News Updates - Colorado Environmental Justice Chronicle

Nearly 10,000 Suncor air pollution violations in 5 years could lead to citizen lawsuit, groups warn

By Michael Booth, Colorado Sun

Citing 9,205 Suncor air pollution violations in five years and inadequate enforcement by state and federal regulators, a coalition of environmental groups Wednesday filed notice of intent to sue the Commerce City refinery as a citizen-led action under the federal Clean Air Act.

Suncor’s pollution incidents continue despite state health department claims of achieving “record” financial settlements over past violations, said Earthjustice attorney Ian Coghill, leading a coalition that includes the Sierra Club, 350 Colorado and GreenLatinos that will sue the refinery in Denver’s federal district court.

Colorado’s most recent “record” fine against Suncor included only $2.5 million in financial penalties, when the cited violations called for up to $32 million in fines, Coghill said. That settlement included violations more than four years old, and machinery upgrades required in the recent settlements have themselves failed and caused pollution, he added.

Exxon, Suncor units lose bid to escape Boulder, Colorado’s climate case

By Nate Raymond, Reuters

ExxonMobil (XOM.N), opens new tab and subsidiaries of Suncor Energy (SU.TO), opens new tab have lost their bids to dismiss a lawsuit by Boulder, Colorado, alleging the energy companies contributed to climate change by concealing from the public the dangers of unchecked fossil fuel use.

Boulder County District Court Judge Robert Gunning on Friday largely rejected, opens new tab the companies contention that Colorado’s courts lacked jurisdiction over them and that federal law trumped the state-law claims asserted by the city and its surrounding county.

Much of Colorado could be pushed into drought by late summer thanks to hot, dry conditions

By Shannon Mullane, Colorado Sun

Colorado has seen an average water year so far, but looking ahead, climate experts say much of the state could fall into drought conditions and struggle to find relief.

Colorado’s very average snowpack has officially melted away from all 115 federal snow monitoring stations in the state, as of this week. Reservoir levels are at 94%, just slightly below average, while precipitation was at exactly 100% of the 30-year median, according to a Water Conditions Monitoring Committee meeting Tuesday.

Heat, however, has been on the rise. Even summer showers may not be enough to combat its effects, or to keep the state away from drought.

Xcel says it needs $1.9 billion to prevent future wildfires as it faces nearly 300 lawsuits over Marshall fire

By Mark Jaffe, Colorado Sun

Facing nearly 300 lawsuits over a wildfire that destroyed 1,084 homes and killed two people, Xcel Energy on Thursday filed a $1.9 billion wildfire mitigation plan aimed at preventing future blazes.

Among the initiatives in the three-year plan are adding hundreds of weather stations and cameras, adding technology to more precisely target planned outages, replacing outdated equipment and increasing line inspections by radar drones.

“These investments are designed to mitigate a risk,” Robert Kenney, CEO of Xcel’s Colorado subsidiary, said in an interview. “We are trying to do everything we can do to tackle this problem and keep our customers safe.”

Visualized: the parts of the US where summer heat has risen the most

By Oliver Milman, The Guardian

An onslaught of record-breaking heat across much of the US has provided yet another indicator of a longer-term issue – summers are progressively getting hotter for Americans in all corners of the country.

The US climate scientist Brian Brettschneider has analysed almost 130 years of federal data and it shows that from New York to Los Angeles there are hotspots where summers have got significantly hotter in that time compared with the average levels of warming brought about by the burning of fossil fuels.

Summers are, on average, now about 0.8C (1.5F) hotter across the US than this earlier period, but many places have had far more extreme summertime increases, being up to 2.8C (5F) hotter.

The West is warming and drying so fast that a crucial drought-monitoring tool can’t keep up, study says

by Elise Schmelzer, The Denver Post

Drought in the American West is becoming a persistent reality instead of a periodic emergency due to climate change, and a recent study found that an essential tool used to measure drought can’t keep up.

Every week since 1999, the U.S. Drought Monitor has published a new map showing drought conditions across the country, with five categories of drought severity depicted in shades of yellows, oranges and reds. Policymakers and elected leaders in Colorado and other states use the map to make critical decisions about water use, campfire bans, declarations of emergency and more.

And multiple federal agencies use the map to determine how much financial aid is filtered to ranchers and farmers in times of drought.