On Oct. 28, the Detroit Pistons beat the Chicago Bulls, starting the NBA season 2-1 and on pace to win 55 games out of 82.
As of today, Dec. 20, Detroit has not won a single game since, and is absolutely crushing a record losing streak. (Hint: Under the NBA recent results category where it says “Streak,” L24 is a real shocker.)
And yet nearly 17,000 attended the last Pistons home game.
What’s the connection to climate and health news? Hear me out.
It takes a lot of optimism, or at least a lot of sunk-cost fallacy, to go watch a Pistons team that might not win another game before Easter. I thought about Pistons fans when I talked this week with Carolyn Elam, a Boulder city sustainability manager, about Boulder’s recent slow progress in meeting ambitious climate goals.
Boulder set a world championship goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2035. Equivalent to this year’s Pistons declaring they’ll win every game between now and the NBA playoffs. An update from Boulder, as you’ll read below, shows the city has seen only an 18% drop in carbon emissions from its benchmark, with the available time between now and 2035 accelerating to a full-court sprint.
Yet Elam is steadfast in believing that big achievements only come after setting big goals. On reading Boulder’s update, Elam said, “I think the community will double down and really try to deliver.”
Perhaps her next career should be coaching the Pistons. Speaking of which, they’ll try for loss No. 25 in a row Thursday night at home against the Jazz. Keep heaving up those 3-pointers, Detroit and Boulder. We’ll be cheering.
CLIMATE
Boulder’s local carbon cuts are a bit slow in coming
Boulder reported some big victories for recycling and reuse goals reducing carbon emissions when it carefully dismantled its old community hospital. Some of the steel beams were reused in a new fire station. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
“We often are surprised at how far we can go. And we often shoot past some of those targets. So I’m actually still optimistic about our goals.”
— Carolyn Elam, City of Boulder sustainability
If anyone in the United States could make it look easy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help fight global warming, it should be the People’s Republic of Boulder, right?
Turns out, cutting carbon is hard. Even for the City of Boulder. And since Boulder has set audacious goals for itself, their year-end reports can look pretty brutal.
Boulder was one of the first cities in the country to set its own goal for cutting carbon, in 2006. Then, in 2021, Boulder doubled down and said it would try to cut its local carbon footprint 70% by 2030, from a very ambitious new baseline of 2018 emissions levels. Remember those 2018 levels already represented significant cuts from the 2005 baseline that many government entities use, so Boulder was giving up a big head start.
How are they doing? A newly updated carbon dashboard for Boulder says “community-wide emissions decreased 2% from 2021 and were 18% below the 2018 baseline.”
That’s a nice number. Representing millions of tons of carbon removal. But it’s a long way between 18% and 70%, with only six years left to go. Boulder’s even bigger goal is to be net-zero on carbon emissions by 2035. And the city doesn’t have the opportunity of shutting down a coal-fired power plant within its boundaries to get a big numbers boost.
“We continue to make progress,” said Boulder sustainability senior manager Carolyn Elam, in an interview. “I think we continue to have to accelerate our progress if we’re going to hit our goal. 70% is … really hard.”
To get at its carbon emissions, Boulder adds up the carbon produced from all categories such as its portion of Xcel Energy’s sales of power in the city, the transportation emissions of cars and trucks inside the boundaries, natural gas burned for building heat and stoves, and more. Boulder gains as Xcel cleans up its statewide electricity generation with solar and wind, but that’s only one portion.
“The biggest thing that we’d have to do to influence that number is just transition the majority of our buildings away from natural gas,” Elam said. Chances to do that are limited somewhat by the fact Boulder has almost no residential construction going on — doesn’t help to ban a gas connection if there’s no new houses going up!
But the city is working with partners to emphasize rebates and other opportunities for existing homeowners and landlords to replace gas furnaces with electric heat pumps and other alternatives, Elam said.
On transportation, Boulder also has little control over how quickly drivers transition to electric cars, or the truck fleets that crisscross the city. But the city is supporting turnover in local bus fleets to clean electric, and is always seeking ways to reduce vehicle miles traveled, Elam said.
Another big target is waste, with the goal of reducing the carbon emissions associated with sending items to a landfill that could otherwise have a useful, emissions-reducing second life. Successfully reusing much of Boulder’s former community hospital during a 2023 deconstruction was a watershed moment, Elam said.
