Democrats and environmentalists are fond of talking about “inconvenient truths,” so here’s one they ought to chew on during this pause in the 71st General Assembly.

Colorado’s Energy Office met its demise in the waning hours of the just-closed legislative session not because of Republicans, who made a good-faith effort to reauthorize and re-energize what has become a listless and ineffectual bureaucratic backwater. Reauthorization failed because of an our-way-or-the-highway mindset among many Democrats, who would rather have the office go away than see it evolve into something better.

The episode deserves detailed review not just because the governor and Statehouse Democrats are frantic to skirt blame for their mishandling of the situation, by hurriedly rewriting history. It also highlights the narrow, dogmatic, disconnected-from-reality way Democrats view energy issues, which has much larger state and national implications.

A number of state programs periodically come up for review at the Statehouse. This year it was the Energy Office’s turn. The fact that most Coloradans don’t even know the state has an energy office and can’t tell you what it does speaks volumes about how badly it’s languished over the years. It was reinvented as a tool for touting the “new energy economy” during the Ritter years, but has hardly been heard from since, except when an audit found that millions of dollars handled by the office couldn’t be accounted for.

Read more at the Glenwood Springs Post Independent