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Pitkin County 2023 greenhouse‑gas inventory shows 22% rise from 2019; coal‑basin methane, transport and waste key drivers
Summary
Pitkin County’s new regional greenhouse‑gas inventory for 2023 shows total emissions rose about 22% relative to 2019, county staff reported March 4, a change officials attributed in part to newly available data (notably methane measurements from Coal Basin) and to increases in transportation and waste‑sector activity.
Pitkin County staff presented a newly completed regional greenhouse‑gas inventory March 4 that estimates total regional emissions rose 22% compared with 2019, an increase staff said is partly attributable to newly available data sources and to higher transportation and waste emissions.
“Total emissions increased by 22% from 2019,” Michael Port, Pitkin County climate action analyst, told commissioners and municipal partners. Port said the report incorporates improved datasets — notably a new vehicle‑miles‑traveled (VMT) dataset and recent methane measurements from the Coal Basin — and therefore establishes what staff described as a stronger baseline for future tracking.
Key findings summarized by Port included a 2% reduction in building emissions driven by cleaner electricity provided by regional utilities, a roughly 6% increase in vehicle emissions (on an apples‑to‑apples comparison with the new VMT dataset), a 14% increase in solid‑waste emissions, and a 22% increase in aviation emissions for the region. Port said methane seepage measurements from Coal Basin — a new data source not included in the 2019 inventory — accounted for about 9% of total regional emissions in 2023.
Port cautioned that methodological changes affect year‑to‑year comparisons. Commissioners pressed the team on how much of the 22% rise is methodological versus real; Port said that if Coal Basin data were excluded but the improved transportation data retained, the increase from 2019 to 2023 would be roughly 5–6%. “This adjusts for, you know, if we eliminated coal basin... we still saw a 5% increase in emissions from 2019 to 2023,” Port said.
The presentation emphasized that cleaner grid electricity is continuing to reduce building‑sector emissions and that planned utility decarbonization and recent local energy‑code updates should drive further reductions. However, staff warned that as building emissions decline, transportation and waste will account for a larger share of total emissions and will be harder to reduce because they are dependent on regional and multi‑jurisdictional factors.
Port and Deputy County Manager Kara Silvernagle described this inventory as the county’s new baseline for post‑COVID, post‑data‑improvement tracking and said the next steps include public release of the report, outreach to municipalities and stakeholders, and a forthcoming county climate action plan and a county operations GHG inventory for staff emissions. Port noted the county obtained DOLA grant funding to support staff work and said the county brought production in‑house after previously relying on external consultants.
Why it matters: the inventory is the county’s primary tool for tracking progress toward its long‑term reduction goals; it signals a shifting challenge as building emissions fall and more complex sources (transportation, waste, methane) become a larger share of the total.
What’s next: staff will release the report publicly, present to relevant advisory boards including the airport board, publish outreach materials, and return with a county operations inventory and a climate action plan later in March. Quotes in this article come from the March 4 presentation by Pitkin County staff as recorded in the meeting transcript.
