Amendment 82 is a dark-money attack on Colorado’s clean energy leadership

With election season here, Colorado voters will decide on a wide range of ballot measures. Now is a good time to think about what makes a good ballot measure and what makes a bad one.

A great example of a good one was Amendment 37, which we passed back in 2004. It required Colorado’s large utilities to provide 10% of their electricity from clean, renewable sources by 2015. It was the first such measure in our nation to come from the citizens themselves and not the state government. Not only was that original goal achieved well ahead of schedule, but its success encouraged the state legislature to keep upping the requirement. Colorado’s largest utility, Xcel Energy, is now on track to provide close to 80% of our electricity from solar and wind, now the lowest cost sources of electricity, in just the next four years.

Amendment 37 had important features that make for a good amendment: first, it was a grassroots effort by Colorado citizens, not an industry effort funded by dark money; second, it moved our state forward, not backward; and third, it provided benefits to all Coloradans, not some special interest group.

This year, there is another ballot measure related to energy, Amendment 82, “Right to Purchase and Sell Natural Gas,” that manages to fail all three of those qualifications that you look for in a good amendment.

Amendment 82 is funded by a dark money group, Advance Colorado, that is behind a whole slew of this year’s ballot measures. It would move us backward toward an old polluting fuel, natural gas, and hinder our efforts to take advantage of the clean electricity we now have available to heat our homes. And it would only benefit the natural gas industry while undermining our progress in addressing air pollution, which benefits all Coloradans. It would provide the gas industry with widespread pollution protection and would likely result in costly court battles.

Decades ago, the natural gas industry touted methane gas as a clean fuel compared to burning coal or oil to heat our homes. But, just as with burning gasoline in our cars, the burning of natural gas in our homes results in nitrogen oxide emissions, which are precursors to ground-level ozone production — a major cause of Denver’s serious air pollution problem.

This air pollution has real impacts for both our health and our pocketbooks. A study by the Colorado School of Public Health of the Denver Metro and North Front Range concluded that if we had simply met the federal ozone requirement over the five-year study period, we would have avoided 390 excess respiratory hospitalizations, 35,000 missed school days due to asthma and 170 deaths, and would have saved up to $580 million each year in healthcare costs. If we fully take advantage of our clean electricity to electrify our cars and homes, the benefits will be much greater still.

Colorado has been a leading state in terms of the percent of new car sales that are electric vehicles, so we are making great progress in that regard. And we are also starting to make good headway in electrifying our homes. Xcel Energy now has excellent rebates for purchasing today’s high-performance cold-climate electric heat pumps that can both heat and cool our homes and operate in the coldest weather without requiring any back-up heat. These heat pumps are marvels of modern technology and use energy about three times as efficiently as gas furnaces. Geothermal heat pumps, which extract heat from the ground instead of the outdoor air are even more efficient and are especially well-suited to new home developments.

A modern, all-electric home not only reduces outdoor air pollution but provides clean air to breathe inside our homes as well. This is especially important for homes with children, as recent studies have shown that the pollution from a gas stove significantly increases the incidence of asthma in children. Switching to today’s induction stovetops not only avoids both outdoor and indoor gas pollution but also provides very efficient, controllable and fast stovetop heating.

Amendment 82 would not give us a new right to purchase natural gas. We already have that right, thank you. What it would do is undermine our state’s efforts to reduce both air pollution and climate change emissions and cost our state money in legal battles. Its purpose is to benefit one special interest group: the methane gas industry. It’s a bad deal for the rest of us.