By Dave Larison

As we reach the quarter mark of the 21st century, it’s become obvious that Longmont is situated between two national political extremes. On the city’s eastern edge is big oil, long term debt-free Weld County, one of the most conservative jurisdictions in the country. To the west is strongly progressive, climate-crazed Boulder County.

Although Longmont is located in the northeast corner of Boulder County, most of its history reflects a civic feel closer to neighboring Weld County. Only in the last 10 years has a progressive, Boulder-like mindset taken over city government.

The two mantras we constantly hear from the left are climate change and density. This is not surprising as it is rooted in core globalist doctrine going back to UN Agenda 21 for sustainable development.

The agenda is anti-fossil fuels, anti-car, anti-suburbs, and transit oriented development. This mentality limits individual freedoms by cramming people into high-density cities for increased indexing and control of their lives, including public transportation. They don’t want you having a single family home in the suburbs with a yard and gas powered vehicle to get you where you want to go on your own timetable.

I am one of thousands of professionals in the weather field who does not adhere to man-made climate change theory. I don’t call it a hoax — the cultists religiously believe in the movement. I do see it as a highly political crusade to destroy the fossil fuel industry and gain control of the all-important world energy economy. And isn’t it interesting that the global warming crowd chooses the scant greenhouse gas of CO2 — 4 parts in 10,000 in the atmosphere — as the villain for climate change? The argument is completely out of scale and based on problematic computer models.

Did you know that the city of Longmont has had a “climate emergency” in effect since October 2019? Where is the emergency? I can tell you having worked with Longmont weather for nearly 45 years in various capacities that the city has a marvelous four season, semi-arid climate.

Yes, there is natural variability — week to week, month to month, year to year and beyond. Climate is simply the long term statistical average of weather for a given area. There’s always going to be outlier extreme weather events, and this is not to be confused with climate.

Local environmental groups like to talk up a new era of drought for Longmont due to climate change, but actual observed weather proves otherwise. The city officially had its wettest year (21.10 inches) in a century in 2023. In fact, six of the last eight years in Longmont have been above the annual precipitation normal of just over 15 inches.

Longmont also doesn’t have “dirty air” producing a hazardous threat to the vast majority of the population. Since the inception of the Clean Air Act and vehicle emissions testing, Denver and the northern Front Range has admirably decreased its ozone and sulfur dioxide levels by 300-400% from the brown cloud era of 50 years ago.

It’s the highly politicized Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that keeps moving the goalposts with draconian federal ozone health standards. EPA brands the northern Front Range a “severe” violator when practically speaking it really isn’t the case.

The new administration in Washington will be introducing practical, non-fearmongering environmental regulations and doing away with irrational Green New Deal mandates. This will pose a huge problem for Longmont’s economy if the City Council continues its ill-advised goals of all-renewables by 2030 followed by city electrification in the 2030s.

Longmont voters will have a golden opportunity for regime change on the City Council in the November 2025 election as four of seven council seats will be up for re-election. All four of these positions are currently held by progressives, including our environmentalist mayor.

The city can return to common sense government like what we saw in the 1990s and early 2000s under Mayors Wilson, Stoecker and Pirnack. This golden age of the City Council culminated in Longmont achieving All-America City status in 2006. Let’s get back to that kind of municipality that longtime residents know and love.

Dave Larison, a retired NOAA meteorologist, has lived in Longmont since 1980.