Volts podcast: Will Toor on Colorado's burst of clean energy policy

In this episode, Will Toor of the Colorado Energy Office shares
about the state’s ambitious climate agenda and the array of
energy policies they’ve been passing under a Democratic political
trifecta.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Washington, DC, is a slow-motion nightmare right now, but out in
the states — at least the states that Democrats control — climate
and clean energy policy is still happening. A few weeks ago, I
covered the fantastic policies recently passed in my home state
of Washington (see also my podcast with Washington legislator Joe
Fitzgibbon).


Today, we turn our gaze to Colorado.


In 2018, Democrats gained a trifecta in the state — the
governorship and both houses of the legislature — for the first
time since 2013. They promptly got busy passing a vast array of
clean energy policies: reform of electric utilities, support for
electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, new restrictions
on oil and gas production.


During this year’s legislative session, Gov. Jared Polis released
a comprehensive roadmap to 90 percent statewide reductions in
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and the state legislature
tackled clean buildings, industry, environmental justice, reform
of state transportation agencies, reform of natural gas
utilities, and on and on.


To discuss this flurry of activity, I turned to a man who has
been involved in Colorado politics since the previous century:
Will Toor.


Toor was mayor of Boulder from 1998 to 2004. From 2005 to 2012,
he was Boulder County Commissioner. During all that time he was
also board chair at the Denver Regional Council of Governments,
where he led efforts on climate policy. He then became director
of the transportation program at the Southwest Energy
Efficiency Project, until 2019, when the newly elected Polis
appointed him to run the Colorado Energy Office.


Toor has had a hand in shaping Polis’s energy agenda from the
beginning, and he has been closely involved in negotiating bills
through the legislature. He helped walk me through Colorado's
sector-by-sector approach to emissions, what the state has
accomplished so far, and what might be next for it.


Listen, enjoy, and if you appreciate work like this, please
consider becoming a paid subscriber to Volts.


As a bonus, here’s a picture of Toor in 2003, as mayor of
Boulder, hosting visiting scholar Noam Chomsky.


Text transcript:


David Roberts


All right, with no further ado, Will, welcome to Volts.


Will Toor


Thank you.


David Roberts


So I've been following states and climate policy for a long time,
and it seemed like a few years ago, Colorado just kind of burst
out of the gate at a full gallop and has been going really strong
now for two sessions of the legislature. So maybe just by way of
starting, tell us some about the political developments of
Colorado over the last five years that put all the pieces in
place that allowed this burst of activity.


Will Toor


Yeah, really, I think what happened was that in 2018, we both
elected a new governor, Jared Polis got elected governor on a
platform of, among other things, 100% renewable electricity by
2040 and bold climate action, and we elected a Democratic Senate.
We had had a Democratic House, but had not had a Democratic
Senate since 2014. And so the combination of having a governor
who was committed to climate action and a House and a Senate that
were aligned and the fact that there was just kind of a pent-up
demand for action on climate and clean energy really set the
stage for a kind of monumental legislative session in 2019.


So that year we had, depending exactly how you count it,
something like 15 major bills on setting climate targets,
modernizing our utility regulation to set our utilities on a
pathway to at least 80% greenhouse gas reductions by 2030. A
bunch of bills on electric vehicles, a bunch of bills on energy
efficiency. We had a major oil and gas reform bill. One of the
things that's a little unusual is that Colorado is a major oil
and gas producer that is actually acting on climate and clean
energy. And Senate Bill 181 completely rewrote the regulatory
structure for oil and gas in Colorado.


Then last year was a little bit quieter because of the pandemic
that kind of shut down our legislative session partway through,
although there was still lots of action at the Public Utilities
Commission and the Air Quality Control Commission. But then this
year has really shaped up to be another year where that kind of
pent-up demand for action really came out at the legislature.


David Roberts


Well, I want to get into some of the specifics of the
legislation, but just as a background political question, because
I'm curious. Do you have a supermajority of Democrats or does
Colorado — do you need a supermajority to sort of override
Republican objections or sort of like, what's the disposition of
the state Republican Party on all of this? Are they just
irrelevantly sitting on the sidelines, or is there some
engagement? What's the degree of Democratic domination, I guess,
is what I'm asking.


Will Toor


So, there's a large Democratic majority in the House. In the
Senate, it's a much narrower majority. For 2019 and 2020, it was
actually a one-vote margin, 18-17. After the 2020 elections, it's
now a 19-16 margin. I would say that some of the issues have been
bipartisan, but the vast majority of votes on clean energy have
been primarily Democrats. There is one Republican in the Senate
who is a very strong advocate for clean energy and climate
action, Senator Kevin Priola, who has actually been a sponsor of
many of the pieces of legislation. Where the Republican Party, I
think, has had an impact has been often helping to shape some of
the pieces of legislation in ways that may make them work better
for their communities.


They often represent rural parts of the state, and there's been a
lot of interest in trying to make sure that we're moving forward
on climate action in ways that can work for rural Colorado in
addition to the urban part of the state. We had one major bill
this year on funding our just transition effort for coal
communities, and that was a very bipartisan bill.


David Roberts


Right, I bet.


Will Toor


Yeah.


David Roberts


So one thing that happened this year, I think prior to most of
the big bills, is the governor issued his roadmap. This is a sort
of roadmap whereby Colorado can reach its goals. So tell us what
the targets are and sort of what is the roadmap, what was the
purpose of the roadmap?


Will Toor


Yeah. So this really came out of that 2019 legislative session.
One of the pieces of legislation that moved forward for the first
time created legislatively adopted GHG targets for the state of a
50% reduction below 2005 levels by 2030 and a 90% reduction by
2050. And the governor asked the energy office to convene the
other major state agencies that were engaged on this — our
Department of Public Health and Environment and Transportation
and AG and Natural Resources — and do both a technical analysis
and a stakeholder process to basically develop the strategic plan
for how are we actually going to achieve the targets that we had
adopted?


We worked with Energy and Environmental Economics, E3, a
consulting firm that's done scoping plans for a number of states
over the years, and really developed a plan that was very much
focused on what was achievable in each one of the major emitting
sectors in the state. So transportation, electricity generation,
the oil and gas industry, residential and commercial fuel use,
and industrial fuel use and process emissions. Those really
dominate our emissions as a state. And we developed sectoral
targets and near-term action steps for each one of those areas.


David Roberts


Right. Maybe it would be helpful, I think, to tell listeners what
is the share of each of those, like, what are the big categories
to the little categories of emissions sector-wise.


