They’re trying to distract us.
The Washington State Climate Commitment Act was passed and signed only three years ago, in 2021, without much fanfare. The intent of the Act is to provide economic incentives to nudge our state’s economy toward a long term goal of converting to a non-fossil-fuel-based economy by 2050. Emry Dinman, in a front page article in the Spokesman last Wednesday, describes the mechanism:
…[T]he Legislature approved the Climate Commitment Act in 2021, capping how much [greenhouse gases] can be emitted in the state each year and requiring businesses that emit the most carbon to bid for an “allowance” to emit a small portion of that overall cap.
Billions have been raised since the first cap-and-trade auction in 2023, money the state has poured into hundreds of projects, including the purchase of electric buses, air quality monitors and air filters in schools, the conversation of the state’s diesel powered ferries to hybrid-electric models, and work to boost salmon populations.
Unable to block passage of the Act, Republicans immediately set to work to undermine and repeal it. While publicly pretending that they, too, wish to tackle climate change (even as the leader of their party, Donald Trump, openly declares his disdain for climate science, withdrew from the Paris Accords, and now declares he will “Drill, baby, drill” if re-elected), Washington State Republicans set out to criticize the cap-and-trade mechanism and to pretend that the whole effort would be too costly for the average citizen.
Already in May of last year Chairman of the Washington State GOP, Jim Walsh, had filed Initiative 2117 with the Secretary of State’s office as “Repeal the Cap and Trade Tax”. Later in 2023 multi-millionaire hedge fund manager and transplant from California, Brian Heywood, single-handedly funded paid signature gatherers to get this and several other initiatives on the ballot. No time was wasted to see how the Climate Commitment Act might work in practice. As noted above, the first carbon allowance auction didn’t even occur until 2023 and we are only beginning to see the benefits of the money from carbon allowance auctions or have any hint of the reductions in the burning of fossil fuels that should result from the cap-and-trade system.
All of this should remind us of a similarly timed effort by Republicans to repeal another landmark law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) The ACA (dubbed “Obamacare”) was signed on March 23, 2010. By the fall of the same year the Republican Party’s “Tea Party” movement took up, among other things, repealing the Affordable Care Act as a crusade of Republicans—before any of the provisions of the ACA had even been put in place. Republicans campaigned (and some are still campaigning) on “repealing Obamacare” even as Americans decided that, in spite of some warts born of compromise, once it was put into practice they generally liked the provisions of the ACA.
One of the important functions of government is to look forward and incentivize actions that will prove ultimately beneficial for the entire country. Knowing that a majority of citizens responsibly understand that global heating resulting from the burning of carbon fuels is a major threat to the future of life on our planet, only a few Republicans (besides Donald Trump, Spokane County Commissioner Al French comes to mind) openly articulate their disdain for climate science. Instead, they twist themselves in knots.
A cardinal example is Tod Myers, vice president of the Washington Policy Center, the reliably fossil-fuel friendly, Koch-donor-group-affiliated think tank that pumps out “free market” propaganda, served as Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ brain, and supports Mr. Baumgartner as her replacement. Like most of the writers and talking heads at WPC, Mr. Myers’ degrees have little or nothing to do with the environmental science in which he professes expertise:
He has a bachelor’s degree in politics from Whitman College and a master’s degree in Russian/International Studies from the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.
According to Emry Dinman’s article, Mr. Myers “emphasized that he believes climate change is a serious threat, has long been an advocate for a ‘carbon tax,’ effectively a tax on all fuels.” It is true that years ago Mr. Myers was criticized by some of his fellow Republicans for an opinion piece he wrote arguing in favor of a carbon tax at the well head or the coal mine (coupled to a dividend sent to those most affected) as a “free market” alternative to government mandates. Of course, no carbon tax has ever come close to passing, mostly on account of Republican opposition to anything that includes the word “tax”.
Regardless of Mr. Myers’ claim of “believ[ing] that climate change is a serious threat”, he recently debated on the same side as multi-millionaire Brian Heywood specifically against the Climate Commitment Act. Note that Mr. Myers is staunchly criticizing the Climate Commitment Act before giving its application a chance to demonstrate its utility in reducing emissions.
For my part, I often reminded myself while performing surgery that “Perfect is the enemy of good.” That adage served me well—and I submit that it also applies to Mr. Myers. The Climate Commitment Act of 2021 was the best compromise that could be made into law to address the real threat of global heating. Certainly it has flaws—like virtually all legislation—flaws that can be worked out over time. For Mr. Myers to lobby along with Mr. Heywood for the repeal of the Climate Commitment Act, a ‘good’ law (in my adage) that has hardly been tested, is an example of throwing out the ‘good’ while claiming to pursue his unattainable ‘perfect’ (carbon fee and dividend). If any of these people were anything but closet climate deniers they would want to give the Climate Commitment Act at least the benefit of the doubt.
A good portion of Mr. Dinman’s exhaustive, nearly 3000 word treatise is directed at trying to determine how much (if any) the Washington State Climate Commitment Act might affect sticker prices for carbon-based fuels, headlined as gasoline. This is precisely the issue on which I-2117’s climate-denying masterminds, Brian Heywood and Jim Walsh, want everyone to focus. They certainly don’t want voters thinking about the long term consequences of government NOT encouraging the transition to renewable energy: the epic storms, the heat, the drought, and the wildfires, the leading edge of which our region is already experiencing. After all, some in the Republican camp profess that “God is in charge of climate change,” that is, we should ignore it. Humans have no responsibility; trying to curtail the burning of fossil fuels is foolish and flies in the face of “progress”.
Meanwhile, on the lower part of the same Wednesday, September 18th, Spokesman front page (pictured below) was an implied warning: “Spokane Recorded Its Third-Hottest Summer.” The body of the article adds some striking details: the second hottest summer in all of Spokane’s weather record keeping (which began in 1881) was just three years ago in 2021—and first place was set in 2015. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist—or a climate scientist—to see the obvious trend to the hotter and drier inland northwest summers predicted by climate models—nor does it require much to link heat and drought to our new annual summertime focus on wildfires. Climate change, better-labelled global heating is already here.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Here’s that front page.
