Bill Ritter on What Everyone Should Know About America’s Energy Revolution

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Bill, why is it important for states to have a clean energy plan? You know, Tom, we live in a day of the need for great transition in our power sector. If you think about five or six years ago, the power sector, and what I mean by that, your energy utilities in America, of every stripe, they were the leading emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the nation.

We as the United States are the leading contributor to greenhouse gases overall, collectively, over the history of the industrialized world. We’re now the second largest emitter to China, but so much of the regulation for emissions of greenhouse gases in the power sector happens at the state level. True also of transportation and at the built environment.

If you’re only on federal work, and right now, I mean, the federal government has not been able to move a serious energy or emissions plan through the legislature, through Congress. So it falls to the states to actually do the work. And we’ve seen, interestingly to Tom, we’ve seen Republican and Democratic governors alike lead clean energy agendas in the states.

And what that in part caused was the coal emissions to bend downward so that transportation emissions became the leader. We can see through state actions how emissions can become less because of those state actions. And actually an entire sector really began to curb in a downhill way its greenhouse gas emissions.

And that’s, as you do, and I know greenhouse gas emissions are the big contributor to warming and something we need to very much control. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Vanderick and I’m joined today by a friend and 41st governor of the great state of Colorado, Bill Ritter.

Bill directs the Center for New Energy Economy at Colorado State University. He also has a terrific new book out that we’re going to talk about called Powering Forward. Bill, thanks so much for joining us. It’s great to see you again. It’s great to see you, Tom.

Thank you. I think we met like 30 years ago when we were both in this wonderful leadership development opportunity called Leadership Denver. It was 30 years ago on September, I think, when we started, August or September, we finished in June of 93 and had what I would consider nine great months in a leadership class.

And it was great to meet you then and meet your wife and just become friends over time. Bill, why did you participate in Leadership Denver? What were you open to get out of it? It’s kind of funny, Tom. I had been a prosecutor five and a half years and then I went to Zambia and I ran a nutrition

center in Zambia for three years as a Catholic missionary. Came back, I was a federal prosecutor and I ended up meeting a guy who had gone through Leadership Denver and all he said was, you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do it. And I really didn’t intend to be an elected official.

At the time I started in Leadership Denver, the day we graduated was the day I was sworn in as the Denver District Attorney because there was a vacancy and then I was appointed by the governor. And so it was really almost accidental in a very sort of synchronistic way that I would take a leadership class before I started as Denver’s DEA and then later became governor.

But I didn’t take it because I thought, oh, I will someday be, you know, whatever. I took it because I came highly recommended by a very good friend of mine and it was everything he promised it would be. Bill, I was sort of forced, I was sort of forced into the class by the CEO at pace and I thought, you know, I’m helping to run this rocket ship of a company.

Why would I want to spend time with community leaders and a handful of sessions and a bunch of school visits with my friends at the Colorado Children’s Campaign were life changing for me. It really opened my eyes to the importance of and the opportunities in public service. And it’s interesting that I think for both of us it was a powerful experience that helped

shape our service over the last 30 years. I remember your transition really well because you were very much in the corporate world and then made sort of that switch to the non-governmental organization world that became a subject matter expert in education. And if you remember, Tom, when I was putting my campaign together for governor, you’re

one of the people that I sat down with. You told me something that was really important that actually wound up in true you. We talked about the dropout rate that Denver Public Schools and the Aurora Public Schools that I was a product of and just statewide the dropout rate was really significant. You said it’s hard to know what it takes, but put a stake in the ground 10 years out.

So I did. And in fact, said several times, we’re going to reduce the dropout rate by 50% over a 10 year period that was in 2006 as a candidate, 2007 as the governor. And we did that. We actually were part of other people came after me and worked on this as well.

But I just remember that advice so well. You telling me, yeah, this is hard stuff, but you need to have a place you want to get to. So we put a stake in the ground and in part, thanks to you, we were able to achieve it. You know, Bill, one of my first grants after we started the Gates Foundation was to the

Colorado Children’s Campaign and they helped launch what became the Denver School of Science and Technology, DSST. It’s now one of the best high poverty STEM networks in Colorado. So some great things have come from that collaboration. If you remember, Tom, the person who was at the time the executive director or maybe president

of the Children’s Foundation was my lieutenant governor. Yeah. Barbara Bryant changed my life by dragging me through schools in the barrios of West Denver. And I think on the second or third school visit, I put my arm around Barb and I said, somebody needs to do something about this Barb.