Will Toor


So, interestingly, if you look at transportation, electricity
generation, the oil and gas industry, and then fuel use sort of
combined in buildings and industry, each one of those is fairly
similar. They're each around a quarter of our emissions.
Transportation is the largest single source, but by a pretty
small margin.


David Roberts


And it just edged ahead recently. Right. Which is the same thing
that happened nationally.


Will Toor


Yeah, basically, electricity has been decarbonizing faster than
any other sector, so it used to be our largest, especially
because Colorado has traditionally been a heavy coal state. Oil
and gas, it depends a little bit on how you count things. So the
way that we count it, the emissions of methane from the upstream
oil and gas industry are one category, and then the combustion
emissions that they have from the processing of oil and gas
actually fit within our industrial sector. If you put those
together, oil and gas would actually be the largest single
source. So there's different ways that you can parse it.


But the way that we generally parse it is transportation is the
biggest, followed by electricity, followed by oil and gas, and
then industrial and buildings.


David Roberts


Okay, well, let's start with electricity, because in some ways
it's kind of the most straightforward. I think the policy
instruments are sort of the most well understood. The road ahead
is well understood. So what are the big things Colorado is doing
on electricity? I know. Obviously getting rid of coal has got to
be step one, right? Or at least phasing it down.


Will Toor


Yeah. So essentially, again, coming out of 2019, we had an
interesting sort of legal and regulatory structure where our
largest single utility, Xcel Energy, which accounts for more than
half of the generation in the state, had a voluntary commitment
to achieve 80% by 2030. And we worked with them to write it into
statute. So, they were legally required to submit a plan to the
Public Utilities Commission to achieve 80%.


David Roberts


Just them or all utilities?


Will Toor


Well, the way that we structured it, they were legally required.
Other utilities weren't technically required, but we gave a broad
grant of authority to the state Air Commission to regulate them,
but said that if they submitted a plan to the Public Utilities
Commission that would achieve 80% by 2030, then they would have a
safe harbor from additional air regulation until 2030. We then
went out to every utility and said, "wouldn't you rather just do
this on your own terms rather than us have to create a mini clean
power plan for the state?" And essentially all of the utilities
said, well "yeah, that works for us."


And so we're in a place where for other utilities, they have all
voluntarily come forward with plans. We've since passed
legislation that actually puts an additional regulatory piece in
place. And so there's now legislation that says that if any
utility did not come forward with a plan, the Air Commission
within nine months would have to adopt rules requiring them to
get to 80%. But we're in a place where all these plans are just
moving forward and it's been pretty remarkable to see our second
largest utility, Tri-State Generation and Transmission is a
G&T cooperative who provide the electricity for most of the
rural co-ops in the state.


David Roberts


Right.


Will Toor


They are historically very coal heavy.


David Roberts


Yes, I was going to ask. They're legendarily problematic in all
states.


Will Toor


Yeah. They not only owned multiple coal power plants, they
actually, in some ways, were a vertically integrated coal company
in the northwestern Colorado. They owned a coal mine and had mine
mouth power plants. And in the past, you know they were funders
of climate denial at the national level. Their prior CEO was kind
of legendary for a conference where he stated that, to sort of
pull from the NRA, "you'll pry our coal plants out of my cold
dead fingers." That completely changed in 2019. So that CEO was
still the CEO when I started this job. When I came in with
Governor Polis in January of 2019, by April they had new
leadership.


That new leadership came in to meet with me to talk about "how
can I work with the Governor's office to help meet his clean
energy goals." And by January of the next year, Tri-State had
adopted a plan to close every coal power plant they have in
Colorado and New Mexico to reduce in-state emissions 90% by 2030.
And they have since submitted a plan to our public utilities
Commission that would achieve 80% reduction in emissions serving
retail loads. So, including the electricity they're importing
from Wyoming and Arizona. Xcel recently filed their clean energy
plan, and they're exceeding the minimum requirement.


They're proposing approximately an 85% reduction. Our municipal
utilities, one of them adopted a plan to get to 80%, another a
plan to get to 90%.


David Roberts


How much of all this is just going to be shutting down coal
plants? I mean, I guess it's kind of the low hanging fruit. Is
that the bulk of where most of this is coming from?


Will Toor


Yeah, it's basically shutting down coal plants, adding a whole
bunch of utility scale wind and solar, and a fair amount of
distributed generation, adding a fair amount of battery storage,
and backing it up with gas combustion turbines. There is a little
bit — we have one utility, somewhat smaller, rural utility, but
it's very progressive, Holy Cross Energy, who are committed to
100% carbon free by 2030. And they're doing a lot that's focused
on demand flexibility, and a lot more on storage. But at the
large scale, it's really shutting down coal, replacing it with
renewables.


David Roberts


And renewables have gotten crazy cheap in Colorado specifically.
Right? I mean, cheapest I think.


Will Toor


Yeah, we're lucky in that we have both a good solar resource and
a good wind resource. Back in 2018, a whole lot of heads turned
when Xcel did their all-sources solicitation, and they were
getting back bids for wind that were coming in at under two cents
a kilowatt hour. And they were getting solar with storage for
under three cents a kilowatt hour. And that's a lot of what's
enabled this transition, is the fact that you have all these
legacy coal plants that cost four, four and a half cents a
kilowatt hour for operations and maintenance.


It becomes a pretty easy decision to replace that with two cent a
kilowatt hour wind.


David Roberts


Well, this actually raises another thing that happened to
utilities in Colorado, I think it was this year, but they're all
going to join organized markets, RTOs. What's the story there?


Will Toor


Yes, so there was legislation this session, Senate Bill 72, that
is really going to push the state towards an organized market. It
both creates a transmission authority and encourages a larger
buildout of transmission, not only within the state but also
connecting to larger markets. It effectively requires that by
2030, our utilities join organized regional markets. It's not an
absolute requirement if our public utilities commission were to
find that it wasn't in the public interest or that it would
somehow get in the way of meeting our clean energy goals. So it's
not a 100% requirement, but given the fact that it should give us
greater access to wind to the east and solar to the west, and
more of an ability to average renewables over a larger area, it
certainly seems very likely that it will move forward.


David Roberts


What RTO would they be joining?


Will Toor


So the bill does not specify. You can look east towards the SPP
market or you could look west towards ultimately Cal-ISO.


David Roberts


Do you know if there are, I don't want to get on a diversion, but
if there are other western states that are — because this has
been talked about for ages, trying to get a western market
started, do you know if other states are as close as Colorado to
kind of making that jump?


