Hi there, Colorado, and welcome to the last Temperature of 2023! In this week’s edition, we are looking back at some of the major stories and themes that shaped Colorado’s health and climate debates this year.
But let’s also take one glancing look back at another major theme we here at The Colorado Sun examined in 2023: How the Colorado Rockies keep winning for losing.
Case in point? For the second time in a month, the Rockies won big when the division rival Los Angeles Dodgers signed a blockbuster free agent: This time pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto. So now, combined with Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers will regularly bring transcendent superstars to play at Coors Field, where the Rockies will benefit tremendously from the surrounding fan interest without having to spend a dime or win a single game. Amazing.
And you’re amazing, too, for supporting local journalism. We literally couldn’t do this without you. So thanks.
Now, onto the news.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
HEALTH
When politics tries to dictate health care
In August, I was talking with University of Colorado bioethicist Dr. Matthew Wynia about efforts by politicians to decide matters of reproductive health care.
“I don’t love the idea of the state telling doctors how to talk to patients and how to practice,” he said. Later, he added: “It’s a terrible idea to try to legislate medical practice.”
Evidence for this position is now abundant in Colorado.
As Jennifer Brown and I reported this year, abortions in Colorado increased significantly in 2022, with the increase coming almost entirely from patients traveling to Colorado from states where politicians had banned or severely restricted abortion access. That year saw a 500% increase in patients coming from Texas, for instance.
While 2023 numbers are not yet finalized, the trend appears to have deepened this year. In preliminary numbers last updated in mid-December, even more patients have traveled to Colorado from out-of-state to receive abortion care in 2023, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The 2,761 patients from Texas represent approximately 20% of the abortions reported in the preliminary year-to-date numbers. In other words, 1 in 5 abortions performed in the state so far in 2023 was provided to a person from Texas.
None of this is the health care system’s doing. It is the result of political actors who stepped between a woman and her doctor, forcing an additional hardship and warping the pre-existing system.
But Wynia and I were not talking about abortion bans in other states — at least not only. Instead, he was also referring to a bill passed by Colorado lawmakers this year to ban so-called abortion pill “reversal,” a practice that purports to be able to counteract the effects of the first abortion drug, thus potentially preserving a pregnancy for women who regret starting a medication abortion.
Scientific support for this idea is thin (though no studies have thoroughly debunked it, either), and Colorado Democrats passed the law saying they wanted to protect patients from quack medicine.
But, to Wynia, this was politicians again trying to dictate to doctors: Jumping ahead of ongoing research and medical debate. Jumping ahead of pre-existing state Medical Board processes for reprimanding doctors who offer unsound treatments or who withhold information from patients.
When one of the bill’s sponsors spoke up at a Medical Board meeting on the ban to tell board members that they needed to “carefully reread the instructions” in the statute, the message seemed clear about who wanted to be in charge. (The Medical Board eventually found that the practice is outside generally accepted standards of medicine.)
A doctor who supports “reversal” worried about the impact on patients: “What would I do if a patient came to me asking for reversal? Would I send them north to Wyoming?”
This is not to say that these two situations are equivalent — even using the numbers provided by supporters of abortion pill “reversal,” no more than a few dozen women in Colorado seek it out in a year. There are legitimate questions about its safety. It is not backed by decades of research and myriad controlled clinical trials.
Colorado’s law — which a federal judge blocked in October — was the first of its kind nationally, while numerous conservative states have passed laws requiring abortion providers to tell patients that reversal is an option, something that Wynia also opposes.
But the story was a reminder: These fights over politicians trying to dictate health care are not just confined to red states. And, as we head into the election year of 2024, they will not be a thing of the past, either.
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
MORE 2023 HEALTH NEWS
CLIMATE
The current and looming battles over stuffing carbon underground
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Number of oil, gas and chemical facilities seeking U.S. subsidies for carbon capture projects
If it’s not exactly too good to be true, it’s definitely too good to be easy.
Stuffing much of our excess carbon underground to help solve global warming is true enough to have launched dozens of major experimental projects around the world. But proving out those proposals takes massive government subsidies, and raises possibly unsolvable ethical dilemmas.
