Mohamed Bughrara

In a written statement, Colorado Democratic Party spokesperson Kailee Stiles said, “Colorado has a year-long fire season, and pollution smog covers the Front Range on a regular basis. Ganahl’s solution to climate change is to make it worse with more of the same politics that caused the climate crisis in the first place. Her loyalty is clearly to the oil and gas lobby, not to Coloradans.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl stated that she would address climate change by increasing the state’s carbon footprint and getting “oil and gas workers back to work.”

Ganahl believes that the state’s fossil fuel sector generates cleaner energy than alternative sources. Despite several studies that have identified man-made climate change, induced by the combustion of fossil fuels and the release of carbon into the atmosphere, as a critical factor that is heating up the state and reducing the flow of the Colorado River, the state’s main water source. 

According to research published in the journal Nature Climate Change by scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Columbia University since 2000, human-caused climate change is responsible for roughly 42% of the severity of the “megadrought” that has afflicted the southwestern United States, including Colorado.

As Colorado continues to experience warmer temperatures as a result of climate change, current Governor Jared Polis stated that the state must be smarter about growth, water use, storage, and other policies. “When we look at other states, we see the sobering warnings of growing desert cities without water sources, new developments that are either left all but abandoned or engaging in buy and dry.”