Category: Pollution from fossil fuels

Sandra Duggan, Denver Post, October 1st, 2026

Amendment 82 would enshrine the right to buy and sell methane gas in Colorado’s constitution and has the potential to weaken existing environmental protections in state or local laws. These are protections that Coloradans depend on to limit unnecessary water pollution and fracking operations across the state. The measure could, for example, overturn local rules that prohibit the use of fracked gas-fired appliances in new construction. It could also serve as a justification to continue the expansion of fracking into the population centers in the Front Range.

The intentionally misleading amendment is being proposed by the right-wing advocacy group Advance Colorado. This dark money group, which doesn’t disclose its donors, is seeking a permanent constitutional change, the likes of which doesn’t exist in any other state and would likely be irreversible. 

Our communities are increasingly experiencing the direct health, environmental, and economic impacts of a fossil-fueled climate crisis. Colorado just recorded its hottest summer in history. Worsening drought is impacting freshwater sources and the Colorado River, causing major lakes and reservoirs like Lake Mead and Lake Powell to hit new all-time record lows. Wildfires burned approximately 235,000 acres across the state during the 2026 fire season. Coloradans strongly support developing our state’s plentiful clean, affordable, renewable energy, including solar, wind and geothermal energy. Our state should focus on transitioning beyond fossil fuels, not locking in a permanent new right for corporate polluters into our constitution.

Sandra Duggan

Bob Walker, Denver Post, October 1st, 2026

We live in a remodeled 100-year-old house that has a basement coal chute. Early cities once choked on the smoke from burning coal for heat. Early residents could also burn trash in their yards. Thankfully, our ancestors had the foresight not to put the right to burn coal in our homes or trash in our yards in our state Constitution. 

Amendment 82 wants to lock the right to purchase or sell natural gas into Colorado’s Constitution. It is written in a deceptively simplistic and vague language. If passed, this bill will cause years of expensive lawsuits in Colorado. The amendment is unnecessary since it is already legal to buy and sell natural gas in the state. Amendment 82 is brought to you by a dark money group composed of very wealthy individuals possibly wishing to extend their fossil fuels profits.

Solar, wind and batteries get cheaper and more efficient every year. Gas does not. Nationwide electric heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces. As more people electrify their lives the costs of maintaining or adding new unnecessary gas infrastructure will fall on fewer people. They will see their monthly gas bills continue to rise. 

A dark money group wants to lock their favorite fuel into our Constitution. This is unnecessary and potentially very expensive as we move into the future. Please vote no on Constitutional Amendment 82.

Bob Walker

Posted on September 30th, 2026

Amendment 82 is unprecedented, unnecessary, dangerous, and guaranteed to increase natural gas-based energy costs.

The Colorado Coalition for a Livable Climate opposes Amendment 82. The Colorado constitution is the blueprint for governing and protection of individual rights. It is NOT the place to address industry competition. The constitution doesn’t pick winners and losers, and should never give one industry the permanent right to lock in profits over another, or the permanent right to lock in pollution.

Amendment 82 does just that. It gives oil and gas corporations the right to exist forever, have a permanent unfair advantage over renewable energy, and to pollute in Colorado.  

Amendment 82 would enshrine the right to buy and sell methane gas in Colorado’s constitution. The ability to buy and sell natural gas has never been an issue. Consumers can buy natural gas to heat and cool their homes, and distributors and utilities can sell natural gas. Amendment 82 doesn’t solve a problem; it creates one.

Amendment 82 insulates one particular corporate polluter from energy industry competition and has the potential to weaken existing and hard-fought state and local environmental laws and regulations. Coloradans depend on these environmental protections for clean water, clean air, clean soils, including safe playgrounds and school yards, and safe farms and ranches, and to rapidly reduce emissions from oil and gas operations to stabilize the climate. By creating a guaranteed market for natural gas, instead of lower prices, consumers will be faced with higher monopoly prices.

Guaranteeing a market means guaranteeing a supply chain. That will create a justification for continued expansion of fracking operations into residential neighborhoods, sensitive watersheds and wildlife habitat, and for natural gas distributors and electric utilities to pass on to consumers the investment costs to build out new infrastructure, including pipelines. This is a recipe for perpetuating more environmental injustice upon communities and fostering sacrifice zones across the State. The measure could also, for example, be used to thwart local government efforts to promote clean energy-based new construction.

Advance Colorado, is the dark money group behind this deceptive and intentionally misleading amendment. Amendment 82 is not the path to lower consumer costs that the proponent of the Amendment claims. It’s the exact opposite. It is a path to higher costs, more pollution, and aggravating the climate crisis.

The oil and gas industry already has out-sized influence and power. It is already propped up and subsidized by the government (translation, Colorado taxpayers) through low severance tax, inadequate financial assurance requirements to cover clean-up costs, and lax regulations and enforcement. Colorado further cemented the future of this industry by creating a credit trading system for the wastewater that is produces. And electric utilities already earn a guaranteed profit through a regulated rate of return, which determines what ratepayers pay for electricity. This legal and regulatory framework already secures their profitability.

The only thing Amendment 82 achieves is to disempower the hard-working people of Colorado of their power to stop corporate and governmental abuse.

Colorado does not need corporate polluters or cheaters in the constitution. This is the time to embrace clean energy competition and solutions that guarantee a healthy environment, not one industry’s corporate profits and tyranny.

For more information about the effort to defeat Amendment 82, and to take action and donate, visit this website.

Kate Christensen, Boulder Daily Camera, September 25th, 2026

I’m grateful that Colorado voters in the 1850s were not convinced by the whale oil industry to put a “right to whale oil” in the state Constitution. One can imagine the tragic boondoggle that would have been. Yet, it is what the oil and gas industry wants us to do this year with Amendment 82, “right to natural gas.” For years, the oil and gas industry has dumped millions and millions of dollars into advertising to convince us that natural gas is clean and safe. The Denver Post reported that in 2017 alone the oil and gas industry spent more than $80 million to shape public opinion in Colorado. It hasn’t stopped. The problem is that natural gas is methane. And methane is 80 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is in the first 20 years that it is in the atmosphere. Anyone who has gone outside this summer can feel that climate chaos is here. The only way to shift course is to transition away from natural gas and all other fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Don’t vote for the right to whale oil. This November, vote “no” on Amendment 82.

— Kate Christensen, Lafayette