A flare stack at the Suncor oil refinery in Commerce City on Feb. 20, 2022. (Quentin Young/Colorado Newsline)
Colorado gets credit for leading the way in many areas of environmental protection. But it consistently proves a failure in at least one respect: ozone pollution.
As Newsline’s Chase Woodruff recently reported, the northern Front Range, including Denver, once again is on track to violate federal ozone standards that state officials had set out to meet. This has been the region’s story for many years, and by 2022 the state found itself so far behind on improvements that the EPA downgraded it from a “serious” to a “severe” violator of ozone standards. Now the state has a new deadline, in summer 2027, to clean up its air, but doing so by then would be a “tough one,” Tom Moore, the Regional Air Quality Control planning director, said.
The result of all this air pollution is not just a bad grade from the EPA. It’s poor health and life-threatening conditions. Low-income neighborhoods and communities close to industrial polluters are hit the hardest. Increases in population, vehicle traffic and industrial activity only worsen the state’s ozone woes. But the more Coloradans understand the health risks of air pollution, the more likely they are to insist that state leaders address it with the necessary urgency.
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Ground-level ozone is formed from a chemical reaction between nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. The source of these oxides in Colorado is largely oil and gas activity and emissions from gas-fueled cars, trucks and lawn equipment.
Colorado is especially vulnerable to ozone pollution due to its dry conditions and abundant sunshine, which fuel ozone reactions. Geographical and topographical features in the state also help generate concentrations of ozone. According to a recent American Lung Association report card, the Denver area has the sixth-worst ozone pollution in the country.
This has wide-ranging health implications for the dense population centers along the northern Front Range.
“Most people are exposed to chronic low levels of ozone in Colorado. This type of exposure can see increases in cardiovascular events — increases in heart attacks and strokes and respiratory events, exacerbations of asthma or (chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder),” Dr. Katherine James, the Climate and Human Health Doctoral Program director at the Colorado School of Public Health, said in a recent interview.
Some populations are more susceptible to adverse health effects, such as children, older people, and those with asthma, lung disease, bronchitis, congestive heart failure and other conditions, and workers in outdoor occupations such as farming, construction, and oil and gas extraction are at greater risk.
But no one is safe. In fact, people who exercise outdoors during high pollution days breathe in much higher concentrations of toxic air than when at rest. High pollution days are associated with an increased rate of emergency room visits, Dr. Fernando Holguin, pulmonary division head at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said in a recent CU podcast. The association of ozone pollution and premature death has been established by research sponsored by the EPA. Almost 490,000 deaths in the world in 2021 were attributable to ozone pollution, according to the State of Global Air Report 2024.
And no longer is it just Front Range residents who are dangerously exposed. “The San Luis Valley has experienced a growing number of ozone alert days, and so has the Western slope,” James said.
Colorado leaders are not entirely to blame for growing ozone pollution. Wildfire smoke from other states contributes to the problem. And state officials have taken some steps to reduce ozone-generating emissions. These include a 2023 measure to curb emissions from oil and gas operations and a ban adopted last year on government use in the summer of gas-powered lawn and garden equipment.
But, given the health threat posed by ozone, officials on balance have fallen far short of necessary reforms. As Woodruff’s story suggests, the corporate-friendly Democratic Gov. Jared Polis is sometimes the problem.
“Opposition from the Polis administration and industry groups has … frequently spelled the end of more aggressive ozone measures taken up by the state Legislature,” the story notes. One of the doomed measures was a proposal last year to prohibit oil and gas operators from conducting high-emission drilling and fracking activities in the summer.
Since 2004, Colorado officials have filed plans to meet EPA ozone standards and then failed to meet the standards. That’s more than 20 years of false expectations. And all that time the state’s polluted air has sickened or killed many Coloradans.
State officials should not go even one more year without adopting the aggressive remedies that could finally bring Colorado into compliance.
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