On Oct. 28, the Detroit Pistons beat the Chicago Bulls, starting the NBA season 2-1 and on pace to win 55 games out of 82.
As of today, Dec. 20, Detroit has not won a single game since, and is absolutely crushing a record losing streak. (Hint: Under the NBA recent results category where it says “Streak,” L24 is a real shocker.)
And yet nearly 17,000 attended the last Pistons home game.
What’s the connection to climate and health news? Hear me out.
It takes a lot of optimism, or at least a lot of sunk-cost fallacy, to go watch a Pistons team that might not win another game before Easter. I thought about Pistons fans when I talked this week with Carolyn Elam, a Boulder city sustainability manager, about Boulder’s recent slow progress in meeting ambitious climate goals.
Boulder set a world championship goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2035. Equivalent to this year’s Pistons declaring they’ll win every game between now and the NBA playoffs. An update from Boulder, as you’ll read below, shows the city has seen only an 18% drop in carbon emissions from its benchmark, with the available time between now and 2035 accelerating to a full-court sprint.
Yet Elam is steadfast in believing that big achievements only come after setting big goals. On reading Boulder’s update, Elam said, “I think the community will double down and really try to deliver.”
Perhaps her next career should be coaching the Pistons. Speaking of which, they’ll try for loss No. 25 in a row Thursday night at home against the Jazz. Keep heaving up those 3-pointers, Detroit and Boulder. We’ll be cheering.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
CLIMATE
Boulder’s local carbon cuts are a bit slow in coming
If anyone in the United States could make it look easy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help fight global warming, it should be the People’s Republic of Boulder, right?
Turns out, cutting carbon is hard. Even for the City of Boulder. And since Boulder has set audacious goals for itself, their year-end reports can look pretty brutal.
Boulder was one of the first cities in the country to set its own goal for cutting carbon, in 2006. Then, in 2021, Boulder doubled down and said it would try to cut its local carbon footprint 70% by 2030, from a very ambitious new baseline of 2018 emissions levels. Remember those 2018 levels already represented significant cuts from the 2005 baseline that many government entities use, so Boulder was giving up a big head start.
How are they doing? A newly updated carbon dashboard for Boulder says “community-wide emissions decreased 2% from 2021 and were 18% below the 2018 baseline.”
That’s a nice number. Representing millions of tons of carbon removal. But it’s a long way between 18% and 70%, with only six years left to go. Boulder’s even bigger goal is to be net-zero on carbon emissions by 2035. And the city doesn’t have the opportunity of shutting down a coal-fired power plant within its boundaries to get a big numbers boost.
“We continue to make progress,” said Boulder sustainability senior manager Carolyn Elam, in an interview. “I think we continue to have to accelerate our progress if we’re going to hit our goal. 70% is … really hard.”
To get at its carbon emissions, Boulder adds up the carbon produced from all categories such as its portion of Xcel Energy’s sales of power in the city, the transportation emissions of cars and trucks inside the boundaries, natural gas burned for building heat and stoves, and more. Boulder gains as Xcel cleans up its statewide electricity generation with solar and wind, but that’s only one portion.
“The biggest thing that we’d have to do to influence that number is just transition the majority of our buildings away from natural gas,” Elam said. Chances to do that are limited somewhat by the fact Boulder has almost no residential construction going on — doesn’t help to ban a gas connection if there’s no new houses going up!
But the city is working with partners to emphasize rebates and other opportunities for existing homeowners and landlords to replace gas furnaces with electric heat pumps and other alternatives, Elam said.
On transportation, Boulder also has little control over how quickly drivers transition to electric cars, or the truck fleets that crisscross the city. But the city is supporting turnover in local bus fleets to clean electric, and is always seeking ways to reduce vehicle miles traveled, Elam said.
Another big target is waste, with the goal of reducing the carbon emissions associated with sending items to a landfill that could otherwise have a useful, emissions-reducing second life. Successfully reusing much of Boulder’s former community hospital during a 2023 deconstruction was a watershed moment, Elam said.
