It also has significant reserves thanks to the Denver-Julesburg Basin, and has more than doubled gas output from 2000 to 2022.
But Democrats in Colorado want to put a stop to that by 2030.
If passed, Colorado will stop issuing all new oil and gas permits before Jan. 1, 2030, and will start to reduce the number of permits issued in 2028 and 2029. Moreover, the bill will require that all permits issued after July 1 start operating before December 31, 2032.
“You can’t restrict something like that—the demand is ostensibly going to stay the same, at least in the near term—so you can’t restrict the supply without automatically increasing the cost,” he told The Epoch Times.
Colorado Republican Sen. Cleave Simpson, who sits on the Agricultural and Natural Resources Committee and is considering the bill, agreed.
“If passed, this just adds to the long list of policies over the last 15 years that continue to make life in Colorado less and less affordable,” he told The Epoch Times. “I assume the national impacts are calculable and problematic as well, I just haven’t considered them given the enormous impact the policy has just on Coloradans.”
The Epoch Times reached out to all of the bill’s sponsors for comment. None of them responded to the request.
Banning Energy
In addition to supplying domestically produced oil and gas to the United States, Colorado’s oil and gas industry significantly impacts Colorado’s economy.
Similarly, in 2021, oil and gas resources accounted for over $48 billion of the state’s total $371.3 billion GSP.
Despite that, Colorado Democrats want to limit Colorado’s fossil fuel production severely.
“Climate pollution from oil and gas wells in Colorado exacerbates climate change, which has been declared the greatest global threat to public health by two hundred medical journals, and has adverse impacts on Coloradans’ health and well-being as described in section 25-7-102, Colorado Revised Statutes.”
Mr. Simpson said about the effort, “The impacts to the people of Colorado are significant, and the outcomes are unconscionable; schools, fire districts, ambulance districts, water districts, the State Water Plan, and local government services all negatively impacted by the proposed legislation.
“I see NO benefits to Coloradans if the bill passes.”
Mr. DeGraaf said his office is looking into SB 159’s effect but said, “We don’t know what the overall impact is. They are keeping those numbers pretty well obscure.”
But speaking to the underlying assumption in the bill—that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant and must be minimized—Mr. DeGraaf said that Colorado legislators aren’t basing their legislation on science.
A Tangled Web
Mr. DeGraaf has submitted Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) requests for over a year and sought information from Colorado senators and representatives who are primarily responsible for pushing energy legislation. He specifically asked for “scientifically validated documentary materials that support the CO2 reduction goals” and “books, papers, maps, photographs, cards, tapes, recordings, or other documentary materials” that legislators based their legislation on, among other scientific material.
The Epoch Times reviewed the CORA results and resulting communications.
In response to Mr. DeGraaf’s CORA request to Colorado Sen. Dafna Michaelson-Jenet, Rep. Manny Rutinel, Rep. Stephanie Vigil, Rep. Mike Weissman, Rep. Tammy Story, Rep. Judy Amabile, and Rep. David Ortiz, he received the reply, “The Members have reviewed the records in their custody at the time of your CORA request and do not have any records that are responsive to your request.”
He sent separate CORA requests to Rep. Brianna Titone, and Mr. Priola—a sponsor of SB 159—and received the same response.
From the Colorado Energy Office, Mr. Toor told Mr. DeGraaf, “The Energy Office does not set emissions goals. The greenhouse gas emissions goals that our office is charged with meeting were set by the legislature through multiple pieces of legislation over the last five years.”
The result, Mr. DeGraaf said, is that the legislation driving emissions reduction requirements in Colorado doesn’t have any scientific basis.
“I would say there’s not just a lack of knowledge, or even a lack of curiosity into it—I‘d say there’s a staunch rejection of knowing,” Mr. DeGraaf said about the science surrounding CO2 and emissions. “When you say, ’Hey, what you’re doing is dangerous for Colorado,‘ you’d think that maybe they‘d say, ’Okay, maybe we should look at the data.’
