DENVER – Colorado will push ahead to develop more affordable renewable energy despite President Donald Trump’s order eliminating many restrictions on fossil fuels production, Gov. John Hickenlooper said Wednesday.
Hickenlooper said Colorado has already met carbon pollution goals under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which is under challenge in the courts and could be weakened or rescinded under the executive order that Trump signed Tuesday.
The Clean Power Plan requires states to cut carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2030.
The environment is vital for Colorado residents and the state’s tourism industry, Hickenlooper told reporters.
“Clean air, clean water continues to be an important part of Colorado’s brand,” he said.
Hickenlooper said it’s important to keep clean energy costs low to avoid burdening residential consumers with higher electric bills. He said market forces are already driving down renewable energy costs.
Even if Colorado is successful in cleaning its own air, pollution from coal-fired plants in neighboring states spills over into the state, Hickenlooper said.
Some states have stopped drawing up new pollution control plans while the Clean Power Plan is in court, but others are moving ahead on their own initiatives to cut carbon emissions or encourage renewable energy, said Noah Long, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Santa Fe.
Falling prices for wind and solar energy are a factor, he said.
“Coal is increasingly uneconomic across the country,” Long said. “Nothing in the executive order changes that.”
The governors of California, New York, Oregon and Washington have criticized Trump’s order. Some said they’ll aggressively pursue policies to counter climate change. The governors of Nebraska and Wyoming said they support the president’s order.
Environmental groups and the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Native Americans asked a federal court in Montana to block Trump’s action to lift restrictions on coal sales from federal lands.
The U.S. Interior Department last year placed a moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands to review the climate change impacts of burning the fuel and whether taxpayers were getting a fair return from the leases mining companies paid the federal government to extract coal.
Trump’s order lifted that moratorium.
Hickenlooper said he doubted that Congress or Trump’s administration would attempt to overturn state air pollution rules that are stricter than federal standards.
Colorado, the seventh-largest energy-producing state in the country, already has tougher rules than the federal government for finding and fixing methane leaks from oil and gas wells, tanks and pipelines. Methane is a form of natural gas.
“I’d be pretty shocked if they suddenly said, ‘Sure, you’re saving your air, it’s too clean,’” he said.
