What are they afraid of?

An article in the Gazette depicted two billboards being defaced by some cowardly pro-abortion extremists. Now, pro-abortion extremists have additionally vandalized a local pro-life outreach to pregnant women.

My question is: what are they afraid of? Both billboards had wholesome pictures extolling the beauty of motherhood. The pro-life center focused on women who were choosing to give life to their unborn child while also supporting post-abortive men and women.

The answer: These evil criminals are afraid to come out and debate the abortion issue in the public square. Their pernicious destruction of private property demonstrates that they believe in killing the unborn up until the time of birth is a Sacrament. Per the so-called Center for Reproductive Rights, “Abortion in Colorado is legal at all stages of pregnancy, with no gestational limit.” Does the public understand that children can be killed throughout all 9 months of pregnancy?

Finally, when will the media give equal coverage to the sickening views of the killers? If the unborn is simply a “blob”, why not display pictures of a viable, aborted blob at 8- or 9-months gestation? And where are the pastors in Colorado Springs who have the courage to speak out about this modern-day holocaust?

Bill Crow

Larkspur

Closing the Nixon coal plant

Sean Page’s article in Sunday’s Gazette, “A reprieve for reliable energy” , tried to make the case for keeping the Ray Nixon coal plant open longer and was critical of efforts by the Sierra Club and other groups to accelerate its closure in favor of clean energy solutions. Under the “Clean Energy Plan” Nixon’s targeted closure date was set for 2029, but in early 2026 Colorado Springs Utilities (CSU) floated a proposal to delay closure beyond that year.

The “Our Spacious Skies” survey, commissioned by the Pikes Peak Community Foundation, and published in November, 2025, was a deep dive into the values that drive residents of this beautiful region. It included an amazing statistic: some 41% of its almost 4,000 respondents selected “The scenic and natural beauty of this place” as their number one “Personal Driver of High Quality of Life”. www.ourspaciousskies.org.

Running a dirty coal plant is inconsistent with this ethos. On the other hand, Colorado Springs is ideally suited for clean energy with its approximately 300 days of sun or partial sun annually. Texas, another sunny state and a big oil producer, is seeing a dramatic shift
towards solar, partly sparked by a big drop in the cost of solar panels and battery storage.

So why is CSU not moving forward quickly towards renewable energy like solar and wind? Why is it trying to penalize solar users, through its attempted and controversial “net metering” charge on those with
rooftop solar? Why is it limiting rooftop panels to 120% of historical usage? Why is it imposing obstacles to the adoption of clean energy?

Perhaps its distaste for clean energy stems from the level of comfort CSU’s top management has with fossil fuels. After all, its CEO spent about nine years at Duke Energy’s Gibson Generating Station, the largest coal-powered plant in the US. Duke has a long history of Clean Air Act violations and expensive legal settlements over pollution. In Nixon’s case, it spews out some 1.2 million tons of CO2 annually, roughly equivalent to what a million cars generate.

The community has spoken! It wants to enhance, not degrade, this very special place. Let’s embrace renewable energy with open arms!

Graeme Cloutte

Colorado Springs

Endless growth on a finite planet

Sunday’s Perspective cover story calls the Sierra Club’s Ray Nixon “retirement party” a media stunt disconnected from reality. But whose reality? The fantasy of endless growth on a finite planet is what’s truly disconnected.

We’ve passed peak oil. You can’t scale any energy grid infinitely, whether it’s fossil or “renewable” (more accurately, rebuildable, since everything requires mining and replacement). The materially honest path is to taper down overall energy use before we’re forced off a cliff. That’s not radical; it’s being honest about limitations and where we’re located in time.

Sean Paige shares that coal still delivered 23.7% of Colorado’s power in 2025. That’s not a win—it’s a sign we waited too long to transition. Blaming the Sierra Club for pointing this out isn’t the hit he implies it is. These folks aren’t hedge fund people with think tank backing. They’re mostly working-class folks holding multiple jobs who’d rather not leave their kids with nothing. Their petition likely got only 1,000 signatures because most working class people are too exhausted and overwhelmed to engage in social and environmental issues, not because the people love coal.

SB 26-022 gives utilities more time, but they haven’t shown us documentation on what they need, and now they are considering nuclear SMRs even though they’ve stated budget is a major concern. Nuclear is exponentially more expensive, so how does that add up?

Delaying a coal plant’s closure to 2040 isn’t “energy realism.” It’s locking in another fifteen years of pollution because we refuse to admit we need to use less and live differently, not just swap one extraction machine for another.

Coal works when the wind doesn’t blow. I get it. But “reliable” doesn’t mean much on an unlivable planet. Tapering down, building local resilience, and admitting limits—that’s the real move. The fantasy is that we can override our reliance on Earth and the entire web of life. There are so many opportunities available to us if we’re willing to admit we have been walking the wrong path for a while now. Let’s choose to turn around together.

“We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?” – Wendell Berry

Ciara Guerrero

Colorado Springs