Colorado is poised to miss its ambitious targets to cut climate-warming pollution by 2025 and 2030, but a newly updated assessment suggests the state has made more progress than anticipated and will nearly hit both benchmarks.
A set of laws signed in the last five years requires the state to rapidly cut pollution driving global warming. Colorado is now obligated to reduce its total greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent by 2025, 50 percent by 2030, and to eliminate any contribution to climate change by 2050. Each of those benchmarks is measured against the state’s 2005 emission levels.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the Colorado Energy Office released a revised report last week suggesting the state has inched closer to meeting the initial targets. According to the updated estimates, the state will still miss both of its self-imposed deadlines — but should hit its 2025 goal in 2026 and its 2030 goal in 2031. Those projections mark a slight improvement over a previous greenhouse gas inventory released two years ago.
Unlike other states, Colorado hasn’t adopted a cap-and-trade market or other policies to force private companies to cut emissions. The state has instead offered a wide array of incentives and regulated specific industries to encourage a shift to climate-friendly technology.
“A lot of places have set goals, not that many have made real progress,” said Will Toor, the director of the Colorado Energy Office. “What we're seeing is that the all-of-government approach that's targeting emissions from all five major sectors — transportation, electricity generation, industrial emissions, oil and gas, buildings — really is setting us on a trajectory towards deep emissions reductions.”
The revised estimates don’t impact the main trends driving the state’s climate progress. In general, the state has made the biggest gains toward its climate goals by regulating oil and gas production and closing coal-fired power plants in favor of renewables. It’s had a far harder time slashing transportation emissions due to a deep reliance on fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks.
The latest apparent improvement, however, isn’t driven by a sudden change in driving habits or new renewable energy projects. It’s largely the result of correcting a data error.
A helpful miscalculation
Clay Clarke, the supervisor of the climate change unit inside the state health and environment department, said the biggest reason Colorado now appears closer to its goals was a correction to the state’s estimates of historical emissions from the oil and gas sector. By fixing the error, his staff discovered that the state’s current policies would result in larger cuts than previously anticipated.
The mistake occurred in a set of spreadsheets estimating past pollution from fossil fuel operations. A calculation error resulted in the state underestimating the climate impact of natural gas leaks from fossil fuel operations. Since the historic emissions are roughly 30 percent higher than previously thought, the state now expects it's on track to achieve even deeper reductions, said Kate Malloy, a spokesperson for the health and environment agency.
The latest emissions inventory also attempts to estimate the effect of policies designed to shift housing closer to jobs and transit. In 2024, Gov. Jared Polis successfully pushed a package of land-use bills through the legislature to encourage more development within cities near major bus and rail routes.
The updated inventory estimates those policies should shift the state closer to its climate goals in the future. While Toor said the new laws won’t do much for the 2025 or 2030 goals, they should significantly reduce the emissions related to new development by 2050.
Western Resource Advocates, an organization tracking Colorado’s climate progress, declined to comment on the new report until they had time to complete a more thorough review.
Danny Katz, the executive director of the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, said he doesn’t have the technical expertise to check the state’s math, but he said the updated estimates appear to align with his views of the state’s climate progress.
“We need to recognize that a lot of these are projections. We need to keep working toward those clear signs that we’re not continuing to warm the planet, like 100 percent renewable energy or having zero-emission vehicles on the road,” Katz said.
Editor's note: The environmental group is a financial supporter of CPR News. Financial supporters
Editor's note: Western Resource Advocates is a financial supporter of CPR News. Financial supporters have no editorial influence.
