Lichens, boy bands and voracious mussels, oh my 

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This will be quick, because an icy cooler full of environmental news awaits just downstream. We’d like you to consider taking our Colorado Sun reader survey if you haven’t already.

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So give it a look, right after a breezy spin through the latest Temperature news.

TEMP CHECK

Lichenology/Etymology

Why are we lichen the Indigo Girls? Because they rock

Last week at ColoradoSun.com we told you about a renowned University of Colorado lichenologist’s obsession with the Indigo Girls, and how she named three newly identified Colorado lichen species after the band and its eco-friendly founders.

That was dreamy enough for biology professor Erin Manzitto-Tripp and her Ph.D. candidate discovery partner Jacob Watts, whose mission in life is to tell the world about overlooked lichens and their key role in the environment.

But it got dreamier.

The Indigo Girls lit up Red Rocks Friday night, and were so tickled their environmental ethos had led to a namesake species that they invited the discoverers for a meetup after the concert.

“Spreading the lichen gospel!” Manzitto-Tripp said afterward, still floating, and eager to hit the road for more lichen discoveries this summer in the Colorado high country. Officially in the botany books are Lecanora indigoana, Lepraria saliersiae, and Pertusaria rayana, named after the band and cofounders Emily Saliers and Amy Ray.

“Amy was especially enthusiastic,” Manzitto-Tripp reports.

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Invasive Species

Will zebra mussels grab hold of the wakeboarding championships?

How committed are we to power-boating the finest of environmental journalism to every shore across Colorado? We stay up late reading aquatic biology reports from the University of Minnesota, that’s how much.

Well, OK, maybe we don’t volunteer that much effort on our own accord. But we will if a reader tells us to. And a very alert, zebra mussel-hating reader pointed us to a Golden Gopher academic study that made her think a boating event at Highline Lake this week could be a bad idea.

Turns out the design of wakeboarding boats makes them hard-to-clean transporters of zebra mussel larvae, which hide out in ballast tanks and other boat sections in search of new watery hosts. And Highline Lake, where state wildlife officials just found larvae again after draining the lake to kill off a previous invasion, is hosting the national wakeboarding championships.

Bad timing!

Wakeboard boats take on more water than other speed boats in order to ride lower in the water and thus create a bigger wake wave for the athletes. Zebra mussel larvae can become so embedded inside that style of boat that it takes a hot water flush or five days of drying to clear them safely, the University of Minnesota study said.

“Perhaps you can highlight the stupidity of holding this event at that lake,” our tipster said.

We’re aware, was Colorado’s response.

“Yes, Highline’s designation as an infested body of water was considered in the planning process of this event,” Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokesperson Rachael Gonzales said.

“CPW and the event organizers continue to work closely to ensure we are not spreading zebra mussels to other bodies of water.”

Only two wakeboarding boats are needed for the competition, Gonzales noted. “They will have to go through the same inspection and decontamination process like any other boat entering and leaving Highline Lake. These protocols have been in place since 2023, after zebra mussels were first discovered in Highline Lake in 2022.”

In warning that half the Minnesota boats studied were carrying zebra mussel larvae or “veligers” in their ballast tanks, the U of M noted how all this started. The voracious, fast-reproducing mussels came to the Midwest from Europe in Atlantic-crossing commercial ships dumping ballast water into the Great Lakes.

Did Colorado officials read the whole study, our skeptical reader wanted to know. She’s heard thousands of enthusiastic spectators from all over the U.S. will trek to the Highline Lake championships.

“I guarantee a good number of them will have their own boats, jet skis, paddleboards, etcetera, as they attend the event,” she wrote. “As this is a national event, all of these folks and whatever water gear they bring have the potential to spread zebra mussels.

“Still sounds totally boneheaded to me.”

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Renewable Energy

EV sales in Colorado start to sputter a bit

It’s becoming a pattern. Months of warnings that Colorado electric vehicle sales could slow are now showing up as reality in the quarterly auto dealers’ reports on new car registrations.

Clean energy analysts had been predicting that a combination of factors could drag down burgeoning U.S. and local EV sales: previously scheduled cuts to Colorado’s tax credit; threats (eventually delivered) to dump the lucrative federal tax credit; and various political and cultural factions’ anger at Tesla chief Elon Musk, tarnishing the leader by far in U.S. EV sales.

Combined electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle sales — the two drive trains that qualify as clean under Colorado rules — slumped to 24.2% of registrations in the second quarter of 2025, according to the Colorado Auto Dealers Association report. That’s down from a combined 26% of the overall new car and light truck market in the first quarter, and 31.3% in the fourth quarter of 2024.

The drop in share happened even as overall Colorado sales jumped 8.3% in the first half of 2025 from the year earlier period. CADA isn’t jumping for joy, however. Their economic analysis found people rushing to secure new cars before tariffs kicked in for the second half of 2025, merely shifting sales sooner rather than indicating a booming car environment overall.

Colorado officials, who built assumptions of nearly a million EVs on the road by 2030 into their models of mandated carbon emission reductions, have made “buy now” into state policy. The Colorado Energy Office notes the $7,500 federal EV credit disappears at closing time Sept. 30. The state credit was scheduled to step down again Jan. 1, then budget analysts said rules required it to be halved after slowing revenue growth triggered cuts to subsidies.

Colorado had previously been running ahead of EV sales goals to reach the 2030 targets, but more severe backsliding would erase any margins for error.

