Leadership Quote by John Hickenlooper

There is a quiet gamble baked into Hickenlooper's boosterish logic: treat climate change not as an existential rupture, but as a planning variable the savvy city can arbitrage. The line opens with bureaucratic throat-clearing - "Given that, and assuming" - a double hedge that makes a sweeping claim sound like mere common sense. It’s a politician’s way of laundering optimism through conditional grammar. If we just "begin to adjust", then catastrophe becomes manageable, even profitable. The implied subject is the pragmatic "we": government, business, residents, all folded into a single can-do actor with the capacity to adapt on schedule.

The subtext is Denver-as-winner in a reshuffled America. "Center of the country" reads as geography, but it’s really about supply chains, migration patterns, water politics, and the future map of economic power. As coastal cities confront sea-level rise and heat, the interior is framed as refuge and hub. The phrase "tremendous advantage" is classic growth rhetoric: it invites investment and in-migration while sidestepping the moral discomfort of benefiting from a crisis that will hit poorer regions first and hardest.

Context matters: Hickenlooper built his brand on technocratic moderation and pro-business urban success, first as Denver’s mayor, later as Colorado’s governor and a national Democrat. This quote belongs to that worldview - climate as challenge, not indictment; adaptation as opportunity, not reckoning. It works because it speaks the language of the American frontier myth updated for the warming era: the smart city doesn’t panic, it positions.