By Richard Martin, Contributing Editor

This is not a good time to be an anti-global-warming activist, an advocate of Gov. Bill Ritter’s “New Energy Economy,” or one of those who believe that we can make significant progress in the next five years in weaning ourselves from a carbon-based energy supply. A cascade of events have disillusioned, disappointed, and discouraged such folks – to the degree that many are taking a silver-lining perspective on the clouds gathering around attempts to transform the energy industry in Colorado and beyond.

The toothless accord that resulted from the Copenhagen summit on climate change last month was the most visible sign that the optimism felt only a year ago has now dissipated. “I think that people are justified in being disappointed about the outcome in Copenhagen,” said President Obama in an appearance on “PBS NewsHour.”

Equally dispiriting is the fact that prospects for a transformative climate-change bill have melted away in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s upset victory in the race to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat. With a cap-and-trade system as dead as a public option for healthcare reform, “advocates of a comprehensive bill to combat global warming are turning their sights to a more modest package of climate and energy measures that they believe has a better chance of clearing Congress this year,” The New York Times reported.

The likely result: a series of feel-good measures calling for voluntary reductions in carbon emissions and doing nothing to erode the country’s reliance on coal for much of its electricity.

Not only is Congress set to do nothing to pass a serious climate-change bill, but lawmakers led by Rep. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, will try to prevent the EPA from treating carbon emissions as a regulated pollutant under the Clean Air Act – an authority validated by a historic 2007 ruling by the Supreme Court.

At the state level, some of the momentum behind the renewable-energy sector – one of the most vibrant areas of the economy over the last two years – has stalled with Gov. Ritter’s surprise announcement that he will not seek re-election. The fate of Ritter’s New Energy Economy program under a new governor, Democratic or Republican, is unclear.

The politics around energy transformation were highlighted last week after an oil and gas industry event in Denver, at which Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper – the leading Democratic candidate for Ritter’s post – addressed the crowd. Firebrand Republican state Senator Josh Penry, the minority leader, dashed off an angry email saying that Hickenlooper “is not a friend of the industry” and should not have been allowed to speak at the reception. Penry neglected to mention that new Colorado Oil & Gas Association president Tisha Conoly Schuller made it clear that Republican contender Scott McInnis had also been invited but was unable to attend.

Hickenlooper, in fact, is viewed by many in the industry as more moderate on energy issues than Ritter – a view bolstered by the fact that Hickenlooper himself is a former petroleum geologist who lost his job in one of the industry’s periodic downsizings. Hickenlooper “knows the industry better than half the people in the room,” said state Sen. Chris Romer, a Democrat from Denver, after the event in an interview with The Denver Post.  “I think Scott McInnis is in trouble with his perceived monopoly of the oil-and-gas industry.”

Ritter’s departure will not come before one last battle with entrenched energy interests in the state. A bill sponsored by Boulder Rep. Claire Levy would require investor-owned utilities to generate at least 30 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, increasing by half the level required under the state’s current Renewable Energy Standard, a centerpiece of Ritter’s administration. Ritter has vowed to make the new standard a priority in this year’s upcoming legislative session.

Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility, is surprisingly not opposed to the bill. Claiming that Xcel is already on target to meet the 20-percent goal five years early, in 2015, company spokesman Mark Stutz told the Summit Daily. “We believe it’s feasible to get to the 30-percent level, with or without legislation.”

Therein lies the primary silver lining to the paralysis gripping our government institutions, blocked by obstructionist lawmakers and large, entrenched interests with huge lobbying budgets: many in the private sector see not only the urgency of combating global climate change but the business opportunity the clean-energy battle presents. For every Larry Nichols, chief executive of Devon Energy and chairman of the American Petroleum Institute, who recently dismissed the climate-change bills passed by both houses of Congress as “extreme legislation,” there’s a John Browne, chairman of BT, who said publicly back in 2002 that climate change is a genuine threat and that the oil industry must find ways to slow or stop it.

In another encouraging development, the Securities and Exchange Commission, hardly a bastion of the environmental left, voted last week to require public companies to disclose in their filings the risks of climate change-driven impacts on their businesses, including new regulations or legislation, macroeconomic trends, and physical risks to company facilities and infrastructure.

In other words, political inertia aside, clear-thinking businesspeople who place profits above ideology have started to realize that the status quo is not good for revenues. Saying that “cleantech is poised to be Silicon Valley’s third great wave of innovation,” the San Jose Mercury-News reported that venture capital investments in the clean-tech sector “grew from $908 million in 164 deals in 2002 to $8.5 billion in 567 deals in 2008, according to data compiled by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte.” Clean tech now represents more than 25 percent of worldwide venture funding, according to the Cleantech Group. And even in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, the American Wind Energy Association said, the wind-power industry added nearly 10,000 megawatts in 2009, beating 2008’s record increase by 18 percent.