Colorado started down this road in earnest in 2023, passing more than a few of the policy dilemma landmarks along the way. Test drills began for carbon sequestration wells, where private companies and state officials hope to find underground geology favorable to hiding away millions of tons of carbon. Two of the most ambitious experiments are on public land, another open question, in these cases on State Land Board property. That state body is tasked with raising money for public schools, and is seeking to diversify sources of income, pivoting from extraction to sequestration.
The geography of carbon capture raises other questions, with some projects located in or near neighborhoods disproportionately impacted by the effects of both local pollutants and the higher temperatures caused by global warming.
A company demonstrating direct air carbon capture, where massive fans suck in carbon from ambient air, has pilot machinery spinning in Adams County. But so far there’s nowhere to pipe the collected carbon, so it’s simply released back into the atmosphere.
Some Pueblo County residents, meanwhile, are questioning state officials who cheer on the sequestration test well being drilled on the Pueblo/El Paso County border on the State Land Board’s Chico Basin Ranch. If that well proves out, will potentially dangerous carbon dioxide pipelines snake across Pueblo County to deliver polluting gases from locations that have tainted the county for decades? Such as Xcel’s Comanche coal plant, or the local cement factory?
It’s becoming more clear nationally, to the consternation of environmental advocates, that the major fossil fuel companies will be among the first to profit from the enormous Biden administration subsidies available for carbon capture and sequestration. In other words, the companies most responsible for digging carbon out of the ground that led to global warming could add lucrative profits by running projects to stuff carbon back in the ground.
Even worse, in environmental advocates’ eyes, one of the few reuses of carbon so far is injecting it in oil fields to push more fossil fuels to the service. Which of course will create new carbon in the atmosphere when burned. And some oil companies on the Gulf Coast are building carbon capture projects to offset carbon produced in massively polluting new projects like liquid natural gas export terminals or chemical manufacturing.
Oil companies may call this acting responsibly. Green activists have other words for it, including “vicious cycle.”
Colorado officials want the state to be a hub of innovation and new technologies for capturing carbon. They agree with some international scientists who say capturing and locking up millions of tons of carbon a year is a key part of slowing climate change through carbon reduction.
We’re going to be one of the colosseums for these clashing ideas in the next few years. Stay with us as we stick with the story.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
MORE 2023 CLIMATE NEWS
- No quick fix to ozone or greenhouse gas air pollution problems. Colorado’s biggest environmental fights continue to be air and water. More about water below, while we try to keep adding to public knowledge about the dangers of ozone, and the challenges of truly cutting carbon dioxide to slow global warming. One seemingly easy fix, shifting from highly polluting gas lawn equipment to the burgeoning market for clean electric, ended up as a halfway measure that frustrated clean air advocates.
— The Colorado Sun - Wolf return was a thrill for advocates, chill for ranchers. The moment a “Hound of the Baskervilles”-looking gray wolf tensed and bounded from a cage somewhere in Grand County was the culmination of years of activism and arguing about endangered species in Colorado. Now we might get wolverines, while wildlife officials also struggle to protect less visible creatures like the lesser prairie chicken, black-footed ferrets, and golden eagles disturbed by new development.
— The Colorado Sun - A yearlong education on the Colorado River. When Coloradans began to realize the West’s most important river is facing an existential threat from drought, growth and climate change, they needed a basic education in water. Shannon Mullane and The Colorado Sun staff all did our best to provide it, answering everything from “what is an acre foot?” to “where Colorado’s water gets used” to “what other rivers might dry up?”
— The Colorado Sun - A quizzical look at the realities of recycling. Colorado is ramping up recycling efforts in a major way in order to start closing the gap we have with other states; we think we’re green, but when it comes to recycling and composting, not so much. People also suspect that the plastics they toss in the correct bin actually get thrown away. So we set out to answer top reader questions through a reported quiz that had some people baffled, but open to learning.
— The Colorado Sun
HEAT MAP
CLIMATE
HEALTH
That’s a wrap for us in 2023. Here’s wishing you and yours a Happy New Year. In 2024, may your carbon footprint shrink and your medical bills be modest and intelligible.
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
Corrections & Clarifications
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