Will Toor


So I think that there is a strong movement across the western
states. You know, I don't know that people are quite ready to
make the jump. There's a multi-state study that Colorado is part
of that Utah is actually sort of coordinating that's looking at
options. There's legislation that I think is being proposed in
other states very similar to the legislation in Colorado. So I
think there's a lot of interest and there's certainly a lot of
discussions taking place but there's a lot of complications in
getting from here to there and doing so in a way that works
financially for customers and for the utilities and that ensures
that the clean energy goals of the different states are honored.


One of the issues that we face is there's some pretty different
politics among the western states.


David Roberts


Yes. Both of which are leery about the politics of the other.


Will Toor


As a sort of interesting digression. One of the pieces of
legislation that got a fair amount of play in the Colorado press
from our fellow state, Wyoming, this year was when they created a
fund of $1.2 million to sue other states for not buying —


David Roberts


I heard about that. I'm just going to assume that that has very
little legal merit.


Will Toor


Yes, I don't think that I would be very concerned with it. And
the truth is we have a fine relationship with Wyoming and I don't
anticipate there will be any litigation.


David Roberts


You don't anticipate being forced by the Supreme Court to burn
Wyoming coal? Okay, so electricity is awesome but in some sense
kind of straightforward. You're going to close down the coal
plants, you're going to ramp up your renewables, you're going to
build a bunch more transmission, you're going to get utilities
oriented in the right direction, get them in a market that seems
all sort of tidy. And doable other sectors are more complicated.
Let's talk about then industry. Sort of industry is known as one
of the difficult to decarbonize sectors or at least less certain
how to decarbonize.


What's the Colorado approach to industry? And it's kind of a side
question how much of what counts as industry in Colorado is just
the fossil fuel industry such that it will disappear when fossil
fuels disappear?


Will Toor


So if you look at our kind of industrial inventory, I think right
now it's about 15 million tons a year, and I think about half of
that is really the combustion emissions associated with the
midstream oil and gas industry. The other half are a refinery
that provides a lot of the liquid transportation fuels on the
Front Range, the Suncor refinery, it's the steel mills or the
steel mill in Pueblo, although that steel mill now has a 250
megawatt onsite solar plant providing a large part of their
electricity. Cement facilities; we've got a couple of large
cement plants.


We also have semiconductor like chip factories and then a lot of
smaller industry that contributes also. And I would say there's a
couple of different pieces that are moving there. So one is on
the regulatory front; the target that we adopted in industry for
2030 is not nearly as aggressive as it is for electricity. So
we're going 80% in electricity. We're headed for a 20% reduction
in industry and that's a 20% below 2005 level. So it's a larger
reduction from today because emissions have grown over time. But
it's certainly what we see as being possible in the industrial
sector is not as deep as the technology and economics allow on
the electricity side.


There are a series of rulemakings that are moving forward at our
State Air Commission. There's one happening right now that's
focused on our trade exposed, energy intensive industries,
basically steel and cement. And then there will be other follow
up ones over the next two years. Under legislation that just
passed, there's a statutory requirement that by the — I believe
it's the end of 2023 — rules need to be in place that assure will
get to that 20% by 2030. The other piece that's moving forward is
we're seeing a lot of activity on the carbon capture and
sequestration front, which is interesting because this was
something that we did not pay a lot of attention to in our first
draft of the roadmap.


Basically our analysis said, "okay, this is something that may be
important post 2030, but we don't think we're going to see a lot
of it in the near term." But then we started hearing from all of
these industrial players who were working on developing projects,
and we ended up not setting any target in the roadmap for what we
needed in carbon capture by 2030, but instead putting together a
carbon capture task force that's meeting this year and is going
to come back to the governor and legislature by the end of the
year with recommendations about what we should be doing on carbon
capture. The big project that has a lot of momentum right now is
actually at one of our cement plants, the Holcim cement plant or
Holcim-Lafarge cement plant in southern Colorado. The town of
Florence is working with Oxy Low Carbon Solutions on a carbon
capture project for that cement plant. And they've done an
initial feasibility study, they're now in a more detailed
engineering study —


David Roberts


To do what with the captured carbon though? What's to be done
with the carbon? Are they going to bury it or are they going to
try to use it somehow, or do they know?


Will Toor


So I think it's a little bit of an open question. One of the
things that we have in Colorado are a lot of saline formations
that are actually geologically good places for sequestering
carbon. There's also a carbon pipeline that crosses southern
Colorado. So they would potentially have the option of using it
for something like enhanced oil recovery, which is probably not —
from a state perspective, we're probably a lot more interested in
seeing it sequestered than seeing it used for something like EOR.
We're also seeing a number of other projects that are smaller
scale that are also in their sort of feasibility analysis side.


So I think it's fairly likely that we're going to see some
meaningful scale carbon capture projects move forward. And as a
state over the next year, we're going to need to figure out what
role do we see this playing in meeting our targets. How do we
look at something like EOR versus true sequestration?


David Roberts


Yeah, that's so tricky. That's so tricky from an accounting
perspective, political perspective, you name it.


Will Toor


One of the things that's interesting is in terms of scale, if you
think about the 20% reduction that we need in the industrial
sector, so we're talking there something like a 3 million ton
reduction. I think that the scale of capture that they're talking
about in just that Holcim project could be on the order of a
million tons a year. We're potentially talking a significant role
there. We're early in our task force process. We won't have
recommendations to the governor until the end of the year. But at
the very least, it's intriguing to really start understanding
what some of the opportunities may be there.


There's also, I have to say, a really interesting project that is
moving forward sort of independently of the state in southern
Colorado. The Southern Utes are historically producers of
methane, kind of coal bed methane. They've got a natural gas
industry and they are working on a proposed project that would be
an Allam Cycle gas plant.


David Roberts


Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.


Will Toor


With, I think, saline storage and saline formations on the
reservation. And they're looking at a fairly large — like their
proposed plant, I think is a 350 megawatt plant. And we weren't
really anticipating that that type of low carbon firm generation
might be coming during this decade. But again, we're seeing
independently a project moving forward that is very interesting.


David Roberts


Yeah, that's such an interesting X factor. The Allam Cycle would
be a great thing for Colorado to stake a claim on.


Will Toor


Yeah.


David Roberts


Okay. That's industry next is the source of a lot of action and
excitement. This particular section, which is buildings, this is,
again, a much less straightforward area in terms of mechanics
about how to get at these emissions than electricity or something
like that. Review a little bit about I mean, there were multiple
pieces of the buildings pushed this session. What all did you
guys do?


