Adam Withrow
UnityQ1 What advisory mechanisms will you implement to ensure that evidence and scientific findings play a crucial role in your policymaking process?
“Scientific findings are the underpinnings of my world perspective. While one might say that we all live in our own worlds, there is an objective reality that we coexist in, and the combined goal of the sciences is to understand what that really is. The Earth is an interconnected web of real systems that we affect with how we live, and our decision making processes have to be grounded in the responsibility to keep those systems alive. For myself, I will choose advisors who are subject matter experts, not financial stakeholders.”
Q2 Colorado farmers are facing multiple threats, amidst water scarcity and rising prices for fertilizer and other imported materials. As agriculture is our #1 export sector, in what ways do you imagine using your role to support evidence-based advancements to protect and support our farmers and natural resources in the years ahead?
“First off, we need to ban for-profit water speculation. Right now, there is a trend toward large financial interests buying up land with water shares with the hopes of leveraging those shares as our man-made crises unfold. We need to promote drought resilience research, training, and conservation methods, and we need to take a larger scale look at how human activity is affecting our water sources to begin with. We already passed the 1.5C threshold - the first 12 month period was from February 2023 to January 2024, and 2024 was the first calendar year that remained above. The rate at which we alter the chemistry of the atmosphere is still increasing, and that’s just one of our problems.”
Q3 America has a growing AI industry, supporting cutting-edge innovation but raising issues of resource use, privacy, and economics. What is the right balance of costs and benefits for new data center construction in Colorado, and how would your policies accomplish that balance?
“There are two prongs to this, so let’s start with the AI itself. We can be absolutely certain that humanity will go extinct at some point in the future. The last human from Earth will die. Artificial Intelligence has the capacity to carry on the legacy of humanlike consciousness long after that time, and it it worth advancing and preserving for that reason.
Data Centers were already becoming the central nervous system of our civilization before the AI boom. Like them or not, you’re using them. Honestly, we need to work toward orbital data centers to mitigate the terrestrial impacts. In the meantime, we need to require on-site power generation through wind, solar, and geothermal stations that can cover the power requirements, and we need to require closed-loop cooling systems.”
Q4 Colorado has experienced a lingering measles outbreak since March of 2025. What evidence-based policies do you support to improve community and preventive health for your constituents, for infectious diseases and other threats?
“As sad as it sounds, we need to get back to the point where people actually understand the disease theory of infection and can internalize what that means. We need to be clear in our language, and instead of creating text message friendly names for things, we need to foster a multi-syllabic vocabulary in our population so that people can better understand what is going on. The ongoing degradation of our language is also degrading people’s ability to comprehend, and that is causing people to gravitate to very silly things instead of proven methods and cures.”
Q5 What are your opinions on the current state of science literacy, and how could K-12 education standards be adapted to form a better public understanding of and relationship building in science?
“Unfortunately, we’re slipping our way backwards into a new dark age even as we’re on the cutting edge of scientific understanding. Ignorance and dogma are so powerful right now that it boggles my mind. We’re at a strange juncture, though, in that our new emphasis on STEM programs, while a step in the right direction, needs to be accompanied with a stronger dose of philosophy to help people learn to think at all. Our education system has become a corporate vocational sorting pipeline, and so those with more humble vocational aspirations tend to tune out learning in general. We don’t want a generation of people who will create for cash without being able to ask whether they should or not.”