Boulder has recently begun an even more ambitious education effort by adding a second, global carbon footprint for the city, counting up carbon created from goods made outside Boulder and brought in as retail sales, for example. That larger carbon footprint from all goods and services used can be daunting for many people to accept.
But sustainability leaders shoot for learning, not despair, Elam said. She recalls early debates about Xcel in Colorado, when regulators wondered if a 5% goal for renewable generation was impossibly high. Those same regulators are now entertaining studies about whether Xcel will hit 80% or 85% renewable generation by the 2030 target.
“We often are surprised at how far we can go. And we often shoot past some of those targets. So I’m actually still optimistic about our goals,” Elam said.
“I think they’re the right goals, to guide our community and to really set that bar out there for people to think about.”
Michael Booth | Reporter
MORE CLIMATE NEWS
HEALTH
Open enrollment is rolling to record numbers
>184,000
The number of people who had enrolled in a health insurance plan on Connect for Health Colorado by Dec. 6.
A crucial deadline passed last week in the state’s annual open enrollment window, and it appears that Colorado broke a record for health insurance sign-ups.
Last Friday, Dec. 15, was the deadline for people who buy insurance on their own to select a plan so that they will have coverage on Jan. 1. Connect for Health Colorado, the state’s insurance exchange, has not yet released a tally of the number of people who signed up by the deadline. But officials have released data on the number of sign-ups through the first five weeks, a period that ended on Dec. 6.
And it’s huge: 184,000 people had selected a plan on Connect for Health.
In a blog post, Kevin Patterson, the exchange’s CEO, said that figure is nearly 30% ahead of last year at the same time. It’s also more than the entire number of sign-ups the state saw in 2021 — though it is still behind last year’s total number of sign-ups, which was a little over 212,000.
“I am overwhelmed with gratitude and appreciation for the response we’ve seen,” Patterson wrote.
Patterson attributed the big numbers in part to what he called “our smoothest enrollment year yet.”
“People are getting through the enrollment process with ease online, over the phone, and with their brokers or assisters,” Patterson wrote.
It’s not always clear what’s driving higher numbers of sign-ups. Are more people eligible for financial help, making plans more affordable? Are fewer people being covered by employer plans, pushing more people to shop in the individual market? But the increase is potentially a good sign for the state’s uninsured rate as tens of thousands of people drop off Medicaid rolls per month.
In a briefing to the state legislature’s Joint Budget Committee on Tuesday, Kim Bimestefer, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, said the state’s Medicaid renewal and disenrollment rates are now roughly in line with what they were prior to the pandemic.
The state has also improved its rate of what are called procedural denials, which is when someone loses Medicaid for technical reasons like not returning their renewal packet. These denials — what Bimestefer called “the bane of our being” — are particularly troublesome because they could signal that people who are eligible are falling through the cracks.
The state’s procedural denial rate falls to about 25% after a 90-day reconsideration period, Bimestefer said.
“We’re going in the right direction,” she said. “(But) we are not happy.”
The state is still working on how to track whether people who are disenrolled from Medicaid pick up health coverage elsewhere. But the record sign-ups on Connect for Health may be a good sign that Colorado can keep its record-low uninsured rate.
John Ingold | Reporter
MORE HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
We here at the Home Central Office Mothership of The Temperature’s Worldwide Reporting Network figured it was a good time to remind us all where electricity comes from. No, it’s not from lightning. And no, it’s not a quadrillion hamsters running wheels in subterranean vaults, though maybe that’s what the so-called “particle accelerator” is under those mountains near Geneva.
Worldwide electricity generation is still dominated by coal, as the chart above shows clearly. It’s a good lesson in the same week that world energy officials announced coal use hit an all time record last year.
Wind and solar are certainly gaining, and that’s equally important and far more hopeful information. But for the planet to stay cool enough for most people to survive in decent health, those dirty-coal numbers have to start pointing downward.
HEAT MAP
CLIMATE
HEALTH
We’d be shocked if there’s anybody left in the office to read this, as holiday hordes empty out to nest at home or travel for Christmas. We’re confident, though, you’ve been reading on your iPhone at the airport. Thanks for living and learning with us. And go Pistons!
— Michael & John
Corrections & Clarifications
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