Will Toor


Yeah, no, this one is really exciting, and this is one that I
would say has been really interesting because some of the
advocates have argued that we need to focus on sort of
enforceable air regulations that somehow would decarbonize
buildings, and we really couldn't figure out what that looked
like. But what we did come up with was a series of strategies in
the roadmap that all of which amazingly moved through the
legislature this year. We had, I would say, four major bills that
moved forward. Three of them are sort of tools, and then one is
the overall organizing principle that allows those tools to be
applied.


The tools were first, a beneficial electrification bill that
requires our electric utilities to create electrification
programs that are analogous to their energy efficiency demand
side management programs, requires the Public Utilities
Commission to set targets for those programs based upon all cost
effective electrification. And it builds into that cost test the
social cost of both carbon dioxide and methane emissions avoided,
and requires the use of a discount rate of under two and a half
percent. So it pushes you to the higher number from that 2016
interagency study, the same one basically that State of
Washington used. So it starts at about $70 a ton for carbon
dioxide in 2020 and, I forget, I think around 1400 a ton for
methane.


We think that that will drive significant investment in
electrification.


David Roberts


And when you say electrification programs at utilities, you just
mean sort of like incentives for heat pumps and things like that?


Will Toor


Yeah. So on the residential commercial side, we think it would be
primarily heat pumps and heat pump water heaters, and then they
could also be doing things on the industrial side, where there's
a wider variety. It also allows them to create programs to
support new all electric construction. So that's one piece.
Another piece focuses on the gas utilities and it basically
expands existing gas utility energy efficiency programs. Right
now we've got pretty large electric utility programs and quite a
bit smaller gas utility programs. And what this does is it takes
that same social cost of carbon and methane, builds it into the
cost test, and then requires the PUC to set targets based upon
all cost effective energy efficiency measures.


So we think that will drive substantial additional investment in
upgrading existing buildings. Third thing: piece of legislation
focused on commercial buildings. Again, this may sound a little
bit familiar from Washington state. We looked at some of the
successful efforts there two years ago, and it requires both
benchmarking of energy use by those buildings, and then it sets
rulemaking at our State Air Commission to adopt performance
standards for existing buildings that require that the sector as
a whole needs to achieve at least 20% reduction in emissions
below 2005 levels by 2030. And so that's including all of the
growth in the number of buildings since then, the entire sector
has to get to that 20%.


And amazingly, on that one, it actually ended up being something
approaching a consensus bill. It wasn't just the environmental
community —


David Roberts


I thought real estate and builders hate that stuff, what you pull
on them?


Will Toor


So we just worked in good faith with all the parties. We agreed
to create a task force that has significant representation from
building owners of various sorts in developing the proposed
performance standards. But the legislation specifies what the
performance standards have to achieve, and so we need to certify
that those standards will achieve the 20% by 2030. But it was
endorsed by the Building Owners and Managers Association and by
NIOP.


David Roberts


Wow.


Will Toor


And labor was on board with it. That's one thing that's been very
important to us is to make sure that we're moving this forward in
a way that helps provide good jobs. We're making sure that any
utility funded programs or high labor standards — I think it's
very important to us, both substantively and in terms of holding
a broad coalition together to do this in a way that works for
labor and that assures that we're helping to create good jobs as
we go forward. We also really wanted to avoid the kind of sort of
existential battle over building electrification we've seen in
some places, that we saw tank legislation this year.


David Roberts


Breaking out all over. There's running battles all over the
country now on that stuff.


Will Toor


And that sort of feeds into then the fourth big bill that sort of
pulls us all together, and which is, I think, the real innovation
here. Senate Bill 264 that we refer to as the Clean Heap Standard
Bill, sets carbon reduction requirements for our gas distribution
utilities. And it includes in their carbon emissions, the
emissions from combustion of gas by their customers. It again is
aligned with our roadmap targets in that sector. So it's a 22%
reduction by 2030. They're allowed to use multiple measures so
they can do more energy efficiency, they can do more
electrification, they can inject hydrogen into their gas lines,
they can reduce leaks on their distribution system.


And we allowed limited use of what some people call renewable
natural gas. We refer to it as biomethane and recovered methane.


David Roberts


Does that mostly come from agriculture in Colorado, or landfills
or what? Where does that come from?


Will Toor


So, there will be landfills, sewage treatment plants,
agriculture, especially some of our dairy farms. The other place
where I think there is an opportunity is there are abandoned coal
mines in western Colorado that are just pouring methane into the
atmosphere. And as of now, there is only one project in the state
that is capturing and using that methane. So there's a number of
opportunities there. The way it's structured out of the target,
they can reach about a quarter of the target through the use of
recovered methane or biomethane. And the rest of it has to happen
from sort of on-system reduction.


David Roberts


Well, I have a question about this. For utilities that are
electric and gas, this seems kind of straightforward. Like you
just shift from the one to the other, right? Shift from natural
gas to electricity would be your main tool and you're fine with
that. But for natural gas utilities that are just natural gas
utilities, I see the road to these 20%, 22% reductions through
these kind of bricolage efforts: efficiency here, reducing
leaking there. But you don't get to zero with natural gas. If
you're a natural gas utility, the end of this story is you going
out of business, is it not? Or how are natural gas utilities
viewing all this?


Will Toor


So a couple of things I'd say there. So we did structure this
around there's the near term target of the 22% by 2030. The
legislation also has the 90% by 2050. Sets future rulemaking
proceedings for setting targets for 2035, 45 on that road to 50.
So at one level, I would say people are focused on the next
decade. And the way that we've framed it is that none of us
really know what the ultimate solution is going to be. Some
people think they know. There are certainly folks who argue that
the solution is obviously full building electrification and maybe
they're right.


There are others who argue that we're going to figure out a way
to do air capture of carbon induced synthetic methane and it will
be using that or that we're going to get to a point where we can
use higher percentages of carbon or of hydrogen than we think we
do in the pipes. We're not trying to answer that question today
because a) we don't feel like we have enough information to
really answer it. The truth is, nobody has really done the level
of analysis that would be required in Colorado as a cold climate
state to answer: What would it really mean for us to fully
electrify, what would it mean for our electric grid?


Nobody really knows how some of these other technologies are
going to pan out and we don't need to answer that today. So we
intentionally structured something that allows us to use multiple
measures today. It allows the utilities and customers to gain
experience with all of these things. It's going to, I think, lead
to a big increase in the use of heat pumps in Colorado and allow
us to get real experience with using cold climate heat pumps and
working out all the kinks and figuring out how do you get high
levels of customer uptake. It will allow utilities to see what
they can do in terms of making recovered methane and biomethane
affordable at scale.


