Goodmageddon, Colorado, keep your snow shovel in the other hand as you scroll through this on your phone. You’re going to need it.
We’re packed with news and fresh perspectives on everything from the inefficiency of walking, to dust clouds melting snow, to the latest timetable for the cheap prescription drug train to Canada.
But the most practical help we can give you today, with foothills snow predictions in the feet instead of inches, and homeowners stocking pantries, comes from Hollywood: Movie rent prices plummeted Monday morning after the Oscars were handed out.
More good news: Those Oscar nominees you missed are looooooong and will keep you busy well into the weekend. “Oppenheimer” is three hours, and of course because it’s Christopher Nolan directing, it’s so confusing it feels like six. “Anatomy of a Fall” is 2 hours 32 minutes and you need to watch it three times to cover each language used. (You still won’t know who did it.) “Poor Things” is 2 hours and 21 minutes. Approximately 2 hours and 18 minutes is Emma Stone doing things that are absolutely not safe for work or for her future orthopaedic health.
So indulge in some streaming catch-up, assuming the power stays on. And bookmark this newsletter when you need a break from nuclear annihilation and cadaver reanimation. Compared to that, even climate change and prescription drug prices constitute relaxation.
Let it snow!
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
CLIMATE
You know who doesn’t hate scooters? The environment, that’s who
You trip over them on the sidewalk. Your auntie can’t steer her walker around them on the way to the park. You seethe with envy watching a fit 20-something fly by using one on their way to a popup speak-easy you weren’t invited to.
But they’re absolutely the best way to travel, according to the environment and a new study by Colorado State University researchers.
Yes, electric scooters, love them or hate them as collapsed city sidewalk ornaments, are the most efficient mode of transportation per mile when you measure the lifetime greenhouse gas emissions that emanate from each trip.
The worst? More surprises, according to Noah Horesh in the CSU mechanical engineering department. It’s a tie between walking and riding the bus.
Buses are great for greenhouse gas emissions when they are full, Horesh explains. But his research is based on the fact that the average number of passengers on hulking city buses is only 7.5 per trip. Given all the greenhouse gas emissions from diesel fuel and the manufacturing process of making the bus in the first place, that averages out to a lot of emissions per passenger mile.
What’s he got against walking?
It’s the eating involved. Americans in particular have a meat and processed food-heavy diet that creates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions in delivering the food needed to fuel a good walk. And walking isn’t kinetically efficient, no offense to pedestrians, Horesh adds. Those two facts put the “lifetime” emissions cycle for a walking trip right up there with a mostly empty bus, Horesh says.
Now that doesn’t mean we should give up walking or electric cars and get scooters. As a percentage of overall emissions, fossil fuel driven cars are still the monsters in producing greenhouse gases. Transportation accounted for 29% of overall greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. in 2021, the study says.
It’s more vital than ever to switch cars and buses to efficient electric batteries and motors, the study concludes. And for policymakers to expand clean mass-transit options, and then for commuters to use them.
“The greatest emissions reductions can be achieved through adopting technologies energized by decarbonized electricity and changing travel behavior,” according to Horesh and mechanical engineering professor Jason Quinn, who are preparing to publish the study.
Even electrified transport can never be pure, Horesh said in an interview, because it appears impossible to eliminate all the emissions associated with constructing an electric vehicle. But, he said, “Basically, electrified transportation can get pretty close to zero.”
Read more about the transportation study, and the charts showing scooters as champions, in next week’s Colorado Sun.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
WEATHER/CLIMATE
The year’s first dust wallop could deal a blow to snowpack
3 weeks
Amount of time that a big dust storm can speed up peak runoff
At the end of February and beginning of March, high winds roared through Colorado bringing what can best be described as a major dust wallop, according to Jeff Derry.
As executive director of the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, Derry keeps a close eye on weather cameras and satellite images for windy storms headed through the desert Southwest. When the storms pass through, plumes of fine soils get swept up by the wind and drifted down across Colorado, typically in March, April and May.
“Sometimes when the storm is happening, you can just look up in the air and feel it in the air. It’s kind of an orangey cloud looking thing,” Derry said.
Derry and his colleagues track spring dust events with an impact in mind: water.
Let us explain. In the spring, Colorado’s mountains are covered with a deep layer of snow, called the snowpack, which melts each year and provides critical water for people across the state.
When that snow is bright and white, it reflects the sun’s light and heat back into the atmosphere. But when dust settles on the snow, it makes the surface darker and, like a dark T-shirt, it absorbs more light and heat. This leads to faster snowmelt and higher runoff.
Colorado’s first dust-on-snow event blew through on Feb. 26 and 27, dropping a lighter load of fine soils on the snow. Bigger winds brought the major wallop through on March 2 and 3.
If the snowpack melts faster and earlier in the year, then by the time late summer rolls around, streams and rivers are low, and farmers are watching their irrigation water supply dwindle. Plants and soils are exposed earlier, which can cause the soil to dry out. Drier soils suck up more water, which means less reaches the stream, and the cycle continues. (Check out this great in-depth explainer by the Sun’s Tracy Ross for more.)
Dust-on-snow events can shift peak runoff three weeks earlier than normal, according to the 2023 Colorado Water Plan. About 140 dust-on-snow events occurred between 2005, when dust tracking began, and 2023. Eleven of these events were observed during the winter of 2022.
