From email from Pete Kolbenschlag:
The first week of July included at least four days in which the global temperature was the highest ever recorded on earth. A recent study shows mountain areas are seeing a decrease in snowpack and an increase in intense rain events. Many high elevation places in our region, including Pitkin, Garfield, Gunnison, Delta, Montrose, and Ouray counties, are already heating more quickly than other places in the United States and world.
As the tourist season began, wineries and businesses in Colorado’s North Fork Valley were facing an unexpected challenge – the main highway east was destroyed by the raging run-off from a small. normally placid creek. And while, so far, western Colorado has avoided the smoke-choked skies we have suffered in years past, the Mountain West has been the anomaly as never-before-seen levels of wildfire ravage Canada and pour smoke across much of the U.S.
The climate emergency is here. While its costs remain unknown, failure to act with the urgency needed only means that what comes due will be even more expensive and more deadly. Western Slope watersheds like the Gunnison River and the Roaring Fork are vital national headwaters. As this area heats more quickly than most of the world, and as our snowpack shifts to torrential rainfalls more damaging than welcome – the fate of this region matters to more than just the locals who live and work here.
And for those who follow climate science, the crisis we face is existential and demanding of immediate, far-reaching action. But science also indicates that we still have some time to act. We are living right now through the impacts of global heating, which will now–due to decades of wilful inaction–certainly grow worse. But how worse remains up to us.
The Inflation Reduction Act is the largest-ever federal contribution to addressing climate change. Through the IRA, western Colorado can solidify itself as a global climate leader. Small cities like Glenwood Springs, Montrose, Grand Junction and Gunnison can provide the research, professional services and economic muscle to help move results-driven solutions forward. And even rural places with small populations, like the North Fork Valley, can showcase rural climate leadership – such as installing more renewables on farms through systems such as agrivoltaics, providing more funding to help farmers shift toward more regenerative practices, and prioritizing the conservation and rehabilitation of degraded lands, habitats, and watersheds.
Climate science does not care if someone believes in it or not. And after decades of intentional industry paltering, direct lies and misdirection too many still think that climate change is not real, is not significant, is not human-driven, or is not worth the effort and cost to address. They are wrong. But the damage from these false-beliefs is more the cover they provide to cowardly or corrupt politicians and policy-makers looking for an excuse, often any excuse, not to act. Industry disinformation campaigns find public purchase which can stymie individual action, but it is the armies of lobbyists that do the real damage, The decades of industry lies have provided cozy cover for failed leaders, bad actors and polluters. And now the crisis the fossil fuel industry’s own (covered-up) science accurately described is here. Hitting like a heatwave, Like a mudslide. Like a wildfire.
But that’s not just my observation: the world’s preeminent body on climate change and climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change largely seems to agree in its 6th Assessment, noting in its spring 2022 installment that sufficient climate action is “being impeded by deliberate misrepresentation of that science to protect vested interests,” according to a summary from the Imperial College of London.
Colorado does not need leaders driving toward the future by looking in the rear-view mirror. The Western Slope has a once-in-generations opportunity right now to step forward as a major force, and national model, for climate action. Now, with historic funding on the table to help western Colorado prepare for and mitigate contributions to and impacts from climate change – the resistance of some leaders to taking action is more than just a climate failure, it is an economic and community-leadership failure too.
With leadership matched to the moment, this work can prepare our communities for what is to come and for a more sustainable energy future. But to seize that opportunity we need policymakers, in city and county governments, in the State House, and in Congress, ready to step up with the commitment and drive to meet it.
Pete Kolbenschlag is a rural advocate, long-time climate activist, and director of the Colorado Farm & Food Alliance which works to provide a platform for rural leadership to support secure, equitable and resilient food systems, conservation, and climate action.He lives in Delta County.