Colorado Newsline
Veto of environmental justice bill would be a broken promise
Gov. Polis said he would lead in facing the existential crisis of our generation. He can do that with SB-200.
Viewed from Downtown Denver, smoke colors red the evening sun over the Rocky Mountains on Aug. 13, 2020. The smoke came from the Pine Gulch fire near Grand Junction and the Grizzly Creek fire outside Glenwood Springs. (Andy Bosselman for Colorado Newsline)
As young leaders in Colorado, we have seen first-hand the devastating effects of climate change. We’ve lived through increasingly brutal wildfires, which destroyed homes, made our air quality the worst in the country last summer, and put both rural and urban communities on the front lines. We need our elected officials to do everything in their power to avert the climate crisis.
KUNC
The Cameron Peak Fire burned through the headwaters for northern Colorado s Poudre River and many of its small tributaries.
Record-breaking wildfires in 2020 turned huge swaths of Western forests into barren burn scars. Those forests store winter snowpack that millions of people rely on for drinking and irrigation water. But with such large and wide-reaching fires, the science on the short-term and long-term effects to the region’s water supplies isn’t well understood.
To understand, and possibly predict what happens after a river’s headwaters goes up in flames, researchers are descending on newly created burn scars across the West to gather data in the hopes of lessening some of the impacts on drinking water systems.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR News
A stand of burned trees and charred ground is seen in Larimer County after the Cameron Peak fire ripped through the landscape.
Charred tree trunks rise from the mountains along the burn scar of the Cameron Peak Fire, a scene so alien one Larimer County commissioner could only describe it as a “lunar landscape.”
Colorado officials hope this sight the aftermath of the largest wildfire in state history leads the federal government to pump more dollars into preventing fires and dealing with their effects.
Gov. Jared Polis and leaders from all levels of government toured the burn scar along the Cache de Poudre River Friday. The group included U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, as well as U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennett, Democrats who have emphasized wildfire prevention and the restoration of public lands during the first months of the Biden administration.
An occasional series of conversations with experts on the science and policies regarding fires.
The conversation about forest health, climate change and last year’s wildfire season moved to the money side this week, with four bills dealing with mitigation and fire suppression on the agenda.
Monday, the House Agriculture, Livestock and Water Committee signed off on House Bill 1008, which would allow local communities to set up their own special districts to finance local mitigation projects.
It’s worth noting that the state’s wish list for mitigation funding is in the ballpark of $750 million, just for the most urgent areas. It would take $2.4 billion to fund all mitigation projects in unhealthy forests, according to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR)