'Both Sides of the Meter' at Colorado Climate Summit

Colorado is a hotspot for energy innovation: The city of Fort Collins is pushing the envelope with a net-zero energy central district. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been generating schemes for energy efficiency and clean energy for 30 years. And the city of Boulder has more solar panels than some states.

All of these were featured programs at the first-ever Colorado Climate Summit, held on the campus of the University of Colorado last weekend in the middle of – you guessed it – the unusual weather event of an early blizzard. But the mood wasn't self-congratulatory -- it was urgent. Hopeful, but urgent. Efficiency and solar panels on roofs aren't enough, warned one clean energy expert.

“We have to look at both sides of the meter,” said Leslie Glustrom, pointing at a chart of Boulder’s carbon emissions that, despite tremendous work and city effort to reduce carbon emissions, showed marginal gains. Glustrom pointed out that Boulder is still dependent on a coal plant. “If you took that offline it would be like taking 150,000 homes off the grid,” she said.

"Utilities are standing in the way of the clean energy transition," warned Glustrom, because the inertia is too strong -- they must be pressed via local government into transitioning to renewables. Boulder itself is taking matters into its own hands, and since voter approval in 2011 has been developing its own publicly-owned utility.

Colorado climate activists of all stripes came to the summit to talk about ‘both sides of the meter;’ it is unavoidable to think about supply in a state facing massive fracking development, as well as traditional oil and gas.  Writer and publisher Robert Castellino founded the sponsoring organization Climate Colorado earlier this year after going through the Climate Reality Project’s international leadership program (which has now trained leaders in Brazil, South Africa, Australia and elsewhere.) The summit also included discussions on youth, growing environmental literacy, the climate's impact on aging, diversifiying and internationalizing the climate movement and more.

You could feel an urgency about climate change in the room; Colorado is really the canary in the coal mine, already seeing more statistically unusual weather than the rest of the country. Massive wildfires consumed the forests of the Front Range around Fort Collins in 2012, and five-day floods killed eight people and destroyed 2,000 homes last September. Driving through these mountains, it is eerie: You see a landscape of orange-brown-black trees. Most of the presenters connected their passion directly to the destruction they had already seen -- the disappearance of a salmon species, or fracking wastewater ponds in a place of great beauty. Many talked about their homes and several teared up.

“In Colorado, climate change is happening. The effects are real," Castellino said.

Localizing the climate fight is working in Colorado, as several of the presenters told the assembled crowd at the Gettches Wilkinson Resource Center at the CU law school. Coloradans have been able to get municipalities to pressure utilities; grassroots advocates in Lafayette were able to use the city's franchise renewal process to fight for a transition to clean energy.

The anti-fracking movement in Colorado has also had success, mostly in the northern part of the state, passing local bans in Lafayette, Broomfield, Boulder, Boulder County and Fort Collins, according to Frack Free Colorado organizer Suzanne Spiegel. (Lafayette's unique initiative declared that the community right to clean air and water is equal to mineral rights held by individuals.) So far, oil and gas developers are still able to head off statewide change.

The summit will culminate in the Switch 2020 plan and several other collaborations put forward by Climate Colorado.

Image credits: Lee Buchsbaum