On March 20, CPR News reported that Conservation Colorado filed four ballot measures targeting the oil and gas industry. The group calls them a direct response to Advance Colorado’s Initiative 177, which would enshrine in the state constitution a right for consumers to buy natural gas and for utilities to sell it.
That framing doesn’t hold up. Initiative 177 is a consumer choice measure that leaves every existing environmental rule in place. The four retaliatory filings, in contrast, open sweeping new legal and financial liability for the oil and gas industry.
Taken together, the measures are designed to make the future of Colorado oil and gas as bleak as possible. Initiative 311 creates a new statutory cause of action so trial lawyers can sue any oil and gas company accused of harming Colorado’s air, water, land, or communities. Its all-encompassing language could cover virtually any operation, even though drilling impacts are already tightly regulated in Colorado.
Similarly, Initiative 313 forces oil and gas operators to fund repairs to aquifers allegedly damaged by drilling wastewater. That piles on a new, open-ended liability standard in the constitution, on top of existing state and federal rules that already govern water disposal and groundwater protection.
Initiative 312 would ban gas distributors from recovering pipeline extension and decommissioning costs from their customers. That might sound consumer-friendly, but those costs are currently reviewed and approved in Public Utilities Commission rate cases, the same process that pays for gas lines, maintenance, and safety. Blocking cost recovery doesn’t make the spending go away, but it does make offering gas service a losing proposition for utilities.
Colorado doesn’t need more help discouraging natural gas. The state’s Clean Heat Plan requires gas utilities to reduce emissions by 41 percent by 2035 and 100 percent by 2050. The Independence Institute has documented that this path could only be possible by forcing consumers off the gas system while blowing past statutory cost caps. A constitutional ban on pipeline cost recovery would finish off a heating source that 70 percent of Colorado households rely on.
Initiative 310 is the most dangerous of the bunch. It writes joint and several liability for oil and gas operations into the state constitution and applies it to current and former operators alike. Under joint and several liability, a plaintiff can demand the full cost of alleged damages from any one company, even if that operator was responsible for only a tiny share of the activity or sold its interests years ago. This is an open invitation to sue whoever has the deepest pockets. If it made it into the constitution, lawmakers would be powerless to fix it after the damage to Colorado’s economy proves severe.
This pattern of one-sided escalation should look familiar to Colorado voters. The same playbook has been running since at least 2018, and voters have shot it down every time they’ve had a say.
In 2018, voters rejected Proposition 112, 55 percent to 45 percent. The measure would have required 2,500-foot setbacks from occupied buildings and other “vulnerable” areas, which would have put 85 percent of state and private land off-limits to drilling. Opposition was bipartisan, with then-candidate Jared Polis saying the measure would “all but ban fracking in Colorado.”
Rather than accept the voters’ verdict, environmental groups pursued the same goals through legislation. In 2019, Gov. Polis signed SB19-181, which adopted the country’s strictest oil and gas regulations. The law fundamentally changed the mission of the state oil and gas commission to prevent, rather than promote, oil and gas development, as well as established 2,000-foot setbacks from homes, and expanded local government authority over drilling. Polis declared the state’s “oil and gas wars” over.
It wasn’t. In 2024, Democratic lawmakers introduced SB24-159, a bill to phase out new drilling permits entirely by 2030, a proposal even its sponsors acknowledged was unlikely to pass. A companion bill, SB24-165, would have banned oil and gas production between May and September and directed regulators to reduce vehicle miles traveled.
Both failed, but as I2I Policy Director Jake Fogleman wrote at the time:
“The legislation represents the most blatant attack on domestic energy production in the state since lawmakers adopted the country’s strictest oil and gas regulations (against the will of Colorado voters) in 2019, prompting Polis to initially declare détente… A ban on new oil and gas production in Colorado would do nothing to stem the overall production and consumption of fossil fuels in the medium term. Instead, it would simply ensure that Colorado producers miss the boat as suppliers elsewhere reap the economic benefits of contributing to an energy-rich future.”
Then came the 2024 ballot-measure war, followed by the Polis-brokered truce, a backroom deal to keep competing ballot measures off the table through 2028 in exchange for new production fees and ozone mandates. Small operators were excluded entirely.
Through a spokesperson, Gov. Polis blamed Advance Colorado for undermining the agreement by introducing its consumer-protection ballot measure. Advance Colorado’s Michael Fields has rejected the premise that his organization was ever a party to the deal.
It’s a strange kind of truce that requires the industry to accept every new regulatory burden and call it a “compromise.” Each round of concessions becomes the baseline for the next restriction.
And when voters do say no, the progressives’ knee-jerk reaction is to go after the industry’s right to argue its case. In September 2022, U.S. House Democrats convened a hearing targeting PR firms that had worked for oil and gas companies, treating public communications on behalf of a legal industry as “disinformation.” Amy Oliver Cooke, director of I2I’s energy and environmental policy center, testified, saying that, “there were decent, hardworking Coloradans across the political spectrum,” opposed to Proposition 112, “who explained what the tradeoff… would look like for them.” Attributing a failed ballot result to industry PR rather than voter judgment is just a way of insinuating that the public cannot be trusted with both sides of the argument.
Conservation Colorado presents itself as a homegrown advocacy group, but its education fund is financed in part by major left-leaning national organizations such as the Wyss Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Energy Foundation. Conservation Colorado claimed credit in its 2019 annual report for helping implement “sweeping” oil and gas regulations through SB-181.
Now, seven years later, the regulatory framework they helped build is apparently insufficient. If Conservation Colorado was genuinely concerned about emissions, they’d welcome carbon-free alternatives. Yet the organization opposed a bill in 2024 that would have designated nuclear energy, the largest source of zero-carbon electricity in the U.S., as “clean energy” eligible for state incentives. An organization that opposes both natural gas and carbon-free nuclear power is not serious about minimizing emissions.
Initiative 177 leaves every existing rule in place and does not weaken air quality standards, setback requirements, or production fees. Instead, it simply bars the government from banning Coloradans from purchasing natural gas or prohibiting utilities from selling it, a direct response to gas-hookup bans already enacted in Lafayette and Crested Butte. Conservation Colorado’s response, four measures designed to impose open-ended legal and financial liability on the industry, makes clear that its goals go beyond environmental protection.
Coloradans rejected that agenda at the ballot box in 2018. They should have the chance to reject it again, and the right to hear both sides before they do.
