Western governors highlight ‘common commitment’ to advancing regional climate solutions

Boulder, Colo. — Western governors expressed their united support on Monday for streamlining unique climate solutions aimed at protecting an increasingly vulnerable environment that traverses state and party lines.

“We have a lot more that unites us than what divides us, and that’s sometimes challenging in this day and age, with people peddling division on both sides of the aisle,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) told reporters on Monday afternoon.

“A wildfire doesn’t know a red county from a blue county or a red state from a blue state,” he added.

Polis was speaking in Boulder, Colo., outside the annual meeting of the Western Governors’ Association (WGA), which represents the governors of the 22 westernmost U.S. states and territories.

Joining the governor, who concludes his one-year term as WGA chair this week, were Govs. Joe Lombardo (R-Nev.), Mark Gordon (R-Wyo.), Josh Green (D-Hawaii), Brad Little (R-Idaho) and Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.).

“We like each other, we work well together, we’re clear that the opportunity for the country is when governors lean in,” Lujan Grisham said.

Gordon, who will soon become WGA chair, characterized states as “the laboratory of democracy.”

“What you find in the West and among western governors is a common commitment to really focus on solutions, rather than politics,” the Wyoming governor said. “We all care deeply about this region.”

Gordon expressed particular pride in the region’s recent push to hasten the development of low-carbon geothermal energy — referring to a specific initiative launched by Polis during his year serving as WGA chair.

The program, Heat Beneath Our Feet, has been evaluating deployment of geothermal energy technologies in the West. The vast majority of high-yield geothermal energy capacity in the U.S. — which can be used for both electricity and cooling — is concentrated in this region, according to the initiative.

Geothermal — which literally means “heat from the Earth” — is a renewable source of energy found under the planet’s surface. Deep wells can extract geothermal energy in the form of hot ground water and steam, with the resultant electricity producing only about one-sixth of the carbon emissions of a natural gas power plant, per the Department of Energy.

Alongside this week’s WGA meeting, Polis released on Monday a progress report of the geothermal assessment, which provided recommendations regarding both the development and deployment of this resource.

“We’ve spent the last year examining the opportunities for geothermal, the barriers to it, how we can better deploy geothermal energy for a low-cost energy source — reliable, especially for a grid with increasingly renewable energy,” Polis said at a WGA session earlier in the day.

The report’s recommendations focus on increasing federal funding for resource assessment and data collection, as well as mitigating risk associated with drilling — through tools like tax incentives for oil and gas companies that could take on geothermal development. 

The report also calls for the optimization of permitting and improving regulatory certainty through streamlined processes and “categorical exclusions for geothermal leasing on part with other energy categories.” 

Also critical to the advancement of this “valuable but remarkably untapped resource in the West” are incentives for consumer adoption and workforce training, per the report.

In addition to promoting the development of geothermal energy across the West, many of the governors touted a bipartisan, multi-state effort to potentially develop a federally backed hydrogen hub in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. 

While hydrogen has a high energy content and can be used in in fuel cells to produce electricity and heat, its applications in utilities and transportation are still emerging. Early-stage research is focusing on developing efficient and cost-effective ways to produce hydrogen and integrate this resource into national infrastructure, according to the Department of Energy.

Lujan Grisham credited the Biden administration for expediting the decarbonization of the West by spending federal dollars on “the future of innovation,” through the bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act.

“This is a group of governors that, frankly, love the new federal — I think I can say that for all of us — investment strategies and opportunities, but have long been standing up much of those innovations and investments on our own,” she said.

At the morning session, governors from both sides of the aisle urged Michael Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to help cut the red tape associated with advancing cleaner water, air and grid solutions.

“How do we focus on making sure it’s not about compliance for compliance’s sake, it’s not about paperwork?” Polis asked Regan at the WGA meeting.

The Colorado governor stressed the importance of holding states accountable, while not being “overly prescriptive about outdated ways of doing it.”

His Wyoming counterpart, Gordon, offered similar remarks, advocating for “legislation that is a little less prescriptive and allows for more grace by the agencies that are meant to administer them.”

“None of us really like the bureaucracy,” Regan responded. “And to a certain extent, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act constrained us in certain ways, but that doesn’t limit our ability to be creative.”

The EPA administrator said officials must “put the bureaucracy to the side” and “look at the solutions at the local level,” while regulating technological standards that offer “as much innovation and entrepreneurship as possible.”

“The law really prescribes that I should be agnostic to some of the sources and focused on the emission reductions and allow for as many technologies and business models to achieve these goals,” Regan added.

While innovations like geothermal and hydrogen could be a boon for the West by offering cleaner, reliable energy resources, Polis offered a sobering reminder at the WGA meeting that the region remains “unique in our challenges.”

The Colorado governor rattled off a list of environmental threats that included water scarcity, rampant wildfires and the West’s positioning “on the front line for international emission transports” from faraway air pollution events.

Making any progress on these issues, he and his colleagues agreed, requires collaboration among both neighboring states and the federal government.

“How do we come together as governors representing states of different political persuasions, to really be able to advocate for the best practice decision within our states?” Polis asked at the afternoon press conference.

“We may not agree on every part of every issue, but there’s a substantial amount of overlap that it gives the western governors the opportunity to truly lead,” he added.