Re: “Can Colorado really achieve 100 percent green energy by 2040?” July 14 Vincent Carroll column.
Vincent Carroll argues Coloradans shouldn’t aspire to 100 percent renewables because we don’t know “what technology will look like in 23 years.” But our leaders have often helped paved the way for innovation. At the time President John F. Kennedy announced the U.S. would land a man on the moon, no one knew how. Yet we achieved that goal and now live in an age of accelerating change.
Colorado consumers may need protection, but not from renewables, which have a horizon that is less distant than Carroll suggests, but instead from policy makers who make decades-long commitments to potentially stranded technologies that no one in the future will want. Where is your 1994 computer or cellphone right now?
K.K. DuVivier, Denver
Vincent Carroll, while painting two Colorado congressional candidates as too optimistic about green energy, is himself wildly pessimistic. He closes by saying no one knows what technology will look like in 23 years. True. But he obviously has never glanced at the trend lines. The cost of solar and storage are continuously falling dramatically. There is no such trend in coal, and even natural gas cannot match this price plunge. It is not draconian government regulations that are driving this trend, as Carroll implies. It is the market.
Only fossil minds refuse to see the demise of fossil fuels. Twenty-three years is plenty of time to prove this.
Daniel MacInnis, Lakewood
While I’m not as optimistic as Congressman Jared Polis and former state Sen. Michael Johnston are about the prospect of Colorado achieving 100 percent green energy by 2040, I’m reasonably confident it will happen around the same time that flying cars become commonplace. I predict that among the various challenges faced in achieving these two technological feats will be how to keep the flying cars from being swatted out of the sky by the blades of wind turbines, as happened to the (by then) extinct birds of prey. And in the more rural areas of our state, I predict there will be the occasional story of collisions between flying cars and flying pigs.
Douglas Fleecs, Greeley
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