Citizen-led WA ballot initiative pushes politician climate action

If Washington Gov. Jay Inslee manages to pass his carbon cap proposal this legislative session, he will owe a debt of gratitude to Carbon Washington and its effort to place a carbon tax on the ballot.

Democratic House members this week revived Inslee’s proposal in a modified form after having run away from it in the regular session.  The House may finally stand up for a climate bill, a vital necessity to have carbon revenues considered in budget negotiations with Senate Republicans. 

This apparently would not have happened without climate action pressure from grassroots activists now seeking 315,000 signatures to place CarbonWA’s I-732 on the November 2016 ballot.  A critical point is that climate-denier Republicans are not the only hurdle to putting a price on carbon pollution. 

“Democrats have not been able to publicly say that they have the 50 votes to guarantee passage,” John Stang reported in Crosscut.  “However, Democratic leaders and Inslee have been . . . trying to create a package that would gain 50 votes out of 98 House members. Legislators have looked warily at signature gathering by the group Carbon Washington . . . I-732 would install a $25-per-ton tax on carbon emissions beginning July 1, 2017 — a much more drastic approach than proposed by Inslee and his Democratic supporters.”

Stang last month was the first to report on prospects for a carbon package revival.  “The prospect of a blunt initiative rather than a more nuanced bill has prompted legislators to huddle about Inslee’s carbon emissions tax proposal . . . “

Passing any climate ballot initiative in 2016 will require a massive public education campaign on the need for carbon pricing to rapidly move clean energy forward.  That campaign should start now.

The package announced Monday clearly points to where Democratic support must be bolstered. The message is in re-allocation of proposed carbon revenues.  For coastal and rural Democrats, over $280 million in forest industry benefits plus a $10,000 tax credit for each new employee hired for at least six months.  For business-friendly centrist Democrats, new rebates of $333 million to the fuel industry and more for other industries to offset higher energy costs (even though this reduces the incentive to switch to clean energy or use energy more efficiently).  The package would also increase education funding to $500 million annually, exceeding the $380 million originally proposed by Inslee, building support broadly in the Democratic caucus.

The Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy, the coalition of groups supporting the Inslee bill, is also creating some pressure by announcing it is considering its own 2016 initiative effort.  But it will not announce a decision until fall.  Because the Alliance is working closely with Inslee and state legislators, a nuanced initiative similar to the current package can be expected.  CarbonWA, with its outright $25/ton price on all carbon emissions, recycling all revenues to taxpayers in the form of tax reductions and credits, seems to be the more potent driver of politician concern.

CarbonWA is definitely picking up momentum.  It just received the endorsement of Ron Sims, who positioned King County as one of the nation’s climate leaders when he was executive. “I strongly support the Carbon Washington revenue-neutral carbon tax ballot measure. It is a bipartisan approach that will reduce carbon emissions, make our state tax code less regressive, and protect manufacturing jobs. We are running out of time to address the growing threat of global climate disruption. Let’s all work together to pass Initiative 732.”

Also just announced are endorsements by Mike McGinn, former Seattle mayor and Sierra Club leader, and Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata. I-732 in addition recently added 350 Seattle and Resources for Sustainable Communities to the list of citizen group endorsers. 

The revival of the climate bill in Olympia speaks volumes about the need for grassroots climate pressure on Democratic Party electeds.  For sure there are some genuine climate champions.  But politicians are caught in a constant crossfire between many interests, business, labor, civic groups, social justice advocates.  Climate is easily lost in the shuffle unless there is an active and vocal citizen presence willing to take matters into its own hands. 

That is what Carbon Washington has done.  CarbonWA is doing this with an organizing model based on working with local climate-oriented groups such as Climate Action Bainbridge and Climate Action Olympia, and building new local groups where there are none.  This granular, social organizing approach plants a climate movement deeply rooted in communities, shaped from circles of active and caring citizens.  Once planted these circles can work on climate from multiple angles, from direct democracy to direct action.  That seems to be the typical pattern. 

The major danger confronting citizen climate politics in Washington state has been the prospect of competing initiatives.  It has created tensions between the groups, as reported in Cascadia Planet here and here.  This has caused concerns among many climate movement people caught in between.  They have expressed those concerns to the groups. That has had a beneficial effect, a joint statement by the groups announced May 4. 

