Two of the treasured Old Year/New Year rituals are to look back and grieve over who left us in the past year, while also gathering up any optimism and energy we can find to help make positive change in the next 12 months.
Right after polishing off an entire tube of chocolate-covered McVitie’s that Santa left in my stocking during the Old Year, I found exactly such enthusiasm for the New Year in reading about Jimmy Carter. It wasn’t just the sugar rush. The Washington Post compiled an amazing 11-item list of things you forgot or never knew about his presidency, and it was an inspired yarn.
Maybe kissed Queen Elizabeth on the lips? Took late-night, drugged-out, incoherent phone calls from his good buddy Elvis? Dubbed the campaign plane Peanut One? Check, to all those.
But for our purposes here at The Temperature, what stuck out was that Carter responded to the oil crisis that largely ruined his term by putting the first solar panels on the White House. Becoming energy independent should be “an exciting adventure” for America, he said.
And so it has been, and so it should continue to be — in the past year at ColoradoSun.com, we’ve written about “sun trains” and geothermal pools and agrivoltaics. We’ll keep pursuing those innovation stories — in health as well — with enthusiasm, alongside appropriate questions about how much impact they can make and when. We’d love for you to jump on the real Sun train with us, and send us your story ideas as well.
In the meantime, enjoy a few more days of a blessed winter pause, down to the last cookie.
Michael Booth
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
CLIMATE
A battery-recycling mandate, and new corporate accountability
Dead batteries are often the left-behinds of consumers’ ambitious recycling efforts — no one knows the right thing to do with them. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)20%
Portion of dead batteries that state Sen. Lisa Cutter says are disposed of properly
One upcoming fight might seem on the small side, and one might look so big it’s hard to get your arms around. But both of the 2025 legislative battles we are previewing this week are a good representation of the environment and climate issues that preoccupy a good portion of Coloradans.
The “small” issue is literally small for most of us, in the form of all those dead batteries you just plucked out of last year’s Christmas toys and ornaments and have no idea what to do with. But many Coloradans find all recycling issues to be “big,” not small, and want to see our landfill diversion rates improved and our reuse of valuable commodities increased to have a thriving and responsible economy.
Your household batteries are not supposed to go in the recycling bins or the trash. So they either go in illicitly, and cause fires at home or in dump trucks or landfills, or they just sit there corroding.
“That’s a lot of the problem with all these waste and recycling issues is people just don’t know the answer, it’s not immediate. People just don’t know,” state Sen. Lisa Cutter, D-Littleton, said.
She wants battery makers to create a “producer responsibility organization” just like the one the legislature required a couple of years ago for cardboard and paper packaging makers. The battery makers would charge themselves a small fee per battery produced, pool the fees together, and then turn the money over to recycling organizations or nonprofits to create a battery recycling system for Colorado.
Don’t expect curbside service, Cutter warns. That would be too expensive for an item as small as batteries, and would just send out more polluting trucks into neighborhoods. Rather, the batteries would likely go to secure collection sites set up at easily accessible areas, whether grocery stores or schools or other common institutional sites.
Cutter likens it to the PaintCare program, where consumers can drop off old cans of paint and other toxic decoration materials at stores or community sites. Fewer than 20% of batteries are disposed of properly, Cutter says, and it’s time to change that.
“We’re just kind of taking one fight right now. So I think that’ll help us get this through,” she said. “It’s pretty sensible legislation.”
One of the big-picture issues belongs at the moment to Rep. Manny Rutinel, D-Commerce City, who thinks Coloradans deserve to know a lot more detail about big companies’ share of greenhouse gas emissions if we want to better attack global warming.
The bill Rutinel will work on would require a demanding inventory of greenhouse gases related to any company in Colorado with over $1 billion in revenue. They would have to detail direct emissions, or Scope 1; emissions related to the offsite energy they use, Scope 2; and finally “supply chain and value chain emissions,” which Rutinel says are often hidden from view and are called Scope 3.