And then over the next decade, I think we will need to answer
some bigger questions about, "okay, what does it really look like
post 2030?" We're not trying to prejudge those answers. And
because of that, we were able to have a broad coalition that
supported this legislation. Our largest gas utility, Xcel Energy,
is a dual fuel utility. They actually supported the legislation
other utilities were not necessarily actively supporting. But I
believe in the end there were no utilities that were actively
lobbying against the legislation.


David Roberts


Oh, interesting.


Will Toor


And, you know, I think that we had all had the opportunity to
watch what happened in the Nevada legislature this year where
there was a sort of similar effort, but one that I think perhaps
was not as focused on building consensus among multiple parties.
Our sense is that we're a lot better off trying to do it the
Colorado way and get as many people as possible on board, learn
from it, and then we'll figure out what the next steps are.


David Roberts


Right. So for buildings, then you have an overall greenhouse gas
reduction, target-specific boosts for energy efficiency and
electrification specific targets for reducing gas, specifically
gas emissions and energy performance standards. The one thing
that seems to be missing is building codes. Have you tackled
those or addressed those yet or what's the deal with that?


Will Toor


So that's very much on our agenda for the next big thing we need
to do. And we did some work on this in 2019. Colorado is a state
that's traditionally a local control state on building codes. But
we were able to do legislation in 2019 that put certain minimum
standards on local energy codes. But it needs to be updated. It's
not aligned with where we need to be to achieve our 2050 targets.
And so this is something we called out in the roadmap. We didn't
have the bandwidth to do that in addition to everything else this
year.


But I'm certainly hoping that we are going to have some vigorous
stakeholder conversations over the next year and come back to how
do we move forward on building codes in a way that aligns with
where we need to be if we're going to have decarbonized buildings
that get us to 90% or more by 2050.


David Roberts


All right. Well, let's then hit the last one, the biggest one in
Colorado and probably the biggest source of controversy and the
biggest source of angst in climate policy generally, namely
transporation.


Will Toor


Oh, just before we jump to that, could I throw one other, which
is oil and gas? In other places, may not be so big, but for us a
really big part of our emissions is methane leaking from the oil
and gas upstream operations. And that's one where the stars are
kind of aligned, where there's real opportunities to reduce those
emissions. Some of it is driven by sensing technology. There's
just much better ability to actually monitor emissions than there
used to be. And that means that you can actually regulate them
and you can reduce them. And so we've got a target in the roadmap
of at least a 60% reduction in methane emissions and that is
moving forward in a rulemaking process at the Air Commission that
the stakeholding is happening right now.


It will be go to the Air Commission for adoption later this year
and legislation that was just passed puts that into statute. So
the Air Commission rules have to achieve a 60% reduction. It also
requires every two years an inventory process to make sure that
we're on track and requires additional rulemakings to get there
if we find that sort of the real world emissions aren't on the
trajectory that we think they're going to be.


David Roberts


Is part of the thinking behind this. I mean, this is a national
problem and it's a long standing national problem, these leaks.
And the industry has traditionally not been very helpful. They've
demanded voluntary standards and et cetera. Is part of the goal
here to sort of kick start this work and figure things out in
such a way that they can be kind of exported like these sensing
technologies and just ways of doing this or is it that we already
know how to do it pretty well and they're just not doing it well?


Will Toor


The way that I would describe it is, back in 2014, I think,
Colorado adopted our first round of methane regulations, and
those did become the model for the national rates that the Obama
administration adopted. The Trump administration unadopted them,
and they are being reconsidered. So, you know, we certainly would
hope that what we're doing here could help to inform a national
standard in the future. To some extent the way that we arrived at
our targets was we looked at what sort of the leading oil
producers with ESG commitments were saying they could do, and we
said, "Well, great, just like we worked with Xcel to take their
voluntary commitment and put it into the statute. We take you at
your word."


David Roberts


Call your bluff might be another way to put it.


Will Toor


No, I would say we take you at your word and we agree that the
technology has evolved to the point where this is possible. And
we are going to work with you to come up with a workable set of
regulations to ensure that we achieve those targets and that all
of the industry achieves the targets that those with ESG
commitments have made.


David Roberts


Okay, so oil and gas leakage, a huge problem in Colorado and some
other states, is being legislated as well. So we can't avoid it
anymore.


Will Toor


Transportation.


David Roberts


Let's talk about transportation. The thing that grumpy
environmentalists say in response to almost every state sort of
climate action plan or set of legislation — they said the same
thing in Washington. It's fine and dandy to do all this, but
you're also spending a bunch of money on roads, you're also
widening a bunch of highways. We all know, everybody knows now
it's been proven a trillion times that widening roads doesn't
help anything, doesn't reduce congestion.


It just leads to more cars on the road and more pollution. So
maybe say a little bit about the broader transportation context
and how you think about that relative to steps you've taken. And
then let's hear about the steps.


Will Toor


So transportation, as we noted, is now the largest single source
of emissions in the state. Just barely, but it's definitely a big
one. And we face the same issues that, as you noted, kind of
every state that is working on this does. Transportation is a
really challenging sector to work on because it involves the
decisions of millions of people about how they're going to get
around. It is very much influenced by land use decisions that are
made by local governments that include both the decisions to
build very dispersed development that puts housing very far away
from jobs, and the decisions by other communities to enact
exclusionary zoning that doesn't allow housing near the jobs.


We have a tradition of local governments having a lot of
flexibility to make those decisions. And even more than building
highways, that's the big thing that really drives the vehicle
miles traveled.


David Roberts


I was going to address that later, but let's talk about that now
because this is the big missing piece in all climate plans.
Right? And it's like — we know from research that density,
walkability, transit is one of the best and necessary ways to
reduce transportation emissions. You can switch out cars for
electric vehicles, but you still are left with a bunch of the
problems of cars, a bunch of the long commutes, the other kinds
of pollution, just the general unpleasantness. So do state
governments have any instruments or tools whereby to impose some
sort of reason or some sort of positive direction on those local
decisions? How do you think about that?


Will Toor


In the Colorado context, I think the way that I would frame it
is: One big step is that as a state, we're acknowledging we have
a problem. And so in the GHD Roadmap, really for the first time,
we identified exclusionary zoning as an issue that we need to
address as part of our attempts to address transportation
emissions. And this year for the first time, we actually had two
pieces of legislation that are just sort of the initial front of
starting to act on this and they're incentive bills. One of them
is a bill that created a new fund for affordable housing.