“Our organizations are committed to working together, and in particular we are committed to avoiding two competing carbon pollution-pricing measures on the ballot in November 2016,” the statement says.  The two groups will work together on public opinion research to determine the most viable strategy. 

The statement concluded, “Because of the ongoing activities of both groups, we are not currently endorsing each other’s efforts. But we have no objections to individuals or groups supporting or working with either or both groups (or making a joint endorsement). We respect each other’s efforts to build a strong movement for climate action and will stay in close contact in the months ahead as the Alliance completes its research work and as Carbon Washington moves forward with its signature-gathering campaign for I-732.”

This represents significant progress.  Alliance members had been sending negative messages about I-732, both public and private.  That proved unacceptable to many people, and the Alliance proved responsive.  Now a prospectively more consultative relationship is developing.  It is hard to say how the two groups will thread the needle if indeed CarbonWA is successful in gaining enough signatures to place I-732 on the ballot.  But at least the two groups are talking to each other now, which is what climate-concerned citizens were demanding.

There is room for further collaboration.  If any climate initiative is to make it against the deluge of fossil fuel money that would be thrown against it in 2016, a massive public campaign should be undertaken now.  We should not wait until fall or 2016. The campaign should focus the promise of clean energy and climate solutions to create a better world and healthier economy. Such a campaign can and should be agnostic on the specific carbon pricing tools, whether a direct tax or a cap-and-trade.  But it should make the carbon pricing connection, how a price on carbon is needed to tip the balance to clean energy rapidly enough to avoid disastrous global warming.  

A public campaign should include everything – social media, earned media, public meetings, outreach to civic groups, developing and providing educational materials to citizen groups of all sorts.  It should empower volunteers to act, and seek to be viral.  It should reach into every community.  

The Better Future Project has built one of the nation’s more successful public engagement models.  Organizing 350 Massachusetts since 2012, Better Future has provided the paid staff infrastructure that has joined hundreds of citizen volunteers working through nine community nodes around the state. They are engaged in a series of campaigns both to keep fossil fuels in the ground and bring on clean energy solutions.  Efforts have shut down all coal plants in the state, and supported offshore wind development.  Citizens are opposing a gas pipeline and forwarding state divestment from fossil fuels. 

People power is what it’s going to take to win the climate struggle, people on the ground talking to their neighbors, presenting to local groups, being a face-to-face climate presence in their communities. But volunteers can’t do it all on their own.  They need materials, training and guidance. The combined resources of the Alliance and CarbonWA can provide what citizens need to propel a public education campaign

It is now 16 months and some days until the November 2016 election. Let’s get a deep-rooted, citizen-driven public campaign going now to demonstrate the viability of clean energy and the need for carbon pricing to rapidly drive it forward.  There is no time to waste.

From the Greenland Coast to the Jersey Shore: Dead Cities Walking

This is the second part of the story that I began several weeks ago about a journey to the New Jersey shore in 2009.  In the first part, Ocean City, Cities in the Ocean, I wrote of sharing my youthful shore experience with my daughter, and of sensing the fleeting nature of the shore towns in the face of rising sea levels.  Here my muse connects to another journey I took much earlier that came to mind during the Jersey journey, flying over the melting glaciers of Greenland nine years before.   

By 2009 I had been working full time as a professional climate advocate for over 10 years.  I had been aware of the global warming threat and calling it out in my writing since the 1980s.  I had written many articles and papers on climate science and solutions, even co-authored a book. But the Jersey shore trip with its visceral sense of death and inevitable loss opened a new dimension. I started writing poetry and songs for sunken cities.  The shore inspired a Springsteen-ish lyric I called “Dead Cities Walking.”