And she looked at me and said, why isn’t it you? And that moment really changed my life. Well, she was she was that way. Good for you. You know, she went on to serve on the Denver Public School School Board.

She just came off last year. She is now moving back to California because her sons and grandkids are there. But she’s a she’s a great, great person and really kind of in my mind, famous for champion children just in such a almost exclusive way. She was just singularly focused on the well being of kids.

No, she’s a powerful advocate, bipartisan advocate, somebody that could make the case for kids to anybody that would listen. I remember she brought me along in my first education advocacy meeting with with Governor Lamb. No, it was a governor rumor.

So anyway, I think she turned me into an education advocate. So after you left office, you had done some neat things when you were in office, including creating this this Colorado promise that really was one of the you were one of the first governors to make clean energy central to your your platform. But after you left office, you started the Center for New Energy Economy.

That’s why did why did you do that? It’s an interesting choice. Yeah, it’s interesting because you I don’t know, Tom, if you remember, but I’m an attorney my trade and I actually had a few different law firms ask if I wanted to join them there former governors, former senators or Congress people to go into law firms and develop some

kind of a practice. And it just didn’t interest me as much as going and working with governors on trying to move an energy agenda. It was 2011 when I left. I very much believe that climate change was this very serious issue.

I had a personal experience as governor of having been able to move a clean energy agenda and believe that the two things were tied in. I also believed in and it was less clear than it is now that there was a business narrative. So you could really do this in a bipartisan way. If people wanted to take climate off the table, you could also really make the case for economic

development. Every governor in America cares about jobs. Most legislators in America care about creating jobs in their in their states or in their districts. We really felt and there’s another guy and I Tom plant who is my energy officer when

I was governor, we really felt like states were not we weren’t paying enough attention to the rest of the world was paying a lot of attention to Congress and constantly disappointed by inaction. So let’s just go work with the governors and work with legislators. And so we now have a clean energy legislative academy that we run for legislators from across

the United States. And we also continue to work with governors, utilities, utility commissions at that state level. CSU has turned into a real national leader on clean energy that the energy institute is an extraordinary place.

Your center is not alone there. You have a lot of colleagues doing amazing work. Yeah. So the guy who runs it, Dr. Brian Wilson is one of the smarter people I’ve ever met. And I really think, you know, when it comes to sort of pure genius, I know you got to

work with Bill and Melinda Gates and a couple of geniuses there. But Brian Wilson is sort of in that category, but he also has a really good business sense and I think a real compelling desire to see things done in a just and equitable way. So you put that together, you wind up attracting people to that vision. My policy center is there.

I think we’re one of the first policy centers in America that’s co-located with engineers who are trying to solve some of the great energy and emissions problem in America. And so it’s a great fortune to be at CSU and to work inside the energy institute because of the kinds of people who are there and really their vision for how to make the world a better place.

That may sound right. It’s really how they believe every day. We’re talking to Bill Ritter, former governor of Colorado. He has a book out called Powering Forward, what everyone should know about America’s energy revolution.

This is a terrific book, Bill. And I was so pleased that you wove your personal story into this. It’s really a personal story, a political story and a science story. So this is a beautiful narrative and a great example of case making for the path forward. Thank you.

That’s really very nice of you to say that. It felt to me like it was an important book to write because it made the case for a lot of the work we were doing. It’s really unfortunate, Tom, that along the way, and it wasn’t really this way when I started, climate and clean energy became politicized.

So I was trying to take us back to a time before it was politicized where we were able to find common ground on working on both of these issues and working on them together, again trying to make the business case for that, talking about the kinds of things we would have to do and do differently. But it was really based on my own experiences and I would say on my disappointment in the

political system and what it’s not been able to deliver on these really important issues. I love the forward by Senator Tim Worth. It focused on interdependence. And I don’t know when he may have penned this a year ago, but it’s so prescient today now that we’re living through a new war that has caused energy shock around the world.

