{"id":8,"date":"2026-11-01T21:33:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-01T21:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/?p=8"},"modified":"2026-11-01T21:33:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-01T21:33:00","slug":"hickenloopers-climate-record-could-be-liability-in-senate-bid-philsugar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/?p=8","title":{"rendered":"Hickenlooper\u2019s Climate Record Could Be Liability in Senate Bid | PhilSugar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Hickenlooper, the former governor<br \/>\nof Colorado and erstwhile presidential candidate, once<br \/>\ndrank<br \/>\nfrom a glass of fracking fluid, a<br \/>\nchemical brew<br \/>\nthat helps in the extraction of trapped natural gas. The drink had been passed to him by an industry executive who also partook, in a meeting that \u201cwas almost ritual-like,\u201d Hickenlooper told then-Sen. Al Franken in a Senate hearing. Franken asked if this signaled a \u201cpact\u201d or some occult practice. Hickenlooper said no.<br \/>\n\u201cIt was a demonstration,\u201d he said, to prove that the company \u201chad invested billions of dollars to create what is really a benign fluid in every sense.\u201d<br \/>\nThat was in 2013, when fracking\u2019s fortunes were riding high on the strength of the<br \/>\nObama<br \/>\nadministration\u2019s touting of abundant natural gas as a \u201cbridge fuel\u201d to cleaner energy. Seven years later, with the shale revolution sputtering, leaving behind poisoned groundwater wells and sickened communities, that bridge looks more like a dead end. Researchers have found that leaks of natural gas, whose primary component is methane, have been heating the planet more intensely in the short term than that Big Kahuna of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide.<br \/>\nHickenlooper has since changed the story of his fracking fluid caper. Last summer, he told<br \/>\nEnergy &amp; Environment News<br \/>\nthat he only sipped from the collective cup to earn the trust of oil and gas executives before subjecting them to tough regulations. \u201cI don\u2019t see how anyone can say I was friendly to the industry because I didn\u2019t do anything except cost them money,\u201d Hickenlooper told<br \/>\nE&amp;E News<br \/>\nreporter Maxine Joselow.<br \/>\nWhat also changed was Hickenlooper\u2019s competition. When Joselow talked to Hickenlooper that July, he was still battling progressives in the Democratic presidential primary, most <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">largest sugar dating platform Philippines<\/a> of whom had signed a pledge not to take contributions over $200 from executives, lobbyists or PACs tied to the fossil-fuel industry. (Hickenlooper has not.) One month later, he dropped out of the presidential contest to run for U.S. Senate instead. In a general matchup against Republican incumbent Sen. Cory Gardner, he\u2019d be almost sure to win: The latest<br \/>\npoll<br \/>\nshows Hickenlooper ahead by 18 points. But before he can face off against <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar daddy na may allowance<\/a> Gardner, he\u2019s got to win the Democratic primary against Andrew Romanoff, a candidate so beloved by climate groups that the youth-led Sunrise Movement has named him a \u201cchampion.\u201d<br \/>\n\u201cClimate is one of the issues where Romanoff has really tried to distinguish himself,\u201d says Corina McKendry, director of the State of the Rockies project at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Hickenlooper, on <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar dating site fees Philippines<\/a> the other hand, \u201chas been trying to deprioritize that issue and really focus on his electability.\u201d<br \/>\nThat strong suit of Hickenlooper\u2019s \u2014 that voters already know and respect him \u2014 may have been tarnished by what the<br \/>\nDenver Post<br \/>\ncalled<br \/>\n\u201ca politically driven and mostly inaccurate ethics complaint,\u201d having to do with who paid for his trips while he was governor (according to the<br \/>\nPost,<br \/>\nhe did). But his moderate politics have always served him well in the purplish Centennial State, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has thrown its considerable weight to his side. \u201cThere\u2019s a widespread belief that Hickenlooper will <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">No. 1 sugar daddy site Philippines<\/a> win,\u201d McKendry says. \u201cI would guess Hickenlooper thinks he\u2019ll win.\u201d Then again, \u201canything can happen at this political moment.\u201d<br \/>\n* * *<br \/>\nThe Colorado Democratic Senate primary<br \/>\n, barely more than a blip on the national <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar daddy profile tips<\/a> political radar, might be the most reliable bellwether of where voters in the Western states stand on climate. In the State of the Rockies project\u2019s annual<br \/>\npoll<br \/>\n, 70 percent of Colorado respondents said they consider rising temperatures \u201ca serious problem.