Whatever your views on the causes of climate change, the urgency of addressing it, or the best means of curbing it, there are a couple of truths we should be able to agree on.
One is that there’s only so much anyone — any industry, economic sector, state or even nation — can do about it.
The other is that whatever we do, we can’t do it in a vacuum. Any energy policy must accommodate the many and varied priorities of our complex economy and diverse society. We cannot afford to curb carbon emissions “at any cost” — even if it were possible — because too many other basic human needs are at stake. Balance is required.
That has been the message of the adults at the table throughout the superheated climate debate. And it has been a fundamental tenet for Dan Haley, who often has served as the adult at the head of that table.
After nearly a decade at the helm of the state’s premier organization for energy industry stakeholders — as president and CEO of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association — Haley will step down. His departure, reported by The Gazette this week, will leave a big void.
Haley’s message of moderation, his realistic and science-driven approach, and his conciliatory tone have served as a compelling voice for the industry. A career newsman before entering the field of advocacy, Haley is a skilled communicator adept at getting his industry’s point across.
That’s no easy feat. It’s an industry that only can be described as embattled in Colorado’s political climate even though our state is one of the nation’s top oil and gas producers. Ideologues in the environmental movement and the politicians in thrall to them have made sport of beating up the industry, blaming it for wide-ranging maladies real and imagined.
No additional level of state regulation of oil and gas production — despite layer upon layer of regulations enacted — seems to satisfy the most vocal hardliners of the green movement.
They remain oblivious to the central role oil and gas have played in growing Colorado’s economy and prosperity over the decades; oblivious, as well, to the role the industry plays in our nation’s energy independence, and to the fact that natural gas produced by the industry still heats most Colorado homes while gasoline gets almost all of us from Point A to Point B on a daily basis.
Through it all, Haley has been an enduring, and agile, warrior. It became a refrain of his — amid calls for ever more rounds of ever more reckless regulations — that Colorado’s traditional energy producers are among the most rigidly regulated anywhere. And they are some of the cleanest producers.
Haley also relentlessly has made the case to regulators, policymakers and the general public that the industry isn’t responsible for most of the Front Range ozone level that is putting the state in violation of Clean Air Act standards.
According to the state’s Air Pollution Control Division, last year roughly 78% of ozone in the state’s highest-ozone areas came from background, natural, wildfire and other sources outside the area, including from states upwind and from as far away as China.
As recounted in The Gazette’s report, Haley told an interviewer in 2021, “Colorado cannot solve global climate change alone and certainly not by squeezing a single industry into arbitrary reduction goals for resources that Coloradans will rely on for decades to come.”
We wish Haley the best in future endeavors — and we wish his industry, and our entire state, other voices who can make the case as well as he has.