“But they’re not interested in looking at the data and actively avoid it.”
When Mr. DeGraaf asked Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, what he based his “climate goals” on, Mr. Polis’s office deferred to Mr. Toor.
“It’s a big circle,” Mr. DeGraaf said. “‘He’s responsible.’ ‘No, he’s responsible.’ I think that’s an interesting way for climate science to be done.
“We never really get the scientist in the room. They just defer to the scientists and say, ‘Well, we have to do this because of the science,’ and it’s like, ‘Well, where are the scientists?’ And they say, ‘Well, they’re too important and busy to answer the question.’
“Then when you challenge them scientifically, they say, ‘Well, I’m just doing what the scientists tell me.’ So then when you ask, ‘What is the actual science, or put me in contact with these people,’ they come up empty.”
Ideology Over Reality
In addition to not basing their climate legislation on science, Mr. DeGraaf said many Colorado legislators are pushing an ideological agenda with a real-world impact.
“Ranches in Colorado are less profitable, and ranchers are going bankrupt,” Mr. DeGraaf said, as an example. “All these taxes, and now wolves are fouling them up. And for beef, the profit has been cut in half.
“And then you look at [Democrats’] overall goals, they’ve got this big push to turn everybody into vegans. Well, what’s the best way to make everybody eat less meat? Increase the price of meat so people can’t afford it.
“So, I think you’ve got a lot of ideological agendas in Polis’s office, and you know, he’s just pushing them through one at a time by various means, and CO2 is one of them. And the nefarious thing is that they’re basically getting people to vote for it. They’re getting the people of Colorado to vote to cut their own throats.”
Mr. DeGraaf said that when he asks supporters of reducing CO2 how they plan to replace fossil fuel energy by 2030, he’s repeatedly told that, while they don’t have an actual plan per se, they believe technology will advance enough “by then” to make the transition to green energy viable.
“It’s great to have goals, but they must be feasible,” he said, adding that the most concerning proposal he’s heard is about CO2 sequestration, which is essentially burying CO2.
“Even if you make something idiot-proof, the world will bring you a better idiot,” Mr. DeGraaf said. “The insanity of the CO2 superstitions continues to prove that you can neither appease tyranny nor insanity, and the Greeniacs epitomize both.
“CO2 experts testified in committee that they someday hope to reduce the cost of sequestration to $100 per ton, with a capacity to sequester 1 billion tons per year—literally pumping $100 billion straight into the ground.
“Strangely, they did not know how much CO2 exists in the atmosphere for a perspective on what sequestering 1 billion tons would mean. Well, from what I’ve been able to determine, there are over 3,200 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, so even if CO2 was a problem, $100 billion to ’solve' less than one-third of one-thousandth doesn’t sound like a good use of $100 billion each year. But that discussion or even consideration is not welcome in any way, shape, or form—tilting against CO2 is considered virtuous.”
‘Useful Idiots’
Mr. DeGraaf said the push to reduce CO2 both in Colorado and the broader United States does not benefit humanity.
“You’re trying to get rid of the foundational molecule of life and literally asking people to pump it into a hole in the ground,” he said.
“I don’t know how much of it is malevolence [in Colorado]. I think it’s malevolence at some level. But I'd say most of it is ignorance just from the sense that they’re promoting an agenda they don’t fully understand. You know, most of the people supporting it, pushing it, are just useful idiots.”
“The figures in this report are staggering and underscore the critical importance of Colorado’s natural gas and oil industry to the state’s broader economic health,” Colorado API Director Kait Schwartz, said.
“They are also timely in the wake of a deeply troublesome legislative session during which lawmakers introduced a bill that could have functionally ended new production in the state. Much more than our industry and affordable energy are at stake each time policymakers pursue radical undertakings handcrafted by special interests whose explicitly stated mission is to end oil and gas production.
“Coloradans of all political stripes should consider these economic figures in the context of the dangerous political games being played, because this industry remains an irreplaceable bedrock of our state’s economic vibrancy.”