Many environmental groups have been trying for more regulation of so-called “indirect sources,” such as transportation, that a company is not responsible for directly but could do something to control. Think Amazon or Walmart warehouses, with all those diesel delivery trucks coming and going, and how that massive traffic has affected metro Denver and its ever-growing appendages of distribution centers.
“You can’t fix what you can’t measure,” Rutinel said, in a text. “Transparency is the first step toward accountability. By exposing the full scope of corporate emissions, this bill gives us the tools to hold polluters accountable and drive meaningful climate action.”
Obviously such a comprehensive bill, seeking action by companies with big lobbying budgets, won’t sail through without comment. We’ll be following any greenhouse gas measures, the future of your bad-battery bucket, and many other environmental issues in the upcoming session, so we thank you for sticking with us in the New Year.
Michael Booth | Reporter
MORE END-OF-YEAR CLIMATE NEWS
Daily entrance going up at Chatfield, Golden Gate Canyon and State Forest. If you don’t have the Keep Colorado Wild pass in your car this year (2025! Yes, it’s here!), you’ll be paying two bucks more a day at these three state parks. Chatfield will be charging $2 a day to go into a special watershed fund to clean up phosphorus before it hits the reservoir and contributes to algae blooms. Golden Gate Canyon and State Forest will charge $12 under a different state bill that authorized them to raise the fee to help improve local roads and access. Keep Colorado Wild is still $29 on your car registration, and a great bargain even if you only visit the parks a few times. More on the new fees at ColoradoSun.com in coming days. Invasive virus hitting invasive birds. A different form of avian bug is attacking another set of exotic birds, but the way Colorado Parks and Wildlife tells it, it’s not quite as depressing as when the older avian flu took down eagles and other raptors. Avian paramyxovirus-1 (PPMV-1) is killing the invasive Eurasian collard dove in the Lower Arkansas valley, CPW says. They say it is different from the avian flu that has killed millions of chickens in Colorado, numerous raptors, and now spread the virus into dairy herds and milk samples before pasteurization. CPW said the newer virus should stay limited to the introduced doves and run its course “in a few weeks.” Coloradans should still avoid handling sick or dead birds. CSU’s new $325 million oil well fund. The EPA and the Department of Energy are shoveling as much authorized money out the door as they can in the waning weeks of the Biden administration, and Colorado State University is a huge beneficiary. CSU will get $324.6 million from the “Investing in America” agenda to run three programs limiting damaging emissions from small oil and gas operations. In another program, CSU will develop a retrofit system for gas compressors that should eliminate nearly all leaks. We’ll have more on the program after chasing down CSU officials in holiday weeks, at ColoradoSun.com. Yes, big things still go moo-sing. Careful readers know we are obsessed with the Western Slope missing cattle story, and thankfully an enterprising reporter like Olivia Prentzel decided to further ruminate on the topic. Her wide-ranging interviews on what we know and what we don’t are a classic only-in-the-West tale.HEALTH
340B: The obscure (but huge) federal program you’re going to hear a lot about
In this July 8, 2016, file photo, a pharmacy technician fills a prescription at a pharmacy, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)“This is going to be a fight at the Capitol.”
— Zach Zaslow, Children’s Hospital Colorado
Colorado is on the verge of a massive fight at the state Capitol over a program you may have never heard of.
The program goes by the super-unsexy name of 340B — who doesn’t love multibillion-dollar federal programs that are named after sections of legislation? — and it pulls together a battle royale of health care industry heavyweights: Hospitals versus pharmaceutical companies versus pharmacies versus insurers.
During a legislative preview session at the Colorado Health Institute’s annual conference last month, CHI communications director Joe Hanel said the upcoming 340B wars may be the lobbying fight of the legislative session and only somewhat jokingly said the rumor is that one-half of the state’s lobbying corps has been hired by the hospitals and the other half hired by pharma.
So what the heck is this program? It’s a prescription drug discount program that benefits hospitals that treat a lot of Medicaid patients.
340B is part of the duct-tape-and-chewing-gum system the federal government uses to help those hospitals make up for the fact that Medicaid generally doesn’t pay them enough to cover what it costs to provide services.
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