Nothing—and everything. Buying and selling gas for cooking and heating is already legal in Colorado today. This measure does something profoundly unnecessary by permanently locking a special right for one industry into our constitution, something no other state has done.

However, 82 is a constitutional change, making it effectively permanent. That means that our ability to safeguard our water from toxics like benzene, and commonsense rules that limit methane gas fracking near our homes and schools—even standard gas safety and inspection requirements—all would be threatened by new corporate-friendly and permanent laws.

And, it hands monopoly utilities a tool they can use to justify raising our bills to pay for new pipelines and infrastructure, and for things we didn’t ask for and don’t want, like hookups for massive new data centers. 

It’s one industry getting to permanently write itself out of accountability using our state constitution as a shield, and nothing like it exists in any other state constitution.

Advance Colorado is the dark money group behind this measure, and a number of other measures on the ballot this year. In 2022 alone, roughly $9 million of the $11 million moving through Advance Colorado’s network was anonymous.

Their funding is so opaque that a local news outlet did a deep dive into their funding network. Independent reporting has traced its money through pass-through nonprofits back to billionaire donors including Phil Anschutz.

Advance Colorado also funds a think tank called the Common Sense Institute, which produces research supporting its initiatives, and Anschutz's own newspapers then cover that research as if it were independent. 

It’s worth asking what their billionaire backers think they’re going to get out of it.