Boy-band Water Warnings Part 2

Denver Water’s “Splashstreet” is back, baby

The music starts. A person wearing a toilet costume with “Denver Water” printed on the tank sits down on a couch, and presumably, falls asleep. Enter Nick, Brian, AJ, Kevin and Howie in a Halloween-themed dream sequence.

You may know where this is going: Denver Water’s Splashstreet Boys are back. Alright.

The oldest water provider in Colorado has decided to take a new approach to getting the word out about Denver water conservation. Last summer, five employees donned sideways baseball caps and all-white outfits to sing “I Water That Way,” an homage to the Backstreet Boys that simultaneously educated customers on watering rules.

The video went (relatively) viral and now has 138,000 views on YouTube, by the website’s built-in counter. (The original “I Want it That Way” video has more than 1.6 billion!) News outlets picked it up. The real Backstreet Boys even weighed in, saying the water crew nailed it.

This week the band was at it again, reminding water users to check their sprinkler schedules while helping Millennials remember what it was like to be a preteen. Water on Tuesdays and Thursdays, not Mondays or Wednesdays, the group sings. Think about water-efficient Coloradoscaping for your lawns and gardens. (The Backstreet Boys have yet to respond.)

“Water’s precious, don’t you understand,” they sing. “Asking you to care for water is the whole point of this band.”

The song, which parodies the Halloween-themed classic “Everybody” (Backstreet’s Back) from 1997, is a fun take on a serious reality, the water provider said in a news release Monday.

When everyone waters at the same time on Monday and Wednesday mornings, it leads to higher energy costs while testing the capacity limits of Denver Water’s treatment plants and storage facilities around the Denver metro area. Eventually, Denver Water may be required to build costly new infrastructure to meet this demand, the release said.

“We’ve talked publicly about this issue for a while now, but we haven’t yet seen the results we need to alleviate pressures on our system,” Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s manager of demand planning said in the release.

So they decided to call in reinforcements, he said. Check out Splashstreet’s newest, not-yet-viral video on Youtube or the Denver Water website.

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MORE ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH NEWS

• Short staffing, complex rules drop Colorado behind on water quality permits. Colorado is lagging far behind some Western states in water quality permits for big dischargers into state rivers, Jerd Smith reports. It’s a combination of understaffing and low budgets, plus a contradiction: Colorado has some enviable high water quality standards, but writing those rules into permits can take longer.
• Colorado could gain from dispersing USDA beyond Washington, but critics see only cuts. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will move thousands of employees out of the nation’s capital in a reorganization the agency says will put them closer to customers while saving money. Around 2,600 workers — more than half the Washington, D.C., workforce — will be moved to hubs in Raleigh, North Carolina, Kansas City, Missouri, Indianapolis, Fort Collins and Salt Lake City. The union representing federal workers immediately criticized the plan as a ploy to cut federal jobs, pointing out that some 95% of the department’s employees already work outside Washington.
• Why did it take 60 years for Colorado’s tribes to tap into their Lake Nighthorse water?
  Southern Colorado tribal leaders’ efforts to get federal waterworks projects at the same useful scale as were done for other geographies and demographics of the state are finally paying off, Shannon Mullane reports. But why did it take so long?
• Pitched battle now underway between Colorado clean energy ambitions and federal shift. When it comes to clean energy, President Donald Trump and Colorado aren’t just on different pages — they might be on different planets. By 2030, Colorado aspires to put almost a million electric vehicles on the road, cut its greenhouse gas emissions 50%, and shut down its remaining coal-fire power plants. The state also aims to have 100% clean energy generation by 2040 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. A Trump executive order put all of that under direct, withering fire, Mark Jaffe reports.
• Holy Cross Energy hits 96% clean energy supply. The co-op that supplies Garfield, Eagle, Pitkin and other mountain counties continues its radical transition to a clean energy leader, with multiple months over 90% clean energy this year. Further progress, however, could be slowed by loss of federal clean energy development credits and higher costs from tariffs.
• A bonus natural history of climate change, from Harper’s. We couldn’t put this essay down after launching into its poetic descriptions of ominous observations: “But we have kept the count for decades now, and the trend is clear. In thirty-five years, the number of individual butterflies observed has dropped by more than half. The number of species has fallen by a third. A dozen butterflies are now missing, including the showy Baltimore Checkerspot and the Aphrodite Fritillary.”

CHART OF THE WEEK

Did the now-canceled federal subsidies for developing clean energy make a difference in Colorado?

A chart from Holy Cross Energy is here to tell you, “yes.”

Bringing online solar and wind projects that enjoyed tax credits cutting costs 30% to 50%, the Western Slope utility is serving 45,000 customers with 85% green electricity so far this year. That’s an enormous leap from the 39% green energy Holy Cross was able to deliver in 2018.

The big leap happened in 2024, when big projects like the Bronco 2 wind farm near Flagler started pumping electricity into the Colorado grid. As we wrote at ColoradoSun.com earlier this week, Holy Cross is now hitting as high as 96% in its peak-generating summer months.

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Thanks for taking a look. If you’ve given up on the Rockies, by the way, you can head to Colorado Springs the next couple of nights to see the intrastate minor league battle between the Rocky Mountain Vibes and the Grand Junction Jackalopes. Best mascots in the state. How can you beat a toasty s’more with sunglasses, and a fictional horned bunny?

When the baseball quality doesn’t captivate you, the merch tent should.

— Michael & John

Corrections & Clarifications

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Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.