And in order for a city to get access to the funding, they need
to do at least one thing from a menu of options. And that
includes making duplexes and triplexes by right in residential
zoning districts. And it includes getting rid of occupancy
restrictions and it includes getting rid of maximum parking
requirements in at least parts of the community. There was
another bill that offered something that cities have wanted for
quite a while, which is greater flexibility to do inclusionary
zoning requirements for rental housing. But again, in order to
get permission to do that, you had to pick from one of these
things that would help to increase housing opportunities and
density within the community.


I think there's a lot of interest in thinking about how do we
continue down that pathway?


David Roberts


You're surely watching California where they're trying to impose
some state rules and the blowback is predictably nasty.


Will Toor


I think that what is going to be politically viable in Colorado,
at least in the near term, will really focus on creating
incentives and it may be figuring out how do we bring more money
to the table and create really meaningful incentives for local
governments. I don't think that the politics here would make it
possible to do a Senator Wiener-like legislation from California.
That's not on the table here. It's not politically viable. But we
are certainly interested in starting to incentivize those local
governments that are on the verge of being willing to go in this
direction because in actual fact, there's a lot of benefits for
the local communities.


It's not just about those broad climate benefits, it's about
creating communities that people can afford to live in and they
can get places by walking. And there's really strong reasons why
this is good for the communities, not just good for the state and
where it works —


David Roberts


Yes, but not always good for the homeowners who show up for the
meetings though. That's the thing with local control.


Will Toor


Yeah, I was a mayor for a number of years and I lived that.


David Roberts


You poor man. What about transit though? Does the state have a
little bit more influence over transit or is that mostly local
too?


Will Toor


So certainly our big transit provider in Colorado is in the
Denver metro area and they are primarily funded by local sales
taxes and they're controlled by an independent board. We did have
a large transportation funding bill this year that I think was
pretty important for starting to change the direction on
transportation in Colorado. It did a number of things, and it
certainly provides money for our State Transportation
Department's ten year plan. That does include major highway
expansions, but it also does a major investment in transportation
electrification. Nearly three quarters of a billion dollars over
the next decade that we think is going to be very important to
achieving our EV targets both in the light duty space and in the
truck and bus world.


David Roberts


What's that money go to specifically? Is it like point of sale
rebates or charging stations or do you know yet?


Will Toor


Well, it does a number of things, and I would say we already have
an existing assignable, refundable tax credit for light-duty
vehicles, and actually for larger vehicles, but it's pretty small
for the larger vehicles as a percentage of their cost. Because it
is assignable, you can actually assign it to the car financing
company at the point of sale. So for the companies that engage in
that, which so far is Nissan and GM, it acts like a point-of-sale
rebate. We also have existing law requiring utilities to invest
and Xcel just got a plan approved to spend $100 million over the
next three years, mainly in infrastructure, but it also includes
enhanced point-of-sale rebates for low-income customers.


David Roberts


Oh, cool.


Will Toor


But this $730 million approximately is divided into three
buckets. One bucket will go to our Department of Transportation,
where it will be used to help transit agencies buy electric
buses.


David Roberts


My favorite.


Will Toor


Another bucket goes to our Department of Public Health and
Environment, where it'll be a clean fleet enterprise that will be
spent on electric school buses, public vehicles, helping Uber and
Lyft drivers switch to electric — and that part is actually
funded by a fee on Uber and Lyft rides. And the fee is one level
if you're in an ICE vehicle and a single passenger, and it's half
as much if you're in an electric vehicle or have two or more
passengers.


David Roberts


Funny.


Will Toor


And then it also will go to helping fleet transition for medium
and heavy-duty trucks. And then the other bucket that lives here
at the Energy Office goes to EV charging infrastructure, and it
goes to supporting low- and moderate-income EV adoption. And the
structure that we're looking at is kind of cribbed from what
we've seen in some other states. And it's sort of like a cash for
clunkers, but where we will work with you on both converting to
an electric vehicle or to an electric bike, if that works better
for you.


David Roberts


Electric bikes, that's going to make some people happy.


Will Toor


Yeah. We started an e-bike pilot last year, and people have loved
it. And we're going to use this money to grow it substantially
because. It doesn't take that much money to do some pretty
significant things with e-bikes. Senate Bill 260 — also this new
transportation funding bill both really ramped up the state
investment in things other than roads. Like historically, most of
our state transportation dollars were, largely by constitution,
were directed towards highways. We did manage to change that for
the local government share of gas tax revenues. A few years ago,
we were able to change it so that's now flexible dollars, it can
be used for transit roads or bikeped.


And so this new bill puts a billion dollars into that local share
that can be used for whatever locals want. It puts a bunch of
money into a multimodal options fund that is basically money that
local governments can apply for for transit or bikeped projects.
They have to match it for one for one. So it kind of doubles the
amount that goes into that multimodal. They created a new air
quality mitigation fund that's kind of focused on our areas that
are in non-attainment with federal ozone standards and on
environmental justice communities. And then it makes a bunch of
changes to the planning process that will have an impact going
forward.


David Roberts


I wanted to ask about that. Where the State Department of
Transportation, you had some new planning requirements there that
they include greenhouse gases in their planning, that they
incorporate induced demand in road planning, which you'd think
like how could any professional transportation agency not be
incorporating induced demand by now? But I'm curious, I mean,
maybe you can't really answer this, but sort of notoriously, this
is true in Washington, like, state departments of transportation
are like dinosaur agencies. They're like the caboose of the
sustainable transportation thinking. I don't know why they all
ended up like that, but do you have that same problem in
Colorado, like, what's the level of sort of wokeness of your
Department of Transportation?


Will Toor


So our DOT has really changed in the last two and a half years.
When Governor Polis came in, he brought in as our DOT director a
woman named Shoshana Lew, who had been in the Obama DOT, where
her role had actually been helping to, among other things,
develop the light-duty vehicle, GHG standards and CAFE standards.
And so she was the first state DOT director who I know, who
really comes from a background of caring about climate.


David Roberts


Right.


Will Toor


And it was certainly a large cultural transition for the agency.
Among other things, it was the first time that there was a young
woman running that agency. And one of the things that is really
striking, that is very different from other DOTs, is the extent
to which many of the leadership positions there are now women
from a climate background. In planning in the new Office of
Innovative Mobility where they created to focus on
electrification and transit and actually hired somebody away from
the Energy Office who was leading our climate and transportation
efforts. So the culture there has really changed.


