Tag: Beetle Kill

Gov. Bill Ritter Wednesday will be in Vail – sometimes derided as an I-70 truck stop with a ski area – to sign a...

Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Udall Wednesday blasted the "obstructionist" tactics of Republicans angered by the passage of health care reform who are crippling the legislative process using an obscure rule to block hearings on Democrat-sponsored bills.

Republicans angered over the passage of health care legislation Sunday have blocked a hearing scheduled by U.S. Sen. Mark Udall for this afternoon on how...

Leaf-gaping season is officially over in Colorado’s high country, and many observers say it was one of the shortest and most disappointing displays of...

One of the biggest loopholes conservationists want closed in Colorado’s revised roadless rule released by the state Monday is an exception for logging roads...

Two state lawmakers from mountain districts are working Capitol Hill the next couple of days in a bid to get the federal government to find some funds to fight the growing mountain pine beetle infestation that has laid waste to more than 2 million acres of Colorado forest. State Rep. Christin Scanlan, D-Dillon, and state Sen. Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, whose districts have been ravaged by the rice-sized bugs, testified before the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands Tuesday that resulting wildfires could knock out the nation’s electrical grid and spoil water supplies for millions of downstream consumers in other states.

Four Colorado projects that convert wood waste, or biomass, into energy received a total of $1 million in federal stimulus funds Thursday, but a state with more than two million acres of dead and dying lodgepole pine forests could use a lot more.

Gov. Bill Ritter is hitting the slopes at Arapahoe Basin today to sign some ski-related bills — not to indulge in the two inches of new snow that fell overnight at the state’s remaining ski area still open for business. If Ritter gets the same kind of reception he got Tuesday during a bill-signing ceremony at the Capitol, he’ll likely get a snowball in his ear at A-Basin, which closes for the season Sunday.

Robb Walt, cofounder of Littleton-based Community Power Corporation, says he’s doing a brisk business these days in modular biopower systems, but not in Colorado despite a huge potential fuel load in the form of a mountain bark-beetle epidemic that’s killed millions of acres of lodgepole pines.

Rifle Mayor Keith Lambert, in an effort to offset the ups and downs of the fossil fuel industry, is offering free or very cheap city-owned land to renewable energy companies interested in relocating to the Western Slope natural-gas capital.