We just went through a pandemic where we saw for the first time as a species that disease is global and we’re suddenly in a very global world and at Getting Smart we like to think of that as a new mutuality that is required in culture and policy. And Tim just made a beautiful case for that. I’ll let you comment on that, but I also want to mention one of your early chapters also

made the moral and spiritual case for sustainability. And so I appreciated making the case from an interdependent standpoint, a moral standpoint and a spiritual standpoint. It was a beautiful way to introduce this topic. It really is a moral question.

And it was. And then on your point about interdependency, the things that we’ve been arguing should we need to do as Americans, we now can see that fossil fuels and an over dependence on fossil fuels is not just an economic issue. It’s not just an environmental issue.

It really is a national security issue. It is for us. But look at the European Union, the UK. It certainly has become national security issues for all of them. And now we’ve got to figure out how do you keep the lights on in the short term and make

this massive transition that we talk about in the book in the long term. Those are all important. I had the ability before I wrote that book to spend some time in Rome. Mikhail Gorbachev, when he left, when he left as Premier of Russia, President, I guess, he developed a group called Green Cross based out of Geneva.

And it was really about trying to find peaceful solutions to big problems. So they invited me to come, Green Cross did, and be the American representative to talk about the Pope’s encyclical. The Pope had drafted the encyclical. So I wasn’t a part of drafting it, but I got to interact with people from the Vatican

about how that rollout strategy should look. I’ve always thought God was in charge of the Pope’s rollout strategy. But it actually is that human beings can be involved in it as well. It was the most amazing thing. And then I got to go to Congress and listen to the Pope comment on climate and a variety

of other things. But you may remember I was a raised Catholic, I was an Emma Catholic, a practicing Catholic. And I really believe that this is a moral issue. And the United States, as I said, is the leading contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. But the negative consequences of climate change, the results from all those emissions, are

going to be visited on people who were not responsible for it. And that’s a justice issue. If someone committed a crime in America and a person who’s innocent gets arrested for it, we would think that’s injustice. And that’s sort of what we’ve done in the climate world is some of the contributors,

the biggest contributors, haven’t done their part. And the people who are going to see the worst first are people who weren’t responsible at all. And so I think that itself makes it a justice issue. And there’s a moral case for us acting.

In the middle of the book, you have a chapter on changing the vision. And your comments just reminded me of this quote. You argue against beating people over the head with facts and then said, a more promising way to change the direction of a conversation is to engage the value systems of a person to whom we are speaking.

This requires insight, humility, empathy, and the ability to speak the languages of different values. So I thought that was a beautiful way to frame our new job as public servants of being conversation hosts. And it’s not just about climate.

If you think about how divided America is, I still believe, I really believe in the depth of my being, that getting back to a place where the center in the middle can hold is going to require that type of listening and that type of willingness to learn from both sides. It can’t be one-sided view.

And you have to hold a lot of things in tension, but that’s the way we’re going to solve, I think, some of our biggest challenges. Bill, I don’t know if you remember, but I’m actually a mining engineer by original training. And then I did a degree at DU in energy finance. So I spent six years in extractive industries.

And you acknowledged in Chapter 9 that the United States really became the great global economic power that it is on the back of fossil fuels. But you say the problem is that we’re just not paying the full cost of the fossil fuel that we use. Right?

Instead, we’ve been subsidizing it while not paying attention to the cost or paying it out of another pocket, right? Right. It’s the law of externalities. And in the United States, if you allow a group, whatever sector, a power sector, anybody

in the industrialized sector, petrochemical manufacturing, if you allow them to pollute and not pay the cost of that pollution, then they’re not capturing an externality and it actually perverts the market because it makes their product less expensive than it really is because an externality has escaped. And we understood that.

The Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, and we began to talk back then about things like nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, mercury pollution, other kinds of significant criteria pollution, pollutants, but we hadn’t really thought about it in terms of carbon and CO2. And the problem is CO2 is a greenhouse gas warming. Methane is like CO2 on steroids.

And we hadn’t really thought about methane and greenhouse gas or carbon emissions as this other externality. And so you’ll see conversations all around country about how do we price carbon? And what they’re asking the question is, is how do we really make it so that anybody who is putting carbon in the atmosphere is paying the fair price for that?

What’s the fair price per ton? And that’s what you have in California, a cap and trade system that caps carbon emissions and allows people to trade credits back and forth. Those are all part of it. And I’ll go back to what you said at the beginning.