They've actually, over the last two years, really begun to do
things like incorporate induced demand into their modeling and to
really start thinking much more broadly about the role of
transportation. Shoshana created a new program coming along with
COVID to provide state funding to help with local street
conversions from car-only streets to streets that could be used
for walking, biking, transit, or sort of retail and restaurant
use — that was super popular. People love it. We now have $115
million coming out of this transportation bill to expand that
program. And so we're already seeing, I think, a much more
progressive vision on transportation in Colorado than you saw in
the past.


But this legislation really builds in a focus both on
environmental justice, creates a new division of environmental
justice, requires much more modeling and mitigation of things
like particulate emissions near highways, and it builds in an
ongoing requirement that the DOT incorporate into its planning,
helping to achieve the state greenhouse gas targets. So there's
actually a rulemaking that is about to start at our State
Transportation Commission to create greenhouse gas budgets for
transportation plans, and future plans will have to show how they
can achieve those targets.


David Roberts


Will any of that apply to the current highway widening plans that
are set for the next ten years, or is this just for future?


Will Toor


So it will certainly apply over the next ten years. It does not
apply to the existing plan. Even though you describe them as
ten-year plans, they get updated every few years.


David Roberts


Right.


Will Toor


And so the legislation explicitly requires that the next time the
plan is updated, the new requirements around greenhouse gas
mitigation and whatever new rules are adopted by the
Transportation Commission and the Air Commission would apply both
to the DOT and to our Metropolitan Planning Organizations. And it
also tied some of the new funding to a requirement that in order
to access that new funding, plans would need to be updated within
the next three years.


David Roberts


Oh, interesting. So there's at least a chance then that not all
of the highway widening that's currently in the plan ends up
happening.


Will Toor


So, there are some projects that are certainly going to happen,
the projects that are very far along, and the ones that most
people think probably make sense. We have a highway through
Denver, Highway 270, that is extremely congested, where they are
planning on adding some high-occupancy toll lanes to them that is
going to move forward. There are reasonable arguments as to why
it should move forward and it's going to move forward. There's a
project on Interstate 70 up into the mountains where the road is
three lanes, and then it's two lanes for a while and then it's
three lanes again where they're going to make it continuous three
lanes.


They're very close to starting construction. That's going to
happen. But projects that are further out in the plan will
certainly need to be reevaluated under the new planning rules.


David Roberts


Right. Okay, let's move on to the last big thing I wanted to hit
before maybe the last two things. I want to talk about
environmental justice quickly because there's environmental
justice kind of sprinkled throughout. So what's the big story on
environmental justice and sort of where are you most proud of it
showing up in legislation?


Will Toor


Yeah. So this is an issue that I think in Colorado, as in many
places and as in the national conversation, this has really
become a much larger part of the conversation over the last year.
There's much more community engagement and organizing around
this, and there's a lot of elements in legislation. The climate
legislation that just passed creates a new environmental justice
ombudsperson at our Public Health and Environment Department. It
creates a new Environmental Justice Advisory Board and gives them
some real authority over money because it's going to take
environmental fines that companies pay and transition those out
of our state general fund into a new fund for mitigation in EJ
communities.


And the Environmental Justice Advisory Board will have a huge
role in how that money gets allocated. There was the creation of
this new environmental justice office at CDOT to make sure that
as CDOT is planning transportation projects, they're really
engaging and thinking about some of those historical injustices
and what the impacts of those projects will be. And then there
are multiple places where various utility programs are being
structured so that significant portions of the investment have to
go to benefit either low-income communities or individual
low-income residents. The other place that I think is going to be
a significant focus is as we move forward with these new
transportation electrification investments, we're really going to
have a focus on deploying especially heavy-duty electrification
in those communities that are most impacted by pollution.


So we have an area, for example, in north Denver, where there are
three major highways, tons of trucks and trucking fleets that are
headquartered around there, the Suncor refinery and multiple
other industrial facilities. When you think about the areas that
are most polluted and where people are really being very much
impacted by localized air pollution, that's not the only place in
the state, but it's really a prime example. And it's a place
where, when we think about fleet investments and where we're
going to deploy charging, I think there will be a major focus on
assuring that that's one of the areas that we focus on early.


David Roberts


The one final thing I had a question about that is the advisory
board — I guess when the EJ people hear about something like
that, they're naturally, I think, suspicious a little bit, given
history. So, what teeth does it have? Can it grind things to a
halt? Can it really what are the legal mechanisms around it?


Will Toor


So again, the place where it will have the strongest authority is
over how those new mitigation funds are spent in EJ communities.
But it will also certainly have a voice in the operations of the
Department of Public Health and Environment and will have a voice
in a rulemaking process. But as you said, it will certainly be an
evolving process as we see exactly how it brings the EJ voice to
bear in his rulemakings.


David Roberts


Okay, just by way of wrapping up, I've kept you long enough, now
you've done so much stuff, we could just do a laundry list for 2
hours. There was some controversy along the way, some of the
state environmental groups got upset. And I think, insofar as I
understand it, the idea was that the roadmap that the governor
released doesn't have legally enforceable caps in these sectors.
It relies on sort of the sectoral policies and incentives and
voluntary agreements. And so they tried to put forward a bill,
Senate Bill 200, that I guess basically would have created a cap
and trade system, or at least caps on all these sectors.


And then there was some negotiation and now there are caps on
some sectors and not others. Tell me the capsule version of that
story.


Will Toor


Yeah, I will do my best, and I think you framed it fairly well.
There was certainly a narrative that was out there that the
roadmap was a purely voluntary and aspirational document. I never
quite understood that when we were moving forward in clean
energy, plans at the Public Utilities Commission and rulemakings
on oil and gas at the Air Commission had already adopted low and
zero emission vehicle standards. Have a 2022 hold for medium- and
heavy-duty emissions and looking at fleet rules and indirect
source standards. Like, there's lots of individual sectoral
policies that were enforceable. But what we did not have was an
overall cap or cap and trade program.


David Roberts


An economy wide program. I guess that was the source of sort of
like the complaint, right? They wanted some sort of enforceable
economy wide cap, right?


Will Toor


That's right. And I think there were a couple of issues that we
saw. One is that all of the work that we had done was sort of
focused on this sectoral approach. And we had a set of strategies
that we believe will get us where we need to go, with
transportation certainly being the most challenging sector. And
for a variety of reasons, the administration doesn't believe that
a cap and trade program is right for Colorado and certainly not
right for Colorado today. We also felt like the approach in SB
200 was such that it was going to take many stakeholders,
including labor stakeholders and many stakeholders from different
areas of the state and different industries who have been pretty
willing to work with the state on implementing the roadmap.


And it was going to turn them into determined opponents of
climate action in Colorado.