Seen the rotting casino towers

fall before the rising tide

Their salt corroded skeletal remains

relics of a reckless age

crumble into the sea

Seen the rising tides devour

the Trump and Harrah towers

One day the ocean got an urge

sent the shore a big storm surge

Where the lights were once so pretty

now a real Atlantic City

Where the city         now the sea

Wrecked remains now underneath

We take tours out there by submarine

to see what’s left of the gambler’s dream

Cruise old shore town Ocean City to Cape May

Drowned boardwalks where they used to play

Where they used to tour old homes of ghosts

now we tour the ghosted coast

They’re building New Atlantic City

up north there on Kitantitty

They’ve moved the roulette wheels

and one-armed bandits

beyond the reach of the sea

New Philadelphia rises out toward Phoenixville

They’re building New New York

where Yonkers used to be

now that the City’s submerged

They’ve saved the Lady

Deconstructed her

Put her back together up there

in New Times Square

We see the old skyline

dying in the sunset

Driving down ghost highways

Garden State Parkways

Memories of former days

Old Led Zepp playing

Signs are saying

Ocean City     Cape May

Driving on my way

to dead cities walking

My venture into the poetic was partly inspired by an incident driving down the Garden State Parkway to the shore. Flipping the radio dial we caught Don McLean’s “America Pie,” the obtuse one-hit wonder about ‘60s rock.  It is the subject of intense hermeneutical debate over which lyrics refer to which stars. As I listened it recalled an epiphany that came to me flying over the west coast of Greenland one August afternoon in 2000 on the top-of-the-world route from Amsterdam to Seattle. 

I had been in Europe at the Ardennes Forest summer retreat of Ecola, the Green Party of French-speaking Belgians, to speak about global Green Party statements to the Kyoto and Buenos Aires U.N. climate summits.  As a co-chair of the U.S. Association of State Green Parties, predecessor to today’s Green Party of the United States, I had been asked in 1997 by Ralph Monoe, chair of the European Federation of Green Parties, to lead author the Kyoto document.  With signatories from six continents it was the first global statement ever by the world’s Green parties.  I was asked back to do the same for the follow-up conference in Buenos Aires in 1998.  In the region where the great World War II Battle of the Bulge took place, I spoke to the Belgian Greens about the statements and the great struggles that would face us to overcome the political corruption that held back needed action to address the climate crisis (and still does today).

Returning home, some six or seven miles above the west coast of Greenland jagged fjords stretched hundreds of miles north out the window to the horizon beneath a deep blue sky. Rocky brown earth along the coast pushed back miles to the white line of the ice pack. On this late summer day fleets of icebergs were sailing in lines out of the fjords into Disko Bay west of Godhavn and then into the Davis Strait, the passage between Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea. Dozens of white glacial fragments freshly calved from the ice pack were sharply outlined against in the dark blue waters.  Though they seemed small from six miles up, their fractal, crystalline shapes were clearly visible, indicating just how massive these immense ships of ice were at ocean level.

Iceberg in Disko Bay, Greenland, by Peter Prokosch

Aboard the plane the last moments of the movie were playing, “American Pie” with Madonna.  The memory of that moment came back while listening to the original McClean version riding down the Parkway. Her version formed the soundtrack to the scenes unfolding outside the plane window.

        

“Bye-bye, Miss American Pie

Drove my Chevy to the levee

But the levee was dry

And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye

Singin’ this’ll be the day that I die

This’ll be the day that I die.”

        

By coincidence, or synchronicity, I’d been reading Brian Fagan’s Floods, Famines and Emperors. Waiting at Schipol Airport before the flight I had just gone through his narrative about cold snaps that ensue when too much fresh water suddenly invades the Labrador and Greenland Seas. The saltiness of waters flowing north makes them heavy and causes them to sink to deeper levels, thus pulling water north and driving the North Atlantic circulation. Too much fresh water shuts down the Gulf Stream circulation that brings that warm water to the Jersey shore and far north of it.  This happened during a great glacial outflow flood at the end of the last ice age, plunging the planet back into cold conditions for many centuries.

Was I seeing the modality for the end of the world as we know it?  Scientists now tend toward the conclusion the planet is overall too warm for a new The Day After Tomorrow-style ice age to break out, but that does not mean a shutdown of North Atlantic circulation would not have serious impacts, mucking with weather systems in ways that bring drought across the planet and make Superstorm Sandys a common event.

        

As the jetliner winged forward and Greenland faded to the rear the tune was concluding:

“And in the streets the children screamed

The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed

But not a word was spoken

The church bells all were broken

And the three men I admire most

The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost

They caught the last train for the coast

The day the music died.”

