Last week’s United Nations report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered little good news for future Coloradans. As Secretary General Antonio Guterres noted, the climate breakdown currently underway should serve as a code red alarm for humanity. The only good news was a finding that we might avoid the very worst consequences of climate change if we immediately make a dash for a fossil fuel free economy before the end of the decade. Presumably, the Glasgow climate conference scheduled this November will consider whether this is even feasible.

The balance between what can be accomplished locally and what requires national, even global effort, is unclear at this point. Yes, we all would like to be part of the change we need to see, but climate change is both a slow motion and a systemic challenge. We only need to glance back since the turn of the 21st century in Colorado to remind ourselves of warning signs that looked like once-in-a-century anomalies. Twenty years ago, Republican Governor Bill Owens observed that the entire state seemed to be on fire during a television interview. While the tourist industry was displeased, what seemed hyperbole has become a recurring annual catastrophe.

Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper, now U. S. Senator, contended with Front Range flooding that ripped out roads and bridges and then inundated tens of thousands of acres of farmland in Weld and other Eastern Colorado counties. Today, Jared Polis is attempting to keep I-70 open as burn scar debris tumbles across the highway from monsoon runoff in Glenwood Canyon. Ski seasons have grown measurably shorter as snow arrives later and melts earlier. Crops are seared in drought-parched fields. Choking plumes of smoke drifted in from Pacific coast fires during the hottest July on record. This is all beginning to feel less and less like a run of bad luck, but something potentially more permanent.

The Colorado Legislature has taken sporadic stabs at addressing environmental and climate threats for nearly 40 years but has failed to develop a coherent strategy. This has been, at least in part, due to its failure to directly link fossil fuel emissions with climate change. Consequently, action has swung between virtue signaling and genuinely substantive action. Bolstered by the bi-partisan infrastructure bill that recently passed the U. S. Senate, the Legislature’s decision to accelerate the deployment of charging stations for electric vehicles anticipates a fleet conversion certain to accelerate.

There will be seismic consequences for thousands of existing gas stations, many family-owned businesses. Should they be afforded an early opportunity to host charging ports, perhaps at a subsidized cost? Do we really want to shoehorn thousands of separate charging stations into existing neighborhoods? If so, how will they be zoned? Will public attitudes about drive-up service windows at restaurants and retailers change once most vehicles are electric? Should they? With the occasional electric car spontaneously bursting into flames, should we transform Colorado emissions inspection stations into sites for annual safety checks?

Preparing to save the planet is going to prove a complicated business. Our fossil fuel-driven economy has more than a century of inertial force driving it forward. The recent effort to require Colorado employers to meddle in the commuting decisions of their workers demonstrated that Social Security isn’t the only “third rail” in public policy. Climate sensitive zoning rules, expanded mass transit and sustainable energy management strategies will each generate economic winners and losers. We are sure to witness heated debate regarding cost/benefit analysis as we push towards a net-zero society and, through it all, climate change denial will nip at our heels.

Fortunately, the majority of Coloradans only need look no farther than their kitchen windows to observe the changes reshaping our weather. Equally observant are ranchers and farmers. We must stop kicking the can down the road on water usage. There is no shortage of worthy ideas. What is missing has been public discussion of them and how we might pay for implementing the most cost effective. We will have to distinguish the urgent from the merely desirable. It would also prove helpful if we created a road map for navigating the transition ahead.

Commencement speakers often recycle the phrase about our responsibility to leave the world a better place than we found it. This may now lie beyond our grasp, which makes the ethics of climate policy such a dispiriting thing. We may be left with decisions that can only produce the least worse outcomes – a diminished quality of life for our children and grandchildren. As British philosopher James Garvey observes, “…world leaders have done nothing morally adequate about climate change in the 20 years since the first warnings of the IPCC.”

No better time to get started than today. Waiting for our leaders to lead might be a fool’s game.