David Roberts


But if the targets are there, why would making them legally
enforceable turn these people against them unless they weren't
planning on meeting them? Do you know what I mean? I mean, that's
the suspicion.


Will Toor


I think part of the problem was that you were looking at making
things enforceable in sectors where it didn't work very well. So
ultimately what the administration said was there were big parts
of that bill that we liked. We liked the environmental justice
provisions, we liked the small fees on GHG emissions to better
fund the climate division within our public health and
environment. We liked the social cost of carbon language, which
broadened the use of social cost carbon for air regulatory
purposes. And we were fine with having the statutory caps in
areas where it aligned with strategies that made sense to us.


So, we were already doing the rulemaking on oil and gas that's
now statutory, and we're fine with having the legislature say
"you have to achieve what we were planning on achieving anyhow."
They did the same thing on the industrial sector and it added
additional regulatory teeth on the electric side. That doesn't
really change much because all the utilities were headed there
anyhow and we already had the authority to act if we needed to if
a utility didn't move forward. But it does strengthen that. So
all of those we were fine with. Where we had issues were saying
that the Air Commission had to adopt a cap on buildings because
who are you capping?


Like, we have the clean heat plans on the gas utilities. We think
that that's a really creative approach to doing sort of the
closest you can get to an overall regulatory requirement on
buildings that makes sense. The way that it was written, we
believe, would have required us to create a cap and trade program
on buildings that would likely have imposed significant costs on
consumers. Whereas the way we've structured it, we have a program
that lives primarily at the Public Utilities Commission that
requires them to work with utilities to develop the most
cost-effective programs possible. That's not what we would have
gotten out of a cap on the enforced through the air side.


Similarly, on transportation, we know that, yes, there are models
out there like TCI (Transportation Climate Initiative) in the
northeastern states. But when we looked at TCI, which I think we
would have been forced to do something like that, what we looked
at was what, seven years now of debate over how to implement it.
Most of the states —


David Roberts


Not implemented by any of the states yet, right? I mean, it's
still —


Will Toor


Not implemented anywhere. And when you look at the projections of
what it would actually do, it would generate revenue to invest in
electrification and multimodal transportation. When you look at
the amount for the four states that are talking about going
forward, you look at the amount that would be invested per state.
And we are getting more money invested in electrification and
multimodal transportation by passing our transportation bill this
year than we would if we were a TCI state. So we sort of looked
at it and said, why would we do this incredibly complicated and
controversial transportation cap approach when we can just work
with a wide variety of stakeholders, have support from the
business community and from local governments and from the
environmental community on these new transportation fees and just
move forward in a much more straightforward and less
controversial way?


It just seems like common sense to us. And ultimately we were
able to get to a place with the legislative sponsors and
advocates where we moved forward with the legislatively adopted
emissions caps in those sectors where it works, move forward on
the whole suite of buildings bills that we think is the most
elegant approach to having as close as you can get to an assured
approach on the building side. And we're able to take significant
steps on transportation and we will continue as a state to move
forward in multiple ways on transportation. We know after this
greenhouse gas budget rule's adopted, we need to think about
medium and heavy-duty vehicles.


We then need to think about post-2025 light-duty vehicle rules,
and there will be more work to do in the future.


David Roberts


They're not here to defend themselves. So maybe this is not fair,
but I feel like some of the people in the environmental community
have an exaggerated sense of the significance of statutory caps.
I mean, people are passing statutory caps all over the place that
are getting violated and thrown out and — it's not magic; just
because you make it statutory that it's definitely going to
happen. You have to do the sort of ground-level work, the sort of
detailed sector by sector work regardless even if you have the
cap.


Will Toor


And the caps make more sense when you have a handful of
industrial operations that you can work with — traditional
regulatory approach makes great sense. When you're talking about
millions of individual buildings and vehicles. You have to focus
on a broader suite of strategies that get you market
transformation.


David Roberts


What about a clean fuel standard like in Washington? Well, it's
on the whole west coast now I guess. Did you think about that?


Will Toor


So we did and it's not on our near-term agenda. We took a look at
it. We did a feasibility study a year ago and the thing that gave
us significant pause was when we did the analysis and looked at
different scenarios for how you would comply. What we saw was a
combination of both a fair amount of cost passed on to consumers
but most of the money going into biofuels. And from our
perspective, we think that the future is really about
electrification. There may be an important role for hydrogen in
the long haul heavy-duty space but at least based on our analysis
to date we don't see the future as being largely about biofuels
in the transportation sector.


David Roberts


Right.


Will Toor


And we were a little put off by an approach in which we were
going to drive a lot of costs with most of the compliance
happening through biofuels.


David Roberts


Yeah, that's sort of the danger of kind of the tax approach or
the incremental rising cost approach is you get the cheapest
proximate solutions, right, but they might not be the ultimate
solutions. And if you know the ultimate solutions why not just
skip straight there instead of trying this sort of bank shot,
ratchet attempt? Well, this has been very illuminating and
excellent. Last question then is: I understand you don't have
authorization yet from the governor's office to give specifics
about your next term agenda but what in your mind are kind of the
big climate wise and clean energy wise what are the big pieces
left for Colorado to tackle?


Will Toor


Also two of them I've already touched on and that is we really do
need to take the next steps on building codes. We really do need
to figure out how the state can work with local governments to
help move towards better approaches to land use that will tend to
reduce VMT and greenhouse gas as instead of driving higher levels
of driving and actually in many cases higher levels of building
energy use also.


David Roberts


Well, it's amazing what happens when you elect a bunch of
Democrats, I got to say.


Will Toor


You know, Governor Polis has been a real visionary in this stuff.
I know I realized that the environmental community hasn't
necessarily framed him as a climate champion in a way that we've
seen in some other states. But, boy, working in the
administration, I have seen the kind of all of government
approach where he is building a focus on climate into every
relevant department in the state and is giving us a real free
hand to move creative policy.


David Roberts


Yeah, I mean, I got to say, even though we've spent now almost an
hour and a half talking about it, we've only hit kind of the big
items. There's all these I mean, this is the kind of stuff I love
reading about. Just this sort of really small bore, very specific
stuff. Just tweaking this agency or this department or this
budget. Just little things. But those are the things that add up.
It's like hundreds and hundreds of those things that really add
up in the end.


Will Toor


Yep.


David Roberts


Well, thanks so much, Will, and maybe we'll see what y'all do
next session and have you back on.


Will Toor


Sounds good. Thank you, David.


David Roberts


All right, thanks a lot. Bye.


Will Toor


Bye.


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