Column | Quinton: The energy trap — and our way out

For weeks now we have been faced with daily news of missile strikes, naval tensions in the Persian Gulf, and the latest geopolitical tremor rattling global oil markets. Gasoline and diesel prices have shot upward. (AAA says Colorado gas prices are up 31% from a month ago.) Here in the Eagle River Valley, we fill our tanks and wonder why energy that comes out of the ground thousands of miles away has so much influence over our lives.

The answer is that we built our economy on fossil fuels whose price is set not in the US but in Riyadh, Moscow, and Qatar. That is not energy security. That is energy dependency dressed up in patriotic language.

The United States produces more oil and gas than any country on earth. But, because fossil fuels trade on global markets, a Russian tank crossing into Ukraine sends our pump prices soaring. A confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas passes, means every commute to Vail, every delivery to a Minturn restaurant, every school bus run in Eagle costs more. High domestic production does not insulate us from that reality. It never has.

Meanwhile, our beloved mountains are desperately telling us something. Snow seasons are shorter. The late-spring snowpack that once reliably fed the Eagle River now gives out earlier. The summers are hotter and drier. Last year’s fire season, and the one before it, and the one before that, reflect a valley growing more arid, with brush that ignites faster and forests weakened by the same warming that has made a ski vacation here a much riskier proposition than it was a generation ago. Climate change is not a future problem for the Eagle River Valley. It is the present reality of everyone who lives, works, or does business here.

These two threats, geopolitical energy vulnerability and climate change driven ecosystem degradation, look different on the surface. One shows up at the pump. The other shows up in the smoke-choked August sky. But they share a root cause: our dependence on fossil fuels. That means they share a solution.

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Our rising sun does not pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The wind moving through the valley does not require a refinery or a pipeline or a petro-state’s cooperation. Renewably electricity, generated locally and regionally, is the only form of energy that is genuinely price-stable, genuinely domestic, and genuinely ours.

Holy Cross Energy, your local electric cooperative, already delivers roughly 85 percent clean renewable power. This is the grid we plug into today. The infrastructure exists. The economics have arrived. Utility-scale solar and wind are cheap and quick to build, and their fuel cost is zero. When oil spikes, your electric bill does not.

The strategic opportunity before us is to use that clean, stable electricity to displace the two biggest remaining fossil fuel dependencies in our daily lives: natural gas heating our buildings and gasoline moving our vehicles. When we heat with electric heat pumps instead of gas furnaces, we cut our exposure to volatile natural gas markets and reduce the carbon pollution that is shortening our winters. When we drive electric vehicles charged by Holy Cross’s mostly renewable grid, we stop sending more money to fossil fuel companies every time an autocrat makes a threatening speech.

This is not sacrifice. Heat pumps outperform gas furnaces in efficiency. Electric vehicles have lower fuel and maintenance costs over their lifetimes.

We all know that our local economy depends on our environment: on plentiful snow, on clean air, on the landscape that draws people here. Protecting that environment and securing our energy future are not competing priorities. They are the same priority, and electrification is how we pursue both at once.

Geopolitical crises will keep coming. The fire seasons will keep testing us. The question is whether we stay hooked on fossil fuels or build our way to a better future.

We have the grid and the technology. We need to act individually and demand smart policy choices from all our elected officials. There is no cavalry coming to the rescue, just us.

Adam Quinton Edwards is board chair of the Holy Cross Energy Board and the vice chair and treasurer for Walking Mountains Science Center.