The coal manufacturing, coal, the coal fire generation in this country and coal miners allowed us to create a manufacturing economy that was second to none in the world. And that allowed us in part to create a middle class that was really second to none in the world. And yet we had this externality we weren’t capturing and we have to walk that back.

So some of my work, Tom, at the Center for New Energy Economy has been to work with coal depended communities and try and ask the question, what’s the just and right thing for us to do for those communities that offered and gave so much to the United States, but now are in serious decline as we begin to look at this transition to renewables, even a transition that involves natural gas, all of which is cheaper than coal.

I really appreciated you closed your book out with a chapter on a just transition that, as John Dorr said, we need to work with speed and scale. But I appreciate your attention to moving with justice as well, that we can do speed and scale and justice simultaneously. And justice has so many faces.

You know, the Biden administration has J40, which is justice 40, 40% of the benefits that come from all the packages like the infrastructure package. They want to go into what are called marginalized or frontline communities. So you have the justice aspect of this. It could be about inner city America and their exposure to the public health consequences

of having factories and power plants built next to them. It could be the justice that is a tribal justice. We had one of the largest furnaces in the country built on the Navajo Reservation, Page, Arizona. And you know, there were people on the Navajo Reservation living under the power lines that had no electricity into their homes.

That’s a justice issue. And then when we shut those plants down, I hope he had a coal mine where they lost 80% of their revenue. So it could be inner city, it could be tribal, it could be cold dependent communities in rural areas and so many people here, environmental justice, and they think it’s the province

of people of color or people who live in disproportionate income communities. It’s also rural America. There’s a big part of this justice issue that can impact in a positive way rural America if we do this right. Bill, I want to know what you’re excited about today, where you see progress being made.

And I want to talk both about policy and technology. Maybe we can start with technology first. What are a couple of new technologies that you’re excited about? If I can, Tom, I’d like to walk into it a little bit differently. And that’s in this way.

I’m part of a conversation where I’m the stakeholder facilitator convener, a group of utility companies who asked the question, how do we get to net zero in the power sector? How soon we don’t know 2035, 2040 and a group of environmental NGOs. They’ve long been at battle about how the power sector should behave. And they said, we want to be convened with them because we want to get to net zero and we want

to put on a united front. And then over time, myself and other people said, we need to have environmental justice leaders be a part of it. So it’s really a tripartite conversation. And here’s what I’m excited about.

And then we’ll talk about technology is that this would have been unthinkable 15 years ago, even probably 10 or eight years ago. These sides were all sort of competing for the truth. And they’re saying, no, we know we need to get to net zero. We have utilities in this country.

Almost every big utility has an ambition to get to net zero. And that just was not part of the conversation. So that’s that’s fascinating. Right. And Excel, you can remember Excel Energy used to be public service company in Colorado.

It’s the parent company for a PSCO. But they have an ambition to reduce their emissions by 85% by 2030. Now, here’s the technology question. They don’t know how to get to 100. Right.

They can get to 85. Others are saying we may get to 80 by 2030. Others may say 75 or 70, but they all have pretty high ambitions for 2030, 2035, 2040. But nobody’s cracked the code on getting to zero. And that’s the technology question.

So one of the things that the administration, the president administration, Biden administration made a big commitment to is hydrogen research. Is there an ability for a hydrogen to be part of getting us to net zero and use it as sort of a storage battery where we put in the ground and when we need it, we bring it back out of the ground and we create electricity with it as part of getting us there.

There are other people working really hard on carbon capture and sequestration. So you take the carbon, the CO2 off the flue stack from a power plant, and you sequester it in a dome in the ground where we’ve removed natural gas over time. Those are the kinds of things that are pretty exciting. There’s and this could be very controversial, right?

There’s a lot being done with nuclear. You’re a former boss. Bill Gates has a company called Terra Power. They’re putting a sodium cooled reactor in Kimmer, Wyoming, where there used to be a very big coal plant. And so they’re looking at this cold, depended community and saying,

we’re going to bring jobs in by building this sodium cooled reactor. When it fails, it doesn’t fail catastrophically like thermal cooled. And then there’s another technology called modular reactors, modular nuclear reactors. They’re kind of small scale, very deep in the ground, but they can power a small community and it doesn’t take very much land. It does take whatever the fuel is for that nuclear reactor.

