The Temperature | The importance of documentary during climate disasters
Hello Temperature readers! Hope you’re all bundled up and warm this week.
I’m staying cozy, writing you this newsletter from my very, very clean house this morning. Why is my house so clean, you ask? It’s because this past weekend I went on a scrubbing, tidying, vacuuming, laundry-ing, back-of-the-fridge-digging rampage thinking that some out-of-state friends were arriving Friday. And there’s no better incentive to really take care of things than the threat of someone else seeing your townhouse-turned-hovel.
It was only after the rubber gloves had come off one final time that I thought to check my calendar. That’s when I realized: their visit is next week.
So, now I’ve got a nice clean house and a bonus weekend to mess it all up.
In this week’s Temp, we’ll look at some of the ways the state is prepping for a new energy future, with legislators angling for bigger, badder solar and geothermal industries. We’ll also look at what happens when wildfire hits and you don’t have time to prepare, as was the case with Heather Szucs and the Marshall fire. More on both below.
FILM FESTIVAL
A documentary about one family’s Marshall fire journey plays this weekend in Golden
After the fire, there were the lists: What does it take to refill a home? Which cleaning supplies were tucked in the cupboard? What counts as a pantry staple? Which list should the scissors go on? The safety pins?
After Heather Szucs lost her home in the Marshall fire the lists began to weigh on her. It was hard to calibrate the way that time collapsed and then unfolded, accordioning back and forth at an unnatural rhythm — a lifetime of accumulation, gone in minutes, had to be built back in mere months.
“Your life stops,” Szucs said. “Everything that you were doing with your life stops. Now you have to do this,” she said, referring to the process of recovery. “And it is absolutely nonstop.”
That process is documented in a new short film, “Way the Wind Blows,” which plays at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival in Golden this weekend.
About a month after the flames ripped across Marshall Mesa, local filmmaker Megan Sweeney started putting out feelers, trying to decide whether to pick up the camera. It had to be organic, she said. Nothing forced. She decided to send out an email to a few friends, and if nothing came back, then she’d drop it.
Szucs, a self-described “yes person,” caught wind of the project. She was interested.
Sweeney describes filmmaking as her “true north,” but even so, the process of showing up and turning on the camera during some of the family’s darkest times was tough. Their first day shooting was when Szucs returned to the site to sift through ashes.
“I felt horrible, just standing there with my camera,” Sweeney said.
Ultimately Sweeney settled into the role through a little reframing. She started to understand that what she was doing was adding some humanity to the statistics that pour out of disasters, putting a face to the numbers.
“You know how in films the camera will swirl around a person? That’s exactly what it feels like,” Szucs said. “Everything is going on so fast around you and you’re just standing still. You’re seeing these things happen, people are out laughing, acting normal.”
Three years later, she is finally getting back to that.
“I can go meet friends now, I can start inviting friends over, but I wasn’t able to do that,” she said. “I was always, always working on recovering our lives. Always.”
Click over to The Colorado Sun tomorrow to learn more about the fire and the film.
LEGISLATION
Two bills in the legislature could open the door for clean energy, but they arrive with baggage
Grants awarded by the state’s Geothermal Energy Grant Program last year
Two renewable energy sources — nuclear and geothermal — are the subjects of separate bills making their way through the Colorado legislature. While both hold potential to diversify the state’s renewable energy options, they also come loaded with baggage that, so far, developers haven’t been able to overcome in Colorado.
House Bill 1040 would add nuclear to the list of designated clean energy sources, opening it up to more funding options.
Sen. Larry Liston, a Colorado Springs Republican and one of the bill’s sponsors, proposed a similar bill last year, and the year before that, in an annual dance to get nuclear energy on the same level as other clean energy sources, like solar and wind power.
Liston’s bill is back, this time with bipartisan support. This year, he is joined by Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Democrat from Dillon, as well as Rep. Alex Valdez from Denver and Rep. Ty Winter from Las Animas County in the House as sponsors.
It’s not necessarily partisanship that Liston has been up against, as much as the legacy of nuclear disasters like the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Closer to home, the lingering effects of radioactive contamination, like in Cañon City, which is still dealing with the fallout of uranium processing decades ago, and Rocky Flats, a Superfund site between Golden and Boulder where nuclear weapons were built between from the 1950s until the 1990s, still looms over nuclear energy projects.
In Pueblo a nuclear energy facility has been proposed, shot down and reintroduced as the city’s coal-fired Comanche power plant enters its final days.
Despite its tenuous reputation, nuclear power is also one of the largest sources of clean energy in the nation, making up about 20% of the U.S.’s total energy production. And the senators, along with economic development groups in parts of Colorado, see it as a viable option to address both the economic and energetic shortfalls of transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Liston is also sponsoring Senate Bill 120, which would create nuclear workforce training through the department of higher education, while Roberts has voiced his support for constructing a nuclear waste facility in his region.
The other renewable source, geothermal energy, has a much cleaner reputation. It’s a major power source for renewable energy hotspots like Iceland and New Zealand, but the upfront costs, lack of adequate equipment, and risk to investors has kept its use small scale or stalled out for decades.
But efforts to expand geothermal energy in Colorado have picked up steam over the past few years. Bipartisan bills in 2022 and 2023 paved the way for more aggressive research and development, by creating a state grant program, an investment tax credit, and a mandate for more studies about all “advanced energy solutions,” including geothermal.
Gov. Jared Polis chose geothermal energy as the focus of his tenure as chair of the Western Governors Association, a coalition of governors from 19 states and 3 U.S. territories.
One of the things that this year’s House Bill 1165 does is clarify which departments will be responsible for geothermal energy projects.
In 2023 the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission was rebranded as the Energy and Carbon Management Commission and, among other things, given a broader mandate that included geothermal drilling.
Right now, extracting water for geothermal uses — like heating and cooling homes, melting snow on sidewalks, or generating electricity — is overseen by the Energy and Carbon Management Commission. Otherwise, those wells (anything shallower than 2,500 feet) are overseen by the Department of Water Resources.
As more geothermal activity is expected in the state, legislators wanted to preemptively sort out what happens when those two uses overlap, and how they can stay out of each others’ way.
This would ostensibly relieve the headaches that developers in Chaffee County told The Colorado Sun their test wells would require — essentially a ping-ponging back and forth between the Dept. of Water and the Energy and Carbon Commission.
Rep. Amy Paschal of Colorado Springs, one of the bill’s sponsors, said that it’s just about “tightening up” the statues so that a geothermal industry can make its way in Colorado.
MORE ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH NEWS
Since we’re talking about preparation, poll results released this morning indicate that only 10% of Coloradans surveyed feel that their neighborhood is “very prepared” for an extreme weather event, such as a wildfire or flooding.
The annual Conservation in the West poll by Colorado College’s State of the Rockies project surveys voters in eight Western states to understand attitudes toward water pollution, air pollution, wildlife habitats and climate change, among other things, then tries to slot those attitudes alongside topics like government intervention, public land management, housing crises and the cost of living.
When presented with 10 issues facing the state, Coloradans showed the most concern about the cost of living, with 87% of respondents answering that it’s “extremely or very serious” in the state. They also showed the highest level of concern among all eight states — Idaho came in second, with 84% of those surveyed showing extreme concern for cost of living, and Montana ranked third. Participants in New Mexico and Wyoming showed the least concern, at 76% and 72% respectively. Might be time to move south.
I’ll let you know how impressed my friends are with my vacuumed stairs. But before then, wishing you either a hyper-productive weekend or a totally restful one, whichever you need.
— Parker & John
Corrections & Clarifications
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