President Obama’s call to increase domestic energy production Tuesday received a rosy reception from Colorado’s lefty lawmakers but was all but ignored by its conservative congressional delegation who are still smarting from the commander-in-chief’s recent blocking of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
The state’s largest rural election association last week once again elected just one green candidate in a bloc of three members looking to reform policies currently geared more toward conventional power sources. Mike Kempe, a chemical engineer and research scientist for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, was re-elected to the Intermountain Rural Electric Association board by a margin of 2,892 votes to 1,870 for challenger John Dendahl. Kempe is often to the lone dissenting vote on the board of the IREA, which has just under 140,000 members in the Front Range suburbs between Denver and Colorado Springs.
Backers of a bill that would have prompted the study of a “feed-in-tariff” program in Colorado to connect renewable energy generators to the grid say the state’s major utilities quietly killed the legislation in committee last week because of their “continuing love affair with fossil fuels.”
Overall taxpayer money delivered to the Pentagon and its contractors in 2010 will add up to well more than an all-time record-breaking $1.01 trillion. As has been widely reported, Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked the new fiscal-conservative Republican Congress to consider cutting the Pentagon budget by $80 billion over the next five years, meaning the Defense budget will still rise in that time but not by as much as it would have done. Republicans derided the proposal, arguing that the country was at war and that there was plenty of spending to be cut elsewhere. As the 112th conservative Congress got underway, Colorado GOP Rep. Doug Lamborn, for example, introduced two bills that would strip public broadcasting of roughly $500 million per year. Lamborn’s bills won’t pass. China meantime is serious about taking over the reins of the world economy. It is spending a fraction of what the U.S. spends on Defense and double what the U.S. spends on the clean energy technologies of the future– and it is selling those technologies and its expertise in creating them to customers around the world including to the cash-strapped U.S.A.
BOULDER — Boulder voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly supported a measure that will allow the city to retain $1.4 million in revenue while the exploring clean energy supply options for the future.
Earlier this year, the city council decided not…
Despite the Gulf oil spill, a massive pipeline break in Michigan and broad concerns about global warming, ambitious climate-change and energy legislation is likely dead for the year. That poses a conundrum, going forward, for environmentalists: How to convince lawmakers of the need for legislation to sever the country’s decades-long ties to oil and to reform energy policy more generally?
BOULDER– The state’s famously progressive college town is rallying around what it sees as a rare opportunity to seriously cut into its carbon footprint. Boulder’s twenty-year franchise agreement with Xcel Energy is set to expire at the end of this year and community members are looking to exit the contract and cobble together new deals to make a major shift toward renewable clean energy sources like wind and solar power.
A pair of energy bills sponsored by Boulder Democrat Claire Levy have cleared both houses of the State Legislature and are headed to Gov. Bill Ritter’s desk for signatures.
Levy’s rural electric association (REA) election transparency bill (HB 1098)…
DENVER– Around 50 environmental volunteers clad in raincoats, ponchos, and umbrellas “stormed” Senator Michael Bennet’s office on Wednesday urging him to take a strong stance protecting the Clean Air Act from recent attacks in Congress.
Even as Gov. Bill Ritter was touting Colorado’s “New Energy Economy” at the 5th annual Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas-USA conference in Denver Tuesday evening, he was being blasted from the right for his
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