The week after the DNC, Denver is calm, quiet and exhausted (or maybe it’s just me). After the frenzy of national attention we’ve returned to a normal pace - the tents are gone, the streets are relatively clear and the weather is cool and sunny. A bag full of hard-won credentials, a heap of compostable cups and a bunch of great stories are the best reminders of last week’s flurry.

A quick recap of some end of week highlights:

Wednesday 8/27: the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado hosted 3 days of panels in its Big Tent (sponsored by Google and Digg). The most interesting to me was T. Boone Pickens, with former Clinton Chief of Staff (and Center for American Progress president and CEO) John Podesta, and Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope on a panel to discuss the audacious Pickens Plan to build the largest wind farm in the world in Texas - spending an estimated $12 billion to create a 12,000 megawatt facility that he estimates will save the U.S. a net $300 million per year in energy imports. If you’ve spent anytime watching prime time television in the last month, you’ve seen his ads.

T. Boone Pickens describes his plan to save us from ourselves

Pope commented early in the panel that If our politics were working, anything that Boone, Podesta and Pope agree to would have gotten done long ago. The 80-year old oil and gas man from Texas did not disappoint. A study of contradictions, T. Boone Pickens described his lack of profit interest in the effort, and the $700 million donated to charity in recent years, while staff handed out fliers for his book (The First Billion is the Hardest, Crown, 2008). The principal funder behind the “swift boat” ads against John Kerry in 2004 also insisted that he intended to keep this work nonpartisan, and insisted he didn’t have a horse in the race in 2008. His stated goal: to engage enough supporters (1 million) for his plan that a bipartisan group of lawmakers will help make it possible by:

- Establishing rights of way for transmission of renewable energy

- Extending renewable energy production tax credits, and

- Providing incentives for alternative fuel vehicles.

Pickens opined that “a fool with a plan will beat a genius with no plan” and described the opportunities for thousands of new green collar jobs in the development of wind and solar corridors (from Texas to Canada, and Texas to California, respectively - note that all roads begin in Texas). He pointed out that we are now importing almost 70% of our oil (which is 25% of the world’s supply, for the U.S., which has 4% of its population), which he estimated (with a famous track record) will cost us $700 billion/yr 10 years from now under a ‘business as usual” scenario – or close to $10 trillion for foreign oil over that period of time. This constitutes, he continued, the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind, with nothing left for health care or education. The second significant step advocated by Pickens is to convert to “the only fuel we have to replace foreign oil” and use natural gas to reduce imports by 50% in 10 years.

Thursday and Friday 8/28-29: Stood in line for hours for two tapings of The Daily Show at Denver University’s Newman Center. Watched the Obama acceptance speech from the Wazee Supper Club in downtown Denver where they’d stuck a big sheet up on the wall in addition to dozen TVs. Could have heard a pin drop, then everyone started cheering. The Google-Vanity Fair party brought coastal opulence and glamour to Denver’s warehouse district (people arrived and departed on shuttle buses in 15-20 person waves), complete with red carpet, top tier national politicians and Chevy Chase (go figure).

On Friday the city exhaled and celebrated its successful hosting stint.

As for the green legacy? So far, it’s subtle - reflected in new green offerings by hotels, restaurants, caterers and event staff, in the 30+ bikes left behind by Freewheelin for the city’s nascient bike share program, and the general buzz generated by the Zero Hero bins (”Why are all those people standing there?” one friend asked me about the volunteer waste sorters) and the various symposia held the week of the DNC. Many people who biked for convenience to avoid the traffic of the DNC are still on their bikes this week. As a city that wants to be liked, we take our cues from the national media, and there seems to be some pride in having carried off the greenest DNC ever that with luck will carry through into private and public events and decisions in the future.

Next up?