The soundtrack keyed to the sight of the Greenland coast slowly receding to the rear, framed by the wing and engines determinedly plowing forward across the curvature of the Earth

“And they were singing bye-bye Miss American Pie . . . “

”This’ll be the day that I die ....”. 

As the thrum of the jet engines drove beyond the Greenland coast making their own full complement of greenhouse gases I thought about rock’n’roll, automobiles, the fossil fuel age, the exuberant expressions of our technological adolescence mostly made in U.S.A., and all the excrescences of that time now up here inexorably warming the atmosphere and melting those glaciers.  How much we are at the end of that age, I thought.  Bye Bye, Miss American Pie indeed.  The day the music died, the day our happy world of pleasant summer days at the shore began to end. 

Flying over Greenland in August 2000 I was indeed seeing the early onset of ice melt that has only accelerated since.  I was flying just north of one of its ground zeros, the Jacobshavn Isbrae glacier, one of Greenland’s three biggest. Jacobhavn, the largest, is a 400-mile long ice river that drains seven percent of the subcontinent and “for some decades . . .  the world’s most prolific producer of icebergs,” Fred Pearce notes in his With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change, cover appropriately decorated with a picture of ice falling from a polar glacier front and splashing into the sea.  My beach reading at Ocean City.  See, I told you I was a curmudgeon. 

“Jacobshavn was the likely source of the most famous iceberg of all – the one that sunk the Titanic in 1912,” Pearce reports.  “But is has been in overdrive since 1997, after suddenly doubling the speed of its flow to the sea.  It is now also the world’s fastest moving glacier, at better than seven miles a year.”  The white stream could now be dumping the equivalent of a Nile River into the sea every year.  It is sending a message that polar ice does not behave in a gradual manner, but abruptly change. 

Thought responsible for four percent of 20^th century sea level rise, Jacobshavn’s flow shot up two times between 1997 and 2003, dissolving its floating ice shelf into icebergs such as the fleet I saw out the plane window.  Scientists such as Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Richard Alley are discovering that glaciers are being speeded up and sent on their way by rivers of meltwater flowing beneath their base. 

“Greenland is a different animal from what we thought it was just a few years ago,” Alley says. “We are still thinking it might take centuries to go, but if things go wrong, it could just be decades.  Everything points in one direction, and it’s not a good direction.” 

The watchword is feedback.  As the Arctic becomes warmer it promotes processes that add to the effect.  White ice and snow repel sunlight, send it back toward space.  Blue water absorbs it.  Ice melt water plunges water deep into the heart of the ice, melting it yet more. 

There was a time 14,000 years ago, Mark Lynas notes in Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter World, when “the giant ice sheets of the last glacial age crumbled and gave way to the Holocene.”  Every 20 years sea levels escalated by over three feet. That went on for 400 years.  This was the result of climate feedbacks generated by small changes in sunlight due to orbital fluctuations.  Humanity today is also changing the degree to which the planet absorbs sunlight at a rate several times greater. “Just as they were in the past, ice-sheet changes in the future could be, to use (James) Hansen’s phrase, ‘explosively rapid.’” 

As I viewed those iceberg fleets sailing out the fjords, I sensed even in August 2000 it was already too late to prevent a severe level of climate change.  Between the physical reality of accumulating warming and the human reality of a politics blocked by self-interested avarice, there was too much inertia locked into the system, rolling like an unstoppable juggernaut or an accelerating glacier.  Nonetheless, I thought to myself, it was important to keep doing everything I was doing.  It would all be needed.  Perhaps the real project would be something other than I immediately conceived. 

Diffuse, ambiguous, it rested at the edges of my consciousness.  But I sensed it would be about planetary survival, about coming to a fundamental awareness of our new position on the planet and making a start on the tools to work with that new awareness.   If solar panels, wind turbines, clean vehicles, better ways of building human settlements and using the land, could not now prevent severe global change, they could at least mitigate its consequences and form the foundation for a way of life fitting to new conditions.

And that is the point for all of us who care and work for the future of our children and our planet.  We cannot pretend we have not left a legacy of climate disruption to our coming generations.  We cannot stop either in trying to leave the best inheritance we can of human societies and economies prepared to take the battering.  Despair is not an option.  The more we understand the conditions we have created, the more motivated we must be to act, to do the best we can.

