Tired of your partner pretending they’re asleep while you’re doomscrolling politics late at night?
Upset that your child who has hacked TikTok algorithms and banked $10,000 from dance videos can’t explain the Gallagher Amendment?
Then we’ve got an event for you! Our ace politics team at The Unaffiliated would never roll away from your late-night anxiety sessions. In fact, they’re offering to show up and handle your most complex politics queries in person, for free, Thursday night at the Denver Press Club.
Wondering if the legislature will fund what Children’s Hospital Colorado calls a youth mental health crisis? Or if a coalition backing an ambitious package of ozone-fighting bills can overcome the Polis administration’s recent let’s-wait-and-see bias? Any new protections afoot for wetlands left vulnerable in a recent SCOTUS decision? Or perhaps you just want to exchange dog photos. The Press Club at 6 p.m. is the place for you.
We’ve got experts on congressional races, gun control, property taxes, campaign finance, housing affordability. It’s like getting an update from your Cousin Darrell only waaayyyy less annoying and waaayyyy better researched. It’s part of The Sun’s commitment to promoting a healthier democracy through better information.
Join them there, and join us below for a deep dive into some exclusive climate and health news. And if you’re heading to Arizona for spring training, don’t forget the high SPF.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
CLIMATE
In drilling for new “geologic hydrogen,” School of Mines may become the hub
The world has long since accepted that there’s an ocean of petroleum underfoot, available in oil or methane natural gas forms, for better and worse, in fueling the planet’s power needs.
But what if there was an equally powerful cloud of clean-burning hydrogen underfoot, waiting to be tapped to help stop climate change?
Colorado School of Mines is setting up to be a hub of knowledge should drilling for all that hydrogen underground eventually become a thing in the fight against emissions. The university is teaming up with the U.S. Geological Survey to create a “joint industry program,” where technology and energy companies will sponsor Mines and government research into underground hydrogen.
The USGS will testify about the clean energy potential for such programs in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Thursday. Colorado’s Sen. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, is on the committee.
Experts call the as-yet untapped hydrogen font “gold hydrogen,” because of where it sits in relation to other potential hydrogen power. “Green hydrogen” is that produced by clean electricity splitting water molecules. “Gray hydrogen,” currently the dominant form in use in American industry, is made from methane natural gas and produces a lot of carbon in its life cycle.
Underground hydrogen, apparently concentrated under Upper Midwest states and the Atlantic seaboard, is gold because 1) it’s already there; 2) leaks while piping it to users do not wreak environmental havoc; and 3) it is used cleanly, either in fuel cells to make vehicle electricity or burned for steam generation with no carbon byproduct.
“There’s just one problem: there’s little scientific information available about how much hydrogen is out there, or where it might be found,” according to a 2023 USGS report on hydrogen’s future.
That’s where the university’s expertise in underground modeling and exploration comes in.
“We are uniquely positioned to tackle the subsurface exploration research in geologic hydrogen,” said Mengli Zhang, co-director of the Center for Gravity, Electrical and Magnetic Studies and co-lead of the new joint program for Mines.
The joint study group’s emphasis will be on “immediately deployable” technology and techniques, Mines officials said, in a release from the school. “Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch here.”
Look for a deeper drill into hydrogen’s future from Sun correspondent William Allstetter next week at ColoradoSun.com.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
CLIMATE
No matter how they tweak it, Denver electric bike rebates sell out in minutes
3 and 8
Number of minutes it took for two Denver rebate programs to sell out
The voracious appetite in Denver for lucrative e-bike rebates is not yet satiated by each new release. A batch released Tuesday sold out in minutes, leaving commuters and recreators waiting until April for another chance.
Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resilience, or CASR, keeps tweaking the format for winning a voucher and the limitations on who can get them, but demand still overwhelms supply even after millions have been spent.
Denver has spent $7.5 million helping residents buy more than 15,000 e-bikes since launching the program in 2022, using taxpayer funds from a climate-related sales tax increase approved by voters in 2020. Overall, CASR receives more than $40 million a year from the tax, with millions more of that spending going to other electrification rebates and climate change programs.
A primary tweak for the February rebate release — which are now scheduled about every other month — was to add a third income level to target help where most needed. Residents with incomes below 60% of the area median get a $1,200 rebate for a standard e-bike and $1,400 for the sturdier cargo bikes.