Boulder has recently begun an even more ambitious education effort by adding a second, global carbon footprint for the city, counting up carbon created from goods made outside Boulder and brought in as retail sales, for example. That larger carbon footprint from all goods and services used can be daunting for many people to accept.
But sustainability leaders shoot for learning, not despair, Elam said. She recalls early debates about Xcel in Colorado, when regulators wondered if a 5% goal for renewable generation was impossibly high. Those same regulators are now entertaining studies about whether Xcel will hit 80% or 85% renewable generation by the 2030 target.
“We often are surprised at how far we can go. And we often shoot past some of those targets. So I’m actually still optimistic about our goals,” Elam said.
“I think they’re the right goals, to guide our community and to really set that bar out there for people to think about.”
MORE CLIMATE NEWS
Cleanup will continue at leaky Jeffco uranium mine. A Colorado cleanup company is walking away from treating tainted water at the shuttered Schwartzwalder uranium mine in Jefferson County, just seven miles from Golden, Michael Booth reports. But the state has confiscated the $7.3 million cleanup bond posted by the company and has enough money to continue for now the effort to keep bad water out of Ralston Creek and Ralston Reservoir.— The Colorado Sun How Coloradans can keep their trees healthy. Years of roller coaster weather in Colorado are taking a toll on our trees. Besides frequent drought, the state experiences extreme temperature fluctuations, with day-to-night temperatures often varying by 30 degrees or more. Recall Dec. 21, 2022, when a 51-degree high was followed by a low of minus 10 degrees in the Denver area. “It’s tough being a tree in Colorado,” says Whitney Cranshaw, emeritus professor of Entomology at Colorado State University. But Jennifer Forker collects some expert advice on how to handle your trees, with an eye on climate change.
— The Colorado Sun Any Colorado River compromises will be “messy.” “The one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is that the post-2026 guidelines will deliver a messy compromise that will be judged harshly by history. That’s the cold reality,” John Entsminger, Nevada’s top negotiator, told hundreds of water watchers, experts and officials during a panel discussion at a key Las Vegas water convention that Shannon Mullane monitored.
— The Colorado Sun Air pollution regulators approve “intensity” plan to cut nitrogen oxides and ozone. The Air Quality Control Commission approved a novel but controversial plan to cut ozone by regulating the amount of nitrogen oxides produced per 1,000 barrels of oil in Colorado, Michael Booth reports. They also gave preliminary approval to a gas powered lawn mower summer use ban for governments, but rejected the tougher option of a full sales ban on the equipment.
— The Colorado Sun Wolves happen. Colorado officials, including the governor, who opened one of the crates, released the first five relocated gray wolves into a Grand County meadow, Jason Blevins reports. The wolves occasionally took a brief look backward, but dashed off to make history after their airplane trip from Oregon.
— The Colorado Sun
HEALTH
Open enrollment is rolling to record numbers
St. Vincent Hospital’s X-ray tech Joyce Boone, left, tours the features of the cat scan machine to a visitor, Asher Massey, during the grand opening Sept. 8, 2021, in Leadville. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
>184,000
The number of people who had enrolled in a health insurance plan on Connect for Health Colorado by Dec. 6.
A crucial deadline passed last week in the state’s annual open enrollment window, and it appears that Colorado broke a record for health insurance sign-ups.
Last Friday, Dec. 15, was the deadline for people who buy insurance on their own to select a plan so that they will have coverage on Jan. 1. Connect for Health Colorado, the state’s insurance exchange, has not yet released a tally of the number of people who signed up by the deadline. But officials have released data on the number of sign-ups through the first five weeks, a period that ended on Dec. 6.
And it’s huge: 184,000 people had selected a plan on Connect for Health.
In a blog post, Kevin Patterson, the exchange’s CEO, said that figure is nearly 30% ahead of last year at the same time. It’s also more than the entire number of sign-ups the state saw in 2021 — though it is still behind last year’s total number of sign-ups, which was a little over 212,000.
“I am overwhelmed with gratitude and appreciation for the response we’ve seen,” Patterson wrote.
Patterson attributed the big numbers in part to what he called “our smoothest enrollment year yet.”
“People are getting through the enrollment process with ease online, over the phone, and with their brokers or assisters,” Patterson wrote.