The only way to verify the impact on the snowpack is to get out and dig pits in the snow. On Tuesday, Derry and his team spent the day digging, traveling through Hoosier Pass, Loveland Pass, Berthoud Pass and beyond. (By pit four, Derry’s achy back was done with it, he said.)
“Hoosier is almost as bad as Red Mountain, but as you go to Loveland Pass, there’s less dust,” Derry said. “It definitely dissipates, which is not uncommon for the dust to dissipate as it moves its way north and east.”
After this dust event, the snow’s ability to reflect solar radiation likely dropped to about 80% from around 100%, Derry said. He’ll know more about the severity of this dust event by next week.
The good news? New storms that bring more snow, like the one set to roll over Colorado starting today, cover up dust and slow the melting impact. Keep an eye out for snow — and dust — updates in coming days at ColoradoSun.com.
Section by Shannon Mullane | Water Reporter
MORE CLIMATE NEWS
HEALTH
Colorado spars with the feds over importing drugs from Canada
Late last month, Colorado submitted an amended application to the federal government for approval of a state program to import lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada.
“We are one step closer to launching our Drug Importation Program,” Gov. Jared Polis, who has championed the program as part of his agenda to lower health care costs, said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
Eh, maybe.
The real news is to be found in sometimes tense back-and-forth correspondence between state and federal officials that was included as an appendix in the state’s application. It shows Colorado and the federal Food and Drug Administration at odds over how Colorado could get a program approved and off the ground. And it also raises questions about whether federal approval will even matter if Colorado can’t get drugmakers and Canadian suppliers to work with it.
Colorado’s program would use a chain of importers and exporters to bring in prescription drugs from Canada to be sold at lower prices in Colorado pharmacies. These are the same drugs available now in the United States, but sold at often dramatically lower prices in Canada.
Here’s the rub, though: In letters and phone calls, officials from the state’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing told the FDA that Canadian drug wholesalers all have provisions in their contracts with manufacturers “that expressly prohibit the exportation of their products to the U.S.”
According to meeting minutes from a June teleconference between the state and the FDA: “Wholesalers in Canada are not willing to put their businesses at risk by selling without the permission of manufacturers. None of the manufacturers have agreed to such proposals from Colorado so far.”
The correspondence was first reported by Phil Galewitz of KFF Health News, who has been tracking state efforts across the country to set up drug-importation programs in order to lower prescription drug costs for their residents.
In a statement to Galewitz, HCPF executive director Kim Bimestefer said, “While we continue to reach out to manufacturers to ask them to do the right thing for consumers, employers and taxpayers, we are also working with the FDA for additional guidance on how to best navigate sourcing drugs.”
HCPF officials included in their correspondence with the FDA a list of 23 drugmakers they had reached out to. Of those, 22 either declined to participate in the state’s importation program or did not respond to multiple requests. One request is listed as “pending.”
The state has also been stonewalled in working with Canadian wholesalers. The wholesale market north of the border is dominated by the U.S.-based titan McKesson, which controls 80% of the market in Canada, according to the state. (If the name sounds familiar, that may be because a McKesson warehouse in Aurora featured prominently in a DEA investigation into shady opioid distribution.)
“Colorado was unable to find someone at McKesson who would talk to them,” the June meeting minutes state.
The state has instead been trying to work with smaller wholesalers, who all raised concerns about violating their contracts with manufacturers.
This puts Colorado in a real bind because the FDA wants to see more specifics before approving Colorado’s program. But Colorado officials say they can’t hammer out those specifics without first receiving the FDA’s backing.
“We believe there is a foundational disconnect between the (FDA) rule and what is practically required to secure Canadian drug supply,” Bimestefer wrote in a letter to the feds in May.
How long the feds will take to review Colorado’s amended application — and what they will say about it — remains unclear.
John Ingold | Reporter
MORE HEALTH NEWS
But as Sara Wilson reports, high costs for health care make it difficult to prevent many people from falling into debt to begin with. And addressing that problem is a lot more complicated. “To really tamp it down, you’d have to take pretty serious action, such as regulating provider prices, and that stuff is politically really hard to do,” one national expert said.
This is the second piece in the Colorado News Collaborative’s project on medical debt in conjunction with KFF Health News and newsrooms, including The Sun, from across Colorado.
— Colorado Newsline
CHART OF THE WEEK
Looks like we’re going to be debating energy independence and the merits or demerits of “drill baby, drill” for the rest of the 2024 election season. So let’s start with some facts. The U.S. Energy Information Administration just updated its picture of who in the world is producing the most oil, and how that compares to previous years. The answers can fuel arguments on any side: The United States is not only producing more oil each year than it ever has, it’s pumping more oil than any other nation ever has. A remarkable statement.
That reality will be encouraging to advocates of energy independence, and absolutely depressing to climate change activists who want to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels.
Remember, we don’t create the facts. We just look for charts that can say facts better than we can.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
HEAT MAP
CLIMATE
HEALTH
Thanks for sticking with us, you’ve only got 36 more hours of snow anxiety in which to kill time. We’ll see you here next week, and remember, always lift with your knees, not your back, because your chiropractor can’t see you until next week.
— Michael & John
Corrections & Clarifications
Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.