But we have some carbon free technologies if you include uranium, carbon capture and sequestration and nuclear in the mix that can get us to that zero place. How about a couple of policies, either that states or countries are pursuing that you find particularly thoughtful? So there’s a mix in America. I said there are Republican and Democratic governors that had moved clean energy agendas, but they’re still close to half the states that have resisted kind of the big things that we need to do.

And you know, it goes back to this thing I said about your conversation with me when I was a candidate for governor. It’s put a stake in the ground. And that’s often what we did. We said, right, we’re going to get to 20% renewable by 2020. We began to move very quickly.

So in my last year, we said, let’s go to 30% and the utility will now say, hey, we got to we got to 30%. But we’re going to an 85% reduction of emissions because you made us get to 30% by 2020. So we need a variety of states to really look at clean energy standards and renewable portfolio standards and energy efficiency resource standards. And things like that low carbon fuel standards. All sorts of standards that can help be sort of the stake in the ground.

If you look at what we’re going to do by 2030 with just present state policy, that’ll be about 40% of the emissions we need to satisfy our what they call our contributions to the Paris Accords that we were out of. Now we’re back in, but it’s the United or the global effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve made these we’ve made an obligation to contribute this much in reduction.

We only get 40% of the way there with states. 60% of that has to come through federal or joint action together, federal and state action. So we need the other states to act and we need the federal government to act. But if those other states said, we’re going to cap emissions at a certain level by 2030, let’s say they say 50%.

And we’re going to work across the economy to do that. Require more of the power sector right now than the ag sector, because the ag sector is harder to decarbonize. But if we if we were able to do that, we could meet our obligation to the rest of the globe to get to that 50% reduction by 2030.

And it would be really helpful if all 50 states were on board. Unfortunately, right now they’re not. Bill, what can education leaders do, either school leaders, system leaders, college leaders? And I think you know this better than I do, Tom, but there are so many school

districts in America that I think are they’re doing what I call lead by example, where they’re saying, OK, our buildings are very energy inefficient. Let’s go in and ensure we’re using the least amount of power we need to use to keep the lights on, keep the building warm and keep children comfortable in those schools. So that’s sort of their own built environment and they’re doing everything

they can to look at that and be self aware about what they need to take their energy usage down. They’ll take their greenhouse gas footprint down, right? Their carbon footprint. Second thing they look at is their transportation system, because most school districts have fairly significant school busing.

And with that busing comes carbon emissions from the tailpipe. And there’s all sorts of work being done on trying to electrify fleets. There’s a lot of groups that are thinking about that. There’s new money in the infrastructure package to focus on that. There are states that have been doing that.

And so so that’s part of it. But the other part of it is to have a student, a child thinking about sustainability from the time they enter the school doors about how important it is to understand that we have this relationship with nature and that relationship with nature requires us to be stewards of how we behave in regard to the outdoor,

whether it’s our air or water or land, any of those kinds of things. And there are ways to to imbue in a child that kind of stewardship from the time, as I said, they enter the doors in pre-K or kindergarten all the way through the day they go out, that’s K through 12. And there at the university level, our president, CSU, is a great example.

She just went through a whole strategic planning and she’s organizing her strategic planning around Colorado State University being a center for sustainability in higher ed. Those are terrific examples, Bill. I love that idea of leading by example and making sure that your operations are are efficient. I know a lot of people in Colorado are moving to a four day

school week in efforts to try to save some costs, both in transportation and and in operations. We’re excited about electric buses, particularly in places that are powered by by renewable sources. And in Colorado, there’s really great examples of school leaders that are empowering young people as climate solutionaries.

There’s some great examples up in Boulder of schools and districts that are infusing stewardship, as you said, across the curriculum. So I appreciate that. We’ve been talking with Bill Ritter, he was the 41st Governor of Colorado, and he’s gone on to create the Center for the New Energy Economy at CSU.

He’s the author of a terrific book called Powering Forward, whatever one should know about America’s energy revolution. Bill, it’s been a pleasure to reconnect after a lot of years. It’s my pleasure. Thank you, Tom.

Thank you. And like I said, kind of midway through the cast, thank you for your advice over time that you’ve given me and thank you for your public service. Thanks to Mason Pasha, our producer and to the Getting Smart team for making this possible. We hope you think this week about how you can be a steward of the environment, how you can lead by example.

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