CAP AND WAIT
CLIMATE FOES GET THEIR DELAYS IN WA
By Mary Liz Thomson
Do climate programs like Washington’s cap and investment law automatically raise the price of gas? No, but mainstream media usually frames the story that way. Why do we have to accept this logic? We shouldn’t, it’s not even true. But this thinking is on track to take down Washington State’s newest carbon tax. After ten years of wrangling the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) was passed as a market-based program to reduce carbon pollution and achieve the greenhouse gas limits agreed to in state law. The program held it’s first auction last spring in 2023.
Right on cue after the industry had to pay their tax assessment in the new Climate program gas prices at the pump went up. For a few months, and then prices went back down. But the damage was done, higher prices could be screamed at and linked to the new carbon tax in news headlines like The Seattle Time’s, Will high gas prices derail WA’s climate policy?
Now there is an attempt to repeal the law, which is stalling all of the possible good spending that could be happening. Like building the new electric ferries that would replace our broken aging fleet, for example.
This week, an ex-Washington State government economist Scott Smith, announced a lawsuit against the state saying he was harassed for including this high gas price reasoning in his assessment of the impacts of the new carbon tax, and told to take it out. He described it as 6th grade math that gas prices had to go up. But that’s a wrong assumption.
Many studies have shown that high gas prices have far outpaced inflation and industry costs, leading to record profits for companies like Shell and Exxon. CrossCuts reported Inslee spokeswoman Jaime Smith commented last July, “While critics of our climate policy will try to pin any and all price increase on the 2021 Climate Change Act, they conveniently ignore that fossil fuel suppliers have always had some of their highest profit margins in the Northwest”. Crosscuts goes on to report that, “In January, Reuters wrote that the oil industry had posted record profits in 2022, and, Seattle-based Climate Solutions wrote that oil corporations posted in the Seattle area their second-highest profit margin in the nation — $1.09 per gallon.” (60–80 Cents a gallon is more standard).
Smith got pushback for a reason, not just politics. The industry could and should absorb these costs and contribute to public programs without passing the cost along to their customers. In fact, it’s literally the very least they have been asked to do. For years the oil and gas industry has said they wanted a market solution for decarbonizing. A price on carbon or cap and trade/invest programs like the ones in California and Washington. But then they sabotage and attack the hell out of these programs the minute they pass.
This February was the hottest February ever on record for our planet. While the largest wildfire ever in Texas stampeded through their state last week, fires from last year still smolder underground in Canada’s boreal forest, likely to burst out again this summer into billowing smoke.
“If the fracturing of our once stable climate doesn’t terrify you, then you don’t fully understand it…The reality is that, as far as we know, and in the natural course of events, our world has never — in its entire history — heated up as rapidly as it is doing now. Nor have greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere ever seen such a precipitous hike”, wrote Climate Scientist Bill Mcguire this week on CNN.
The world is facing fire, famine and flood disasters at weekly rates we’ve never seen. It should not be too much to ask for the oil industry to chip in to confronting these circumstances. Especially when they are benefitting by making record profits. This is their cost. Their social duty.
But now Washingtonians who have been negotiating for progress have to wait again and face more frustrating delay. After finally collecting the climate tax, the money can’t be spent! All because hedge-fund executive and republican megadonor, Brian Heywood, bankrolled an initiative campaign to overturn it, which will be on the ballot in November. A repeal that could scrap the whole system.
It’s not that cap and trade programs are some kind of complete solution for meeting climate change emission commitments, of course they are not. But they can be an important start. Instead we see again how difficult it is to try and achieve even a small amount of headway against the winds of money and alliances with the oil industry. Brian Heywood said to EE News, “Exactly what does it mean to decarbonize? I’d like a definition of that”. How utterly condescending is that. People have been working on the details of this for years. Still, he gets to throw a big wrench into a program that was on the edge of success.
Washington Governor Inslee and his climate team spent a decade trying to meet a lot of different groups needs in their climate plan, including using an industry preferred market solution. It is a cap and invest program designed to put money into actual material programs that will reduce carbon emissions. It was going to go towards 188 solar farms, Washington’s badly needed new fleet of electric ferries, infrastructure and charging for electric vehicles, among other things.
But no, right now, no one can lift a finger. What a wasteful waste. As the impact of climate change keep increasing exponentially, we are leaving ourselves unprepared.
