The freight train of climate change is bearing down on Wyoming, and our leaders are in deep denial

BY D. REED ECKHARDT

Oh, I get it.

            We’ll stand in the railroad tracks, shout “STOP!” and put our hands in front of us to halt the 18,000-ton beast bearing down on us. That surely will do the trick.

            Squish!

            That is the image that pops to mind as Wyoming’s lawmakers and state officials have scurried around the State Capitol recently in an effort slow the impacts of climate change on the Cowboy State and its ever-shrinking budget.

            Consider Senate File 25, sponsored by the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. It would require that energy

The freight train of climate change is bearing down on Wyoming.

utilities plying their trade in Wyoming provide 95 percent if their power from a list of specified energy resources. And that list would purposely exclude renewables like solar and power. If the companies did turn to wind or solar, they would face fines for every megawatt of energy not produced by an “acceptable” source.

            And the House Appropriations Committee is looking at a bill that would tax all energy generated from those same sources. It makes companies pay an excise tax for the “privilege of producing” such energy in Wyoming.

            These measures, of course, are designed to protect the Cowboy State’s coal and other carbon-based resources, the communities that produce them and, of course, the state’s coal-heavy funding stream. Such efforts are laughable, but they are not funny. Consider the leaders of a state with barely 600,000 residents even thinking they have the ability to control the forces that are remaking the entire world’s energy scene.

            Kind of like a man standing on the tracks to stop a train.

            Of course, that doesn’t stop Wyoming’s leaders from ignoring science (yes, the climate is changing, and, yes, it is caused by humanity, and, no, stopping up your ears and shutting your eyes is not going to make scientific facts go away). Nor does the ever-clearer truth keep someone like its governor from fighting to maintain a course that leads only to budgetary and economic destruction.

So there was Gov. Mark Gordon, pledging in his State of the State address, that he and Wyoming would rather go down in the effort to win the impossible fight to save coal than to take actions that make so much more scientific, environmental and fiscal sense. The governor — who I once thought was smarter than this but who has apparently lost his mind — even made the claim that the 28 states moving toward the use of renewables are part of a conspiracy that is “target(ing) the industries that have helped raise our standard of living … and made us the premier economy in the world.”

            Did he really just say that Wyoming industries are “still discriminated against, maligned and declared for dead.” Yes, he did. A global conspiracy to target the Cowboy State? Really? (Not to mention the mistruth that Wyoming has a leading economy. It doesn’t, by any measure.)

Might it just be, Mr. Governor, that those states have the clarity to see that the future of the Earth does not run through carbon, so they have turned toward a different, more successful future? That’s not a conspiracy; it’s a matter of seeing, and handling, the truth. Indeed, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has just announced that renewables now produce more electricity in the United States than does coal. So Gordon is going to turn the tide? Really?

Unfortunately, the governor and Wyoming will die trying. Gordon has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule the state of Washington’s decision not to allow coal trains to roll to its ports. That lawsuit  has about as much chance of succeeding as would Gordon to stand on that imaginary track.

And then there is the governor’s, and the Public Service Commission’s, foolhardy effort to block the state’s largest utility from closing coal-fired plants around Wyoming. 
PacifiCorp announced earlier this year that it is pivoting toward renewables with plans to close two-thirds of its coal-burners by 2030. So the PSC and the governor have sprung to coal’s defense, “investigating” the utility’s plans rather than heeding the underlying message: Renewable energy is cheaper to produce, and it’s better for the globe. Even utilities (and the big energy companies, which also are moving away from carbon) can see that. That Gordon, and the PSC, and the Legislature are blinding themselves to this is stunning — and stupid.

Indeed, now would be the time for the governor and Wyoming leaders to turn toward renewables as a way to at least fill in the gaps of the state’s declining coal revenue stream. This state has abundant wind and solar, and its shrinking mines are providing ever fewer jobs (due, in part as well, to the mines’ growing reliance on technology). A pivot toward renewables just makes sense — as a job creator and revenue generator.

Get off the tracks, Wyoming. The train is bearing down on you. And the end results are not going to be pretty.

D. Reed Eckhardt is the former executive editor of the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.