, tropical storms and hurricanes, and rising sea levels that are here and now. We’re close to blowing past the 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming from preindustrial times mark the 2015 Paris Climate Accords set for us to avoid by 2030.
The current administration in Washington has declared all out war on climate remediation efforts. Then presidential candidate Donald Trump called the fossil fuel barons together in Mar-a-Lago in 2024 to ask for a billion dollars in campaign contributions in return for his unflinching support. That’s one campaign promise he’s delivered on. Trump thinks windmills are ugly. I assume he sees coal plants as attractive.
The Secretary of Energy, Colorado’s own Chris Wright, acknowledges the reality of climate change, but sees the effects coming far in the future, his children’s problem, and cautions against “climate alarmism.” Look out your window, Chris, and you’ll be alarmed, too. Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, doesn’t even recognize the facts. He calls the concept of an energy transition a “semi-religion.” Get the faith, Doug.
Through all this, there’s reason for optimism. We have the tools available to fix the problem. Renewable energy is flourishing, making up 91% of all new electricity capacity in the U.S. the first five months of 2025. The world’s second largest economy, China, is building twice the amount of renewables as the rest of the world combined. They achieved their wind and solar objectives in 2024, six years earlier than projected.
Locally, cooperative power provider Holy Cross Energy has committed to 100% renewable by 2030 and they’re going to make it in a walk. Holy Cross already achieved 100% in March of this year because the Comanche 3 coal plant in Pueblo was down again and the average for the year looks like 90%. Xcel Energy, the national, investor-owned power company that serves the majority of Carbondale, stands at 47%. They’re estimating to be 100% by 2050.
A federal judge has ruled there is insufficient evidence of an “energy emergency” to keep a coal plant in Michigan open past its scheduled termination date as ordered by Wright. Wright also kept the Craig, Colorado coal plant open after its planned December 2025 shutdown due to the “emergency.”
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, co-owners Tri-State Generation, Transmission Associates and Platte River Power Authority, and environmental groups Earthjustice and Sierra Club have sued to have the plant closed.
The Roaring Fork Transportation Authority has added 11 electric buses to its fleet along with the eight it already has. Electric vehicle sales in this country are lagging because of insufficient charging facilities, but they’re booming in China and Europe. The majority of passenger vehicles sold in China are fully electric or plug-in hybrids.
Earthjustice, a legal environmental nonprofit, has had a string of victories lately. They’ve blocked oil and gas pads in the Gulf of Mexico (not America), ended fracking on Pawnee lands in Oklahoma, supported all-electric building codes in Denver, New York, Los Angeles and Oak Park, Illinois, stopped Enbridge Energy’s oil pipeline underneath the Straits of Mackinac in the Great Lakes, got a stay in the Department of Defense’s (not War’s) freeze on wind farms, fought unfair solar fees in Arizona, and prevented liquified methane gas terminals in the Gulf of California.
Pollution regulators are asking Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission to apply tougher emissions restrictions on Commerce City’s Suncor refinery. Black Hills Energy, a Glenwood Springs methane gas company, is building battery storage for wind power.
On a personal note, I had a discussion with a friend lately about the record-breaking, oppressive heat we experienced this summer. She’s an Evangelical Christian and a devout Trumpster from Rifle. I said the climate’s screwed up (I don’t drop F-bombs around her). Without prompting, she said, “It’s all those greenhouse gases we’re emitting.”
The word’s getting out. We’re hearing concerns about the climate from unlikely sources. That’s who we climate crusaders need to target and quit preaching gloom and doom to the choir.