Colorado Democratic Senate candidate and former state house speaker Andrew Romanoff on Monday released a new ad showing the "hellscape" he says will come about if the government doesn't stop climate change.
The apocalyptic scenario in the campaign video takes place in Colorado Springs "in the not so distant future." It shows a little girl describing her isolated life underground with her family. As she says she misses seeing the sun, her father appears in a hazmat suit to cover the last bit of sunlight peeping in with aluminum foil.
"What I miss most is the sunshine," the little girl says in the ad. "But we've been here for a really long time now."
A voice on the radio then reports the temperature at 127 degrees Fahrenheit with an air quality index number of 420. According to the federal government, moderate air quality ranges between 51 and 100 on the air quality index, while the range of 301 to 500 is "hazardous," the most dangerous label on the scale.
"This is not the stuff of fiction, nor some far off threat," the ad's narrator says. "This is a clear and present danger to life on earth. A catastrophe of our own creation. A climate crisis that condemns our children to an ever hotter planet."
The video also features Romanoff's top Democratic primary opponent, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper. The ad attacks Hickenlooper for his ties to the fossil fuel industry and his defense of fracking in 2013.
Hickenlooper, a former petroleum geologist, also defended fracking in his 2016 memoir The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics.
"Fracking is good for the country's energy supply, our national security, our economy, and our environment," Hickenlooper wrote.
Romanoff touted the ad's scientific legitimacy in an interview with the Colorado Sun. "I don't know when [Colorado] looks like that," Romanoff said. "But for many parts of the world, that hellscape is already here."