Thursday night, at the Payne Institute for Earth Resources at Colorado School of Mines, Inside Energy hosted a live event focusing on the politics of energy in Colorado. The event, co-sponsored by Colorado School of Mines, opened with an audio-visual presentation by Inside Energy journalists Jordan Wirfs-Brock and Rebecca Jacobson on how energy policy in Colorado has developed over the decades. From gold mining, to oil and gas drilling, to wind and solar, Colorado has been at the forefront of energy policy making. Inside Energy’s presentation laid out the importance of these issues and how they’ve played out.
The Mining Act of 1872 should have been more aptly called...The Mother of Mining! Original (and amazing) painting by Deviant Art user wawa711, turned into the Mother of Mining by Rebecca Jacobson.
The Mining Act of 1872 should have been more aptly called...The Mother of Mining! Original (and amazing) painting by Deviant Art user wawa711, turned into the Mother of Mining by Rebecca Jacobson.
In 1973, Jordan’s mom worked for the U.S. Forest Service at the remote Table Rock fire lookout in Eastern Oregon. She had to drive 100-miles roundtrip to buy groceries each week, a daunting task with gasoline rationing. Photo by Flickr user Musgrove and the Pumi.
In the wake of the 1970s oil crisis, Jimmy Carter declared the “moral equivalent of war” on the oil shortage – which had the rather unfortunate acronym M.E.O.W. Image by Rebecca Jacobson.
Nearly half of the coal generation operating in Colorado today was built during the “MEOW”-era. Image by Jordan Wirfs-Brock.
In response to the energy crisis, the Department of Energy was established in 1977. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory opened its doors in Golden, Colorado that same year. Image credit: NREL.
Colorado is, and has always been, a testbed for navigating the balance of how to manage scarce resources through compromise between government, communities and private industry. Image by Jordan Wirfs-Brock.
Following the presentation, we turned to a discussion on some of the high-stakes policy issues involving energy today. Our experts were a multi-faceted panel including academics and industry:
- Lee Boughey of Tri-State Generation and Transmission
- Tracee Bentley, Executive Director of the Colorado Petroleum Council
- Dr. Ian Lange of Colorado School of Mines
- Meghan Nutting, Vice President of Policy and Government Affairs at Sunnova.
Design by Ryan Conley. Issues chosen by Inside Energy team.
We posed a series of issues to our panelists to get their Yea! or Nay! vote. We also posed these questions as an “official ballot” to our audience.
And here’s what we learned:
For each issue, panelists gave and defended their votes, then the audience weighed in with a voice vote to round out the consensus vote.
Couldn’t make it to the event? You can view video of the entire thing right here.
This is Inside Energy’s fourth Spark! event. But, wait…. What is Spark!? you may ask. All the answers are here. Got an idea for what our next Spark! event should tackle? Send it in to Insiders@InsideEnergy.org.
