State of the Campaign Friday Post 1/30/26

The office where I do most of my writing looks out over the sandstone cliffs of the Colorado National Monument. The paddock between is filled with an amazing array of goats - more than 30 different breeds. A short distance away two bald eagles perch in a bare tree searching for dinner. 

As usual today looking at this scene I feel a bitter pang of empathy. These creatures, like all of our furry, feathered, and fishy friends, can surely feel their environment changing but have no way of knowing the magnitude of what is ahead. Humans, on the other hand, have known for half a century that climate change was developing into a global emergency - now we see it every day, sometimes with our own eyes.

When I started working on the climate change problem and first ran for Governor in Arizona (2018) no one was talking about climate except maybe Al Gore and James Hansen. I remember a reporter trying to scold me, "Yes, but what does that have to do with our lives?" No one asks that kind of question anymore unless they have a huge financial stake in one of the industries that are continuing to burn carbon for profit. 

Our campaign has a wide range of thoroughly researched, elegantly crafted and well financed solutions for Colorado, but none as important as our plan to rehabilitate our atmosphere.

A reasonably smart monkey can learn to pull the levers of power in Denver. The irreplaceable element right now is a workable plan for deploying the technology for removing carbon from the atmosphere and turning it into usable products (including biodegradable plastics!). This carbon reclamation industry already exists in more than a dozen locations around the globe. However, on its current growth trajectory it will take a couple million years to be useful. I often compare climate change to WWII. In the early 1940's we had much of the technology needed to fight the NAZIs, but it was going to do us no good without a massive mobilization. The key is in the scale. 

Our team has developed The Interstate SkyCarbon Blueprint which will take the existing Governors Climate Alliance and build a network of Direct Atmospheric Carbon Removal facilities - much like we built the interstate roadway system a few decades ago. Colorado will lead the way and, seeing positive the effects on climate change and the benefits for state GPD, other states will (we hope) follow suit.

So we are bringing together this campaign for Colorado Governor (2026) and wow is it complicated. There are so many elements coming to life at once and all of them critical. I fall asleep face down on my desk more often than I would like, waking up with my Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill miniatures staring at me and Eric our Campaign Director, or the bellowing of the sheep next door in my ears.

The sheep.........so relentless in their reminder that this work is about innocent lives. Most of us never signed on to be victims of a cloud of carbon unleashed by human greed and cloaked in the shame of those who failed to stop them. 

- Chris Komor, Candidate for Colorado Governor 2026

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