The standard rebates, with no income qualification needed, remained $300 and $500. The added layer is for moderate income households making below 100% of the area median, or one person making below $86,900. Those rebates are $700 and $900.
Denver made it easier to sign up for an account so that voucher seekers could sign in immediately at release time to get in the queue. Still, a Denver spokesperson told us the low- and moderate-income vouchers were all claimed within three minutes of the 11 a.m. opening, and the standard rebates were gone by 11:08 a.m.
Other tweaks that could help voucher seekers for the rest of 2024: Anyone who wins a voucher and then fails to redeem it at a qualified bike shop within the new, longer window of 90 days, will be disqualified from seeking another voucher for the rest of this year. Use it or lose it, indeed.
Safety and recycling are added tweaks as well. The qualified bike shops can only take vouchers for batteries certified under nationally recognized fire safety standards. And the shops also have to participate in a recycling program for used batteries, an increasing worry in the electrifying world.
Next release for Denver is April 30, mark it down.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
MORE CLIMATE NEWS
HEALTH
Exploring Colorado’s urban-rural telehealth gap
6
The number of rural counties in Colorado’s top 20 counties for rate of telehealth use.
We’ve written a lot previously about the challenges that rural hospitals and clinics face in recruiting doctors or maintaining specialty lines of service.
One potential solution to these problems is the rise of telehealth visits — which would allow people in rural areas to connect virtually with specialists without having to leave their communities and would allow doctors to schedule more visits with patients in these communities without having to travel to get there.
But a new analysis by the Center for Improving Value in Health Care offers a sobering look at whether the promise of telehealth is actually reaching rural Colorado.
CIVHC manages Colorado’s all-payer claims database, which contains more than a billion medical claims submitted in Colorado since 2013, making it a vast source of information on how health care is actually working in the state. CIVHC conducted the analysis in conjunction with Colorado’s Office of eHealth Innovation, which is devoted to leveraging technology to improve health care in the state. The analysis sought to better understand how telehealth was being used in Colorado and why it isn’t being used more often.
In looking through insurance claims data from 2020 and 2021, CIVHC found that the counties with the highest rates of telehealth use in those years mostly weren’t rural. Instead, heavily populated Front Range counties dominated the list of the 20 counties with the highest rates of telehealth use.
The 20 counties with the lowest rates for telehealth use were all — save for Mesa County — rural.
The analysis didn’t specifically offer an explanation for the gap, but it did find that a lack of a computer or a lack of a smartphone were correlated with lower rates of telehealth use. Veteran status was also correlated with lower telehealth use.
The report also raised questions about whether billing problems are limiting the use of telehealth. CIVHC found that insurers generally paid less for telehealth visits than they would for similar in-person visits, making it more lucrative for providers to continue seeing patients in-person. Insurers were also more likely to deny coverage for telehealth visits than for in-person visits.
“We found that many providers reported complexities, challenges and claims denials for unclear reasons when attempting to bill for telehealth,” Ashley Heathfield, a senior project manager at the Office of eHealth Innovation, said during a webinar on the analysis last week.
You can view the full slide deck from last week’s webinar here.
John Ingold | Reporter
MORE HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
As we barrel toward a presidential election this fall, American voters appear strongly in favor of keeping the Affordable Care Act in place.
In the Kaiser Family Foundation’s latest tracking poll, 66% of voters said they support either expanding the Affordable Care Act or keeping it the way it is. Democrats were most in favor of the law, unsurprising given that the ACA — aka Obamacare — was championed, passed and subsequently defended largely by Democrats in Congress and the White House. But independent voters also are in favor of keeping the law.
Only 37% of Republicans were in favor of expanding the law or keeping it the way it is, while 39% said they want to repeal the entire thing.
The latest edition of the survey also asked people about the expenses in their lives that most worry them, with health-related bills coming out on top. Nearly three-quarters of people surveyed said they were very or somewhat worried about being able to afford surprise medical bills or the cost of health care services.
You can read the full survey results on the KFF website.
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
HEAT MAP
CLIMATE
HEALTH
Thanks for hanging, readers, much appreciated. Listen up for our Temperature podcast Thursdays, with other great podcasts every day ranging from the great outdoors to Colorado’s rock music history. See you next week.
— Michael & John
Corrections & Clarifications
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