It’s not always clear what’s driving higher numbers of sign-ups. Are more people eligible for financial help, making plans more affordable? Are fewer people being covered by employer plans, pushing more people to shop in the individual market? But the increase is potentially a good sign for the state’s uninsured rate as tens of thousands of people drop off Medicaid rolls per month.
In a briefing to the state legislature’s Joint Budget Committee on Tuesday, Kim Bimestefer, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, said the state’s Medicaid renewal and disenrollment rates are now roughly in line with what they were prior to the pandemic.
The state has also improved its rate of what are called procedural denials, which is when someone loses Medicaid for technical reasons like not returning their renewal packet. These denials — what Bimestefer called “the bane of our being” — are particularly troublesome because they could signal that people who are eligible are falling through the cracks.
The state’s procedural denial rate falls to about 25% after a 90-day reconsideration period, Bimestefer said.
“We’re going in the right direction,” she said. “(But) we are not happy.”
The state is still working on how to track whether people who are disenrolled from Medicaid pick up health coverage elsewhere. But the record sign-ups on Connect for Health may be a good sign that Colorado can keep its record-low uninsured rate.
MORE HEALTH NEWS
Colorado could copy a Texas program that has had success tracking runaway foster kids. When foster kids in Colorado run away, it can sometimes take days before someone goes out looking for them. In Texas, a 300-person team of investigators starts looking right away. As Jennifer Brown reports, it’s a model that some would like to see Colorado adopt, though some state officials are skeptical of its benefit.— The Colorado Sun As foundation for “excited delirium” diagnosis cracks, fallout spreads. Instances of police violence sparked a reconsideration of the diagnosis “excited delirium,” which so often featured in medical reports for people like George Floyd who died during encounters with law enforcement. But, as momentum builds across the country to ban the diagnosis, supporters of reform are encountering entrenched attitudes and the complexity of redesigning training for first responders.
— KFF Health News
We here at the Home Central Office Mothership of The Temperature’s Worldwide Reporting Network figured it was a good time to remind us all where electricity comes from. No, it’s not from lightning. And no, it’s not a quadrillion hamsters running wheels in subterranean vaults, though maybe that’s what the so-called “particle accelerator” is under those mountains near Geneva.
Worldwide electricity generation is still dominated by coal, as the chart above shows clearly. It’s a good lesson in the same week that world energy officials announced coal use hit an all time record last year.
Wind and solar are certainly gaining, and that’s equally important and far more hopeful information. But for the planet to stay cool enough for most people to survive in decent health, those dirty-coal numbers have to start pointing downward.
CLIMATE
Colorado regulators trim Xcel’s ambitious and pricey energy plans. The PUC knocked billions off the utility proposal to protect consumers.— The Colorado Sun Climate change and health: Heat causing dengue cases to soar. Warmer temperatures create even more habitat and prime conditions for dangerous bugs.
— AP Do offshore wind plans depend on a ship of fools? The dream of clean energy from enormous windmills planted in the ocean relies on finishing one of the most complicated ships ever built.
— WSJ People are moving to shoreline states, but moving out of flooded neighborhoods. America’s internal migration continues to Florida, Texas and other Gulf states, but climate change flooding is already wiping some choices off the map.
— NPR
HEALTH
Denver Health has started offering abortion services. It’s the first time in the safety-net hospital’s long history that it has done so.— Axios The case of the singing brain tumor patient. Speaking of Denver Health, a surgeon there kept a patient awake — and singing — during brain surgery (with her consent) so that he could make sure he wasn’t damaging important parts of the brain while removing a tumor.
— 9News A question of morel values. Pricey mushrooms are believed to have killed two people and sickened 51 others at a sushi restaurant in Montana, leading to questions about why good mushrooms go bad and whether the delicacy is worth it.
— KFF Health News Time to jump off the tongue-tie treadmill? The United States is seeing an explosion in the number of tongue-tie procedures — typically performed on newborns who are struggling to breastfeed. But is there actually evidence to back up the practice?
— The New York Times🔑
We’d be shocked if there’s anybody left in the office to read this, as holiday hordes empty out to nest at home or travel for Christmas. We’re confident, though, you’ve been reading on your iPhone at the airport. Thanks for living and learning with us. And go Pistons!
— Michael & John
Corrections & Clarifications
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