In those bergs that day over Godhavn and Disko Bay, I sensed the end of the world as we knew it.  Now, another August nine years later I felt the approaching of that darker day driving along highways to places where that melted ice water would come. It somehow felt fitting to be reminded by the car radio of a song I rarely hear about the end of youthful innocence, the day the music died.  The day the Jersey Shore of my younger days would go under the waves. For weeks after that flight I experienced life as a temporariness.  Driving through standard, autofied urban/suburban development, the sense of passing came with an immediacy, as if this will not be here tomorrow. 

The feeling of immediacy passed, but the apparition remains.  Life is impermanent.  There is wisdom in accepting this.  Nothing lasts long but Earth and Sky, goes the Native American saying.  Holding on to what must inevitably change causes suffering, as the Buddha said.  We must accept the passing of things.  But I cannot do so without a certain sense of grief, cannot take the realities of climate change into my soul without feeling a leaden heaviness of dying pasts.  All things must pass, and we must too.  But what shall we leave, above all to our children?  From that question I cannot be detached. 

Erika’s generation will know a changed world of drowned cities and possibilities past.  At least I had a chance to share with her a little of the joy I felt in my youth’s warm summer waves and boardwalk playfulness.  I will work for her generation, to leave the best I can, as we all should.  It’s the least we can do. 

Postscript – In March Stefan Ramsdorf, one of the world’s leading scientists studying the North Atlantic circulation, wrote in Real Climate:

“The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland is practically the only region of the world that has defied global warming and even cooled. Last winter there even was the coldest on record – while globally it was the hottest on record. Our recent study attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is apparently unique in the last thousand years . . .

“It happens to be just that area for which climate models predict a cooling when the Gulf Stream System weakens . . .  That this might happen as a result of global warming is discussed in the scientific community since the 1980s – since Wally Broecker’s classical Nature article 'Unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse?' Meanwhile evidence is mounting that the long-feared circulation decline is already well underway . . .

“Another new aspect is the importance of the increasing mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet, which causes extra freshwater to enter the North Atlantic that dilutes the sea water . . . The ice loss amounts to a freshwater volume which should have made an important contribution to the observed decrease in salinity in the northern Atlantic.”

“Beginning of a revolution” – Earth Day’s first organizer on the 45th

Forty-five years ago today as a 17-year-old growing up in the Philly area I hitchhiked down to Fairmont Park to take part in the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970.  I had been reading The Environmental Handbook, created for the event. For all the problems it depicted it also portrayed remarkably hopeful possibilities for building a sustainable world.  In the midst of the fractures of the Vietnam War era, there was a ray of sunlight in all this.

Sitting on a grass hill on a sunny day with the Philadelphia skyline in the background, I heard an inspiring line-up.  Where else could you see Allen Ginsberg and Edmund Muskie on the same stage?  The range embodied the essential significance of Earth Day, the unification of what had been many disparate movements – wilderness and wildlife preservation, anti-pollution, opposition to freeways, worker safety, etc. – into a unified “big tent” environmental movement that led to an environmental revolution. 

More than two dozen environmental acts were passed in the wake of Earth Day, laws to strengthen protections for clean air and clean water, the Endangered Species Act, the law that mandates environmental impact statements for large projects.  It was the foundation for the environmental protections we have today. Earth Day planted the seeds of my own work as a sustainability writer and advocate from the 1980s to today. 

A young man was there that day.  I’m sure he was on stage but I can’t say I recall him.  It was Denis Hayes, the first organizer of Earth Day.  He was travelling by train up the East Coast with Muskie, Ginsberg and the crew visiting different rallies. I later made my way to Seattle and came to know Denis as president of the Bullitt Foundation. Denis has wryly shared with me his ironic feelings about being primarily known for something he did in his 20s. But those in the know understand he’s done a lot more since. 

As Jimmy Carter’s solar energy head, Denis shaped what is now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.  When Ronald Reagan came in to rip the solar panels Carter had installed off the White House roof and tear down the renewable energy programs Carter had started, Denis successfully preserved the core of the most important research efforts. We owe a great deal of today’s clean energy revolution to the seeds he planted, and saved. 

