When Colorado Democrats took full control of state government nearly seven years ago, one of the party’s top priorities in the General Assembly was the passage of a climate action plan that would commit the state to the ambitious cuts to greenhouse gas emissions recommended by climate scientists.

House Bill 19-1261, signed by Governor Jared Polis in 2019, marked the first time Colorado had codified greenhouse gas targets in state law — and the end of calendar year 2025 is the deadline to meet the first of the goals, a 26 percent reduction in statewide emissions compared to 2005 levels.

Colorado will fall short of that goal.

That outcome has been all but certain for the last few years, as the state struggled to achieve the needed cuts, especially when it came to vehicle emissions, and state officials have previously acknowledged their efforts to meet the 2025 goal were at least a year behind schedule. The target slipped further out of reach this year as President Donald Trump’s administration and Republicans in Congress rolled back an array of clean energy incentives, including tax credits for electric cars and home heating upgrades.

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Still, Colorado’s top energy official said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the findings of the state’s latest comprehensive emissions report. Released this month, the biennial report, known as a greenhouse gas inventory, is the first to estimate the effects of the recent federal rollbacks on Colorado’s climate action plan.

“In terms of our GHG emissions trajectory, the impact is not as large as I feared it might be,” Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said in an interview. “What the latest inventory shows is that it basically pushes us back (another) year.”

That means the state now expects to meet its 2025 target — about 103 million tons of carbon emissions, a 26 percent cut from about 140 million tons two decades ago — in 2027. Its trajectory towards the next target, a 50 percent cut by 2030, is similarly about two years behind schedule, at least for now.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty about what the federal government is going to do in the future,” Toor cautioned. “There is a lot more work that we’re going to need to do to make sure that we are accurately capturing the effects of all of the attacks on clean energy … from the Trump administration.”

Colorado’s approach

Climate scientists have warned that to avert the most catastrophic impacts of global warming, governments around the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by midcentury.

The world is badly off track to meet those targets. While the rate of growth has slowed, annual carbon emissions have continued to rise globally, reaching another all-time high in 2024.

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Colorado’s emissions peaked around 2010 and had declined by about 16 percent from 2005 levels as of 2023, the latest year for which historical estimates are available, according to the new inventory.

Polis’ administration has embraced what it describes as a “whole-of-government approach” to climate action, pursuing a wide range of policies across different emissions sectors and regulatory bodies, including the Public Utilities Commission, the Department of Transportation, the Air Quality Control Commission and the Energy and Carbon Management Commission.

That approach hasn’t been without its critics among climate and environmental advocates, who warned as early as 2020that the state wasn’t doing enough to meet its 2025 and 2030 goals. Advocates have been repeatedly left frustrated by the scope and ambition of the Polis administration’s climate regulations, especially at the AQCC.

U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, a Democratic candidate for governor in 2026, on Dec. 9 announced a climate plan centered on a “cap-and-invest” program, reviving a proposal that some influential advocacy groups had hoped to enact through the AQCC after HB-1261’s passage seven years ago.

A separate report released this month by a coalition of Colorado environmental groups emphasized the need for the state to make “strategic near-term capital investments” to get back on track with its emissions goals.

“Coloradans see the impacts of climate change firsthand, in the form of more intense drought, more frequent wildfires and longer hotter summers,” Stacy Tellinghuisen, deputy director of policy development with Western Resource Advocates, said in a briefing on the new report. “Those impacts translate into real costs, but taking action — enacting forward looking policies to address climate pollution — has benefits for equity, for affordability and for air quality.”