Face the State

Face The State Staff Report

An analyst who has studied the climate change policy in several different states now says Colorado is being subjected to a rigged—and potentially costly—scheme.

Paul Chesser, director of the North Carolina-based Climate Strategies Watch, in Denver this week, is challenging the economic backing behind Gov. Bill Ritter’s latest environmental policy, saying funding is adversely impacting the Governor's decision making.

In September, Ritter's 34-member Colorado Climate Action Panel concluded 10 months of deliberations when it released its 70 policy prescriptions. Mostly promoted as a strategy to curb the emission of greenhouse gases, these prescriptions formed the basis for Ritter’s Climate Action Plan that followed. Released in November, the plan closely mirrors the panel’s goals of reducing statewide carbon dioxide emissions 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

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While the strategy may appear appealing at first glance, Chesser is traveling the nation attempting to get others to look more critically at the research and funding used to promote policies such as those coming out of the CCAP. The panel's work, underwritten by the liberal Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Democrat billionaire Pat Stryker, and the Denver Water utility, was also co-founded by the Center for Climate Strategies, an activist outfit that Chesser argues is far from objective in its analysis.

According to Chesser, the organization cannot be trusted because he says it has misrepresented itself. Specifically, he argues that CCS is very closely connected to the Pennsylvania Economic Council, a national advocacy group funded by left-leaning environmentalist donors such as the Turner Foundation, Heinz Endowment, and the Energy Foundation.

“[CCS is] posing as objective management consultants, and they don’t divulge who their funders are,” said Chesser. “They’re not who they say they are. People aren’t finding out who they are.”

Chesser also disputes the assumptions underlying the scientific basis for the Colorado climate panel’s prescriptions. “It’s all based on their view that there’s going to be a climate catastrophe, but there’s broad dissent on the issue,” he said.

More than 19,000 American scientists have signed an online petition that reads in part: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

But the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, which joined CCS in organizing the panel, disputes Chesser's claim, saying that the 34 Coloradans who served on CAP directly shaped the policy proposals presented to Ritter. Nearly all of the 70 proposals were approved unanimously.

“People are more interested in solutions offered by Coloradans than criticisms from outside groups,” said RMCO president Stephen Saunders.

Chesser said his research has shown that a CCS-created template ends up pushing the same costly policy agenda in most or all the different states in which it has operated. Its prescriptions regularly include carbon taxes, cap-and-trade regulations, and renewable energy mandates.“The whole stakeholder process has been granted a credibility that it does not deserve,” he said. “It’s a fixed process created, controlled, and run by CCS, and funded by global warming alarmist advocates, which calls everything it does into question.”

In addition to questioning funders of the commission, Chesser is now also vocalizing concerns about the funding arrangements behind University of Colorado professor Heidi Van Genderen’s appointment as the governor’s climate change adviser. He uncovered the fact that Van Genderen is being paid by the left-leaning William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to serve in her official capacity.

Chesser says the lack of attention provides a double standard.

“Imagine if a conservative foundation were paying someone to act as a governor’s tax and budget adviser, there would be uproar from the other side,” he said.

Casting further doubt on the governor’s climate plan, a new Independence Institute report authored by Suffolk University economics professor Benjamin Powell concluding that CCS and the panel did not fairly quantify benefits, understated many costs, and even erroneously counted many costs as benefits. The Independence Institute report concludes that the alleged estimates of $5 billion in savings from the governor’s plan “are not just wildly optimistic; they are the product of a purely fictitious analysis.”

But Saunders says the stated opinions of Chesser’s contract employer, the North Carolina-based John Locke Foundation, should be considered when analyzing his analysis on climate change and related investigative work. “The John Locke Foundation believes that state government should do nothing about climate change or greenhouse gas emissions,” Saunders said.