\u201d Eighty-one percent said that \u201cissues involving clean water, clean air, wildlife and public lands\u201d matter when they vote. Even Republicans express concern about the heat-induced changes to rivers and forests they observe close to home. \u201cThe partisan divide is not as stark as you might imagine from all the language that comes out of Washington,\u201d McKendry says.<br \/>\nThe Yale-and-Harvard-educated Romanoff, a 53-year-old mental-health advocate who served eight years in the Colorado legislature in the early 2000s, has staked out positions to the left of Hickenlooper on every issue, from health care to police reform to racial injustice. But it\u2019s on climate that the contrast <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sugar dating safety Philippines<\/a> is most stark. Hickenlooper worked as a petroleum geologist until 1988; while governor, he angered environmentalists when his administration<br \/>\nsued<br \/>\nthe city of Longmont, Colorado, over its <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">sponsor relationship Philippines<\/a> local fracking ban. Joe Salazar, a former state House representative who now leads an anti-fracking coalition called<br \/>\nColorado Rising<br \/>\n, once threatened to strip $200,000 from Hickenlooper\u2019s governor\u2019s mansion fund if Hickenlooper \u201cdidn\u2019t shut the hell up\u201d about an amendment Salazar authored allowing residents to sue over fracking-related earthquakes. \u201cOur battles were pretty epic,\u201d Salazar says.<br \/>\nNor does Hickenlooper support, as Romanoff does, the Green New Deal resolution proposed in Congress. During his presidential campaign, he earned the ire of no less than New York <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">best sugar dating sites Philippines<\/a> progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for saying the proposal could \u201cdistract\u201d from the real work of getting to zero emissions by 2050. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to have a concentrated, focused, integrated, comprehensive program to address climate change,\u201d he said in a debate last week. He\u2019d just prefer that it didn\u2019t \u201ccost an arm and a leg.\u201d<br \/>\n* * *<br \/>\nHickenlooper\u2019s campaign didn\u2019t respond<br \/>\nto requests to comment for this story. Romanoff, on the other hand, will talk to just about anybody. He holds twice-weekly<br \/>\nvirtual town halls<br \/>\n, debates libertarians on AM talk radio, and once schooled a right-wing podcaster mom not to refer to other humans <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">paano pumili ng sugar daddy<\/a> as \u201cillegals.\u201d He\u2019d even go on<br \/>\nHannity<br \/>\nif the show\u2019s producers asked him, which they haven\u2019t. One reason for his near-constant availability, he says, \u201cis that I\u2019m obviously outspent in this race.\u201d (Hickenlooper has raised slightly more than<br \/>\n$3.5 million<br \/>\nfor his campaign; Romanoff\u2019s has roughly<br \/>\n$2.2 million<br \/>\non hand.)<br \/>\nAnother reason is to hold forth about the climate crisis, a topic he appears to relish. \u201cI raise it in every conversation, every house party, every interview,\u201d Romanoff says. He is not put off by questions about how he\u2019d find the money to pay for the necessary overhaul of the energy and transportation sectors. \u201cWhen you\u2019re facing <a href=\"https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/\">verified sugar dating sites Philippines<\/a> mass unemployment, putting people back to work building clean energy infrastructure seems like an even better idea than it did before,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve been describing this as a New Deal moment. Instead of a Civilian Conservation Corps, you could create a Climate Conservation Corps. Because even if for some reason you didn\u2019t care about, oh, I don\u2019t know, the survival of life on earth, you might care about jobs.\u201d<br \/>\nYou also might care right now about racism and economic inequality and police reform and when for God\u2019s sake to expect a vaccine: In 2020, there is just so much to worry about. \u201cBefore the pandemic we were talking about the climate crisis and health care,\u201d Romanoff says. \u201cThe epidemic has crowded out most of those conversations.\u201d<br \/>\nMcKendry thinks that might not matter: Disease and inequality and global warming are all social justice issues that disproportionately affect black and brown people, and typically the same people who care about police brutality also care about the environment. If \u201cincreased awareness by white people of racial injustice can also help mobilize around climate,\u201d she says, \u201cthen we can really get things done.\u201d<br \/>\nCopyright 2020 Capital &amp; Main<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado and erstwhile presidential candidate, once drank from a glass of fracking fluid, a chemical brew that helps in &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugardaddy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}