Across the country 1.8 million Latinos live near oil and gas facilities. In Colorado, 58% of all active oil and gas wells are in high Latino counties. This includes me and my family in Greeley. My son and his classmates are students of Bella Romero Academy where permits were approved for a 24-pad site in 2017, less than 700 feet from their playground.
The site was originally slated to be developed near a mostly white school a few miles away. With the help of the nonprofit Weld Air and Water, the parents organized and the plans were scrapped. In court, for the approval of the permits, Extraction Oil and Gas, now Civitas, argued that the site behind Bella was more suitable than the previous site. Now we are faced with plumes of pollution that leave parents like me worried for the long-term health of our children and staff members. Communities like mine have been treated like sacrifice zones for too long, our leaders must stop acting like we are disposable.
The plans and solutions put forth thus far have maintained the oil and gas industry’s ability to pollute and profit, leaving low income communities and communities of color to deal with blatant institutional and environmental racism.
Colorado’s Environmental Justice Act requires that community health, safety and self-determination be prioritized to undo decades of harm. Our elected officials and regulators must show the courage to do what’s needed for communities impacted by oil and gas operations. Colorado is facing an air quality crisis. Our leaders must urgently act to reduce ozone pollution and ensure that the state complies with federal air quality standards.
State action to address ozone continues to be inequitable, inadequate and ineffective. Despite being downgraded to severe nonattainment with federal ozone standards, the state continues to hand out new air pollution permits that increase harmful ozone-forming emissions — thousands of new permits in the past few years alone.
We have exceeded federal ozone standards for well over a decade but have repeatedly submitted plans to the EPA that have failed to clean up our air. In 2022, the state submitted an ozone State Implementation Plan (SIP) that it knew would fail to bring the nonattainment area back into compliance with federal ozone standards. Because of those failures, the state had to undertake a follow-up rulemaking to adopt additional measures on ozone pollution.
The follow-up SIP rulemaking once again fell short. For example, the state moved forward with a concerning “NOx intensity” standard that doesn’t guarantee reductions of ozone precursor emissions. It included a requirement to use cleaner or zero-emission drilling and fracking engines for only a small subset of disproportionately impacted communities — and excluded many communities of color and low-income communities.
Alongside allies, we sounded the alarms on these failures, but we were once again ignored. This dissection of disproportionately impacted communities occurred in a rulemaking earlier in 2023 — and in response GreenLatinos Colorado and environmental justice partners filed a lawsuit to restore protections. Despite opposition from those impacted, state regulators moved forward with the policy.
How many times will our communities have to share their stories because the state refuses to go far enough to clean up our air and protect public health?
The 2024 legislative session presents a critical opportunity to achieve meaningful reductions in ozone pollution. An interim legislative committee on ozone air quality has dedicated significant time to focus on our air quality crisis and consider policy options. They came to Weld County and saw the poor air quality our community faces every day. I hope they see that immediate action is absolutely necessary.
In this coming session, the legislature must address permitting of new ozone-forming emissions. It is time to get serious about tackling oil and gas sources, which cause nearly half of the ozone pollution along the Front Range. It’s past time for real enforcement as we see industry failing to meet the current laws. We need a robust plan to ensure reductions of ozone and bring the area back into compliance with federal standards.
When Gov. Jared Polis was running for his first term, he came to my son’s school. “All Coloradans deserve to be safe at home, at school, and at work. But today, some families don’t have this basic guarantee,” he wrote in a Facebook post. Seven years later, there are still wells at Bella Romero and we still don’t have that guarantee.
Our community — nuestra comunidad — has fought for generations to be heard. We are no longer asking for change; we are demanding it. We cannot meaningfully address our ozone pollution problem until we get serious about taking on the stranglehold of the oil and gas industry. Let 2024 finally be the year that the legislature and state stand alongside the people, not polluters.
Patricia Garcia-Nelson is based in Greeley and works with GreenLatinos Colorado as the Fossil Fuel Just Transition Advocate.
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