Thank you for letting me speak today. My name is Katherine Toan, I am an 

environmental and natural resources attorney here in Colorado, practicing largely in 

oil and gas. I am here today to discuss the immediate and long term consequences 

of the EPA's proposed rule. I am here to support the proposed rule, and to 

additionally urge the federal government to end its policy of "temporal discounting" 

when considering future human lives in the context of climate policy more 

generally. Climate change is rapidly escalating towards an existential crisis for 

humanity, one that scientists have predicted will cause long-term agricultural 

instability, water shortages, disease, population shifts and coastal abandonment, 

storms, fires, global scale species loss, and of course all of this leads to massive 

political disruption, conflict, and war. We are already seeing the early signs of some 

of these, and they will be layered onto our already daunting geopolitical challenges 

such as overpopulation, natural resources scarcity, economic inequality, and 

weapons proliferation. The threat or magnitude of human suffering can hardly be 

exaggerated, and is all the more grotesque and unimaginable from where we sit: the 

most privileged and wealthy generation in history, condemning our children so we 

can set our air conditioners at 68 without having to pay Y2 penny more per kilowatt 

hour. 

Climate change is, I believe, not only the most serious problem facing humanity 

today, but also one of the most intractable and complex. Like cigarettes, the thing 

that brings pleasures today - and that seems completely impossible to give up - is 

building to catastrophic effect in the future, and like smokers, we are inclined to 

enjoy the moment at the expense of our very likely future. Our future, probably. Our 

children's future, definitely. 

Our increases in energy consumption over the last 100 years or so have been 

without parallel in human history, and has allowed us to achieve a level of human 

dignity and achievement similarly unparalleled. We put a man on the moon, sent 

Voyager beyond the influence of our star, and connected the world into one 

instantly available at our fingertips. I could be in China tomorrow, just because. 

Maybe some of the fossil fuels industry here wish I would go. 

Cheap fossil fuels have allowed us to do many foolish things as well. We push 

motorized vehicles across desert soils and tundras that take hundreds of years to 

heal. We spread our houses across the landscape, eating farmland and requiring 

even more from our vehicles. We built cities in deserts and flooded them with 

millions of people demanding water to be pumped from rivers a hundred miles 

away, and then we built golf-courses and artificial lakes to entertain them. While our 

highest achievements will always be possible, this careless and wanton devastation 

would not be possible if the cost of climate change were factored into the price of 

fossil fuels. In 1970, if when we enacted the Clean Air Act, we had had the strength 

of character to require the old plants to keep up with new technology in a timely 

manner, our problems today would be smaller. Coal would have been more 

expensive, yes, but that expense is what incentivizes the investments in renewable 

energy research, development, and infrastructure. 
The problem we are discussing today is new technology vs. old technology; the 

problem is not "coal" versus "natural gas." Technology exists for new coal plants 

with emissions reductions of 40% over the average currently existing plant. Natural 

gas burns cleanly at the plant, but that does not account for upstream fugitive 

emissions, emissions which are often not detected but flow invisibly into the air, and 

include co-pollutants with direct human toxicity such as benzene and other VOCs. 

Furthermore, unlike coalmines, natural gas well pads spread out over our landscape 

in a patchwork of development in and around population centers, disrupting 

humans and ecosystems alike over hundreds of thousands of acres. Modern fracking 

is only a decade old, and we know far too little about the costs to be making so many 

long-term infrastructure investments in it. For just one example, despite industry 

denials (and the EPA leaving its investigation in Pavillion, Wyoming), we have 

evidence of groundwater contamination, groundwater that Colorado will need 

desperately as our climate becomes drier and less predictable. 

It is our existing infrastructure, including our legal and economic subsidies for these 

lethal, addictive fuels, that prevents us from making larger, currently achievable 

advances in renewable energy technology. These rules are simply an important step 

forward towards a future where energy security and environmental security coexist. Please stop discounting the future. The economics of today allow this rule, but 

the economics of tomorrow demand it.