Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission late Friday approved new limits on smokestack pollution from 18 large corporations, a vote immediately denounced by 44 local governments and environmental groups who called it a cave-in to industry and a gutting of environmental justice laws passed in 2021.
The rules call for cuts of up to 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions of such major companies as Suncor, Molson Coors and Leprino Foods, and new efforts to trim industrial “co-pollutants” emitted alongside greenhouse gases but which hit surrounding neighborhoods, such as nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and components of ozone.
The system settled on by the Air Pollution Control Division after months of negotiations allows companies who say it’s too expensive to achieve the cuts to buy pollution “credits” from other companies that have successfully cut emissions. Failing that, they can pay into a fund run by the state that would finance other pollution reductions in impacted communities.
Those provisions allow some of the state’s richest corporations to “pay to play,” opponents said, and subvert demands made in House Bill 1266, known as the 2021 Environmental Justice Act, to target pollution in disproportionately impacted neighborhoods with low incomes, high minority representation, and a long history of living with toxic air.
The environmental coalition may sue the AQCC over the new rules, or push for new legislation directing state officials to fulfill the requirements of House Bill 1266. A group of 16 state senators and representatives wrote the air commission before the vote warning that the proposed rules failed to carry out the intent of the legislature.
“We’re deeply disappointed. We saw the draft rule get progressively eroded from the intent of the Environmental Justice Act more than two years ago to what we saw passed over the weekend,” said Boulder County’s climate and health strategist Collin Tomb, speaking as a member of a coalition of 44 local governments working on the air pollution rule that includes industry-heavy Denver, Adams County and Commerce City.
“The state increasingly leaned the draft rule in favor of these powerful companies in spite of community concerns,” Tomb said. “Some of these companies are reporting record profits, which undermines their claims that pollution controls are too costly.”
Environmental advocates said they were overwhelmed by the legal and corporate resources of the 18 companies and the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, even as state officials had touted giving pro bono independent legal help to nonprofit groups who wanted official party standing in the rulemaking.
“It’s incredibly disempowering to the communities to invite them to the process and then have the results reflect virtually none of their input,” Tomb said. “When one side is just so much more powerful than the other, the role of the state should be to lean toward protecting the community, as the Environmental Justice Act clearly stated.”
The Air Quality Control Commission “continues to be a place where our good efforts go to die,” said Ean Tafoya, Colorado director of GreenLatinos and a member of a broad environmental and neighborhood justice coalition working on the industrial pollution rules.
“It’s personal for me,” said Tafoya, who has family living near the often-fined Suncor refinery and near large meatpackers in northeastern Colorado that are part of the list of 18. “It’s an unjust trade and pay-to-play system. It’s riddled with loopholes, to allow the worst offenders to not make reductions in co-pollutants. We’re tired of this balance of cost and peoples’ health. We can do both.”
Top state officials praised the new industrial rules as the legitimate fulfillment of the 2021 law, saying they would make real differences in the most pollution-impacted communities.
A company may buy a pollution credit from a company in a different neighborhood, said Colorado Energy Office director Will Toor, but they can only buy them from the 18 companies on the list the new regulations target. That means pollution will have been reduced in another impacted community. “You’re not buying credits from California,” he said.
Moreover, the separate fund companies may pay into as a last resort to offset emissions will also be spent for greenhouse gas and pollution controls in impacted neighborhoods, Toor said.
Sept. 29, 2023 ☀ Auraria Campus ☀ Downtown Denver
GET YOUR TICKET