As president of Bullitt Foundation, Denis was a seminal funder of climate work in the Northwest, how I got to know him.  Safe to say without important start-up and continuing funding from Bullitt the regional climate movement would not be the powerful presence it is today.

Over recent years Denis led construction of the world’s greenest office building, the Bullitt Center, which generates its own energy from a solar roof and its own water from a rain-gathering system.  It is a true zero-energy building.  He also has a new book out, Cowed: The Hidden Impact of 93 Million Cows on America’s Health, Economy, Politics, Culture, and Environment.

Though most people might know Denis from Earth Day, clearly he’s never stopped being a sustainability pioneer.  So it was a pleasure to see him give a short talk at the Earth Day Climate Action Festival at Seattle Central College on this 45^th Earth Day.  Under a sunny sky, and appropriately for the heavily youthful crowd, Denis called on a new generation to seize the day. 

"Today we’re talking about passing the torch to a new generation,” he started.  “That has probably never happened in history.”

Instead, the new generation is going to have to wrestle the torch out of the grasping fingers of those who hold it now.  Much as his and my generation had to seize its own day, “The new generation is going to have to struggle.” 

Denis overviewed the environmental crisis that was emerging in the years before the first Earth Day, pollution, pesticides, freeways ripping through cities, and compared it to China today.  These were national struggles that yielded national victories. 

“What you have facing you today is very different that what was facing us,” he noted.  “You’re addressing global issues,” such as climate, ocean acidification, overfishing, migratory species. To address these, “We have to come together not as a nation, but as a people.” 

Denis called to a moral obligation to stand up for the poorest. “Those who have done the least to change the planet will suffer the most.”

“The important stuff is always done by young people,” Denis said to the young crowd.  “This is not just a rally.  This is the beginning of a revolution.”

Truly we need as profound a global sustainability revolution as the environmental revolution spurred by the first Earth Day.  And many young people are coming to the fore to make it happen.  Denis is still in the fight, and so I am and many of our generation.  But it is the young who are our hope and inspiration.  You will seize the torch, and our aging bodies will keep up with you as long as we can.  Now as then – For the Earth. 

Competing WA cap-and-trade ballot initiative? A modest proposal to stop the insanity

The rise of competing Washington state climate ballot initiatives has been in the cards for several years now. 

Last week, as reported in Cascadia Planet, Climate Solutions and Washington Environmental Council, the two Washington state environmental nonprofits leading the legislative charge for Gov. Jay Inslee’s carbon cap-and-trade bill, announced that they are considering running their own 2016 initiative if the governor’s bill fails.  That seems an increasingly likely outcome.

The initiative could well be a cap-and-trade, which is problematic for a number of reasons.  One is competition with a 2016 carbon tax ballot initiative already on the streets. Another is the sheer complexity of cap-and-trade.  Below I will delve into the pitfalls of a cap-and-trade initiative and offer a modest proposal to conduct complementary initiative efforts. 

Consideration of ballot initiatives far predates the governor's bill.  In 2012 and 2013 when I still served as Research Director of Climate Solutions, a group I helped found in 1998, talk of an initiative filled office meetings and staff retreats.  We were briefed on polling around different initiative options, and big funder money was in prospect.  Perhaps the biggest funder of all, California hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, raised the possibility of a ballot initiative in keynoters at major 2013 Climate Solutions fundraisers in Seattle and Portland. 

An independent effort was stirring though.  Frustrated with the failure of Climate Solutions and allied groups to pass meaningful climate policy, either in the state or nationally, economist Yorum Bauman was organizing Carbon Washington to join climate-concerned citizens around the idea of a carbon tax ballot initiative.  An alum of Sightline Institute, Bauman had in 1998 co-authored a book on the topic entitled Tax Shift with Sightline founder Alan Durning and Rachel Gusset.  It was about a concept pioneered at Worldwatch Institute, from which Durning had emerged, to shift the tax burden from what we want to encourage by taxing what we want to discourage.   Carbon pollution, for instance.

Of course, that aroused substantial tensions between the groups.  CarbonWA’s consideration of a 2014 ballot initiative stirred some heated discussions between leaders of the groups.  CarbonWA in the end opted against a 2014 run, instead continuing to organize and educate the public. 

Climate Solutions was meanwhile busy getting ready for a legislative push. In 2012 the prospect that Jay Inslee would be elected governor stirred great enthusiasm.  As a congressman, Inslee was one of Capitol Hill’s climate leaders.  As governor, it was thought, the guy who challenged Barack Obama to a basketball game (He’s told me the story) would rain down threes on the opposition in the state legislature and finally get a climate bill with teeth passed.  That would be in contrast to 2008, when the somewhat reticent Gov. Christine Gregoire did not push hard for a binding carbon cap, and so a bill that set only goals was passed.

It looked like that scenario would come about until in early 2013 two turncoat Democrats lined up with Republicans in the state senate, turning over control to the Rs and locking out the possibility of a carbon pricing bill.  For all we know, it was for precisely that reason that the two conservative Democrats sold off their party. 

Attention turned to the 2014 session, when it was thought a strong effort could turn the Senate back to the Democrats and re-open the legislative track.  Inslee was successful in gaining Senate Republican agreement for a public engagement process to set up for 2014, the Climate Legislative and Executive Workgroup, which held hearings around the state in 2013.  The four-member group included two Democratic climate action supporters, and two Republican legislators who are climate change deniers.  Predictably there was a majority and minority report. 

Then in 2014 Inslee appointed a group of citizens representing business, labor and public interests to serve on the Carbon Emissions Reduction Taskforce (CERT).  The governor’s instructions clearly pointed to a cap-and-trade system, in which carbon trading markets seek the lowest-cost carbon reductions.  Though the CERT report looked at both carbon tax and cap-and-trade options, the path was clearly toward the latter.  Inslee likes the certainty of a cap and is skeptical of the efficacy of carbon taxes.  “If you’re going to limit carbon, you should limit carbon. Don’t bring a feather to a knife fight,” Inslee told Grist. 

As the CERT was meeting the political campaign was ramping up.  With support from Steyer and other high-net-worth funders, a number of Republican state senators thought to be vulnerable were targeted.  One funder told me that with a concerted get-out-the-vote effort up to six seats could be turned. But Democrats were fighting uphill in an off-year election in which Republican turnout tends to be higher.  It was also the sixth year of a presidential term in which the party of the president typically does not do well.  That was especially the case with Obama, whose policies had turned off the youth and ethnic voters who once flocked enthusiastically to his side.  When election day came in November dismal results in the U.S. Senate were paralleled in Washington state. Republicans stayed in control. 

Nonetheless, the legislative track had already been grooved too deeply to turn back.  In December Inslee proposed the Carbon Pollution Accountability Act, a cap-and-trade.  In an effort to win supporters on the Republican side he directed most revenues that would be raised in the carbon auction to education and road maintenance, two areas where the state faces genuine funding crises. 

To this date, Republicans have not taken the bait.  Demonstrating their allegiance to fossil fuel interests they have lined up solidly against the carbon cap, and even put a “poison pill” in a gas-tax-funded transportation package that would effectively make it impossible for Inslee to implement standards for lower-carbon fuels.  Perhaps the governor can still pull it out. But the clock is ticking down and he’s behind on the boards. 

Thus the initiative option being discussed at Climate Solutions and by allied groups comes into play.  Climate Solutions has spent significant resources and time building an impressive coalition to push climate action, the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy.  The group line-up includes environmentalists, labor, ethnic community advocates and health advocates.  If a statewide initiative is to be passed, it will indeed require the progressive unity embodied in the Alliance.  It will also require the substantial grassroots citizen networks that have been assembled by CarbonWA.  Plus around twenty million or so bucks.  This is why it’s time to get together around something that works, and, with genuine respect for the governor, that is not a cap-and-trade ballot initiative. 

This is not about policy design.  It’s about politics.  Competing initiatives open vulnerabilities for the opposition to attack a climate movement that can't seem to get its stuff together.  Making one of them cap-and-trade amplifies the problem. Cap-and-trade is simply too complex a measure to present to voters at the ballot box, as the graphic accompanying this post illustrates. Try to explain that to voters when you are out gathering signatures, or running 30- and 60-second radio and TV adds.  It just doesn’t work. 

There’s an additional reason not to take cap-and-trade to the ballot.  Its complexity draws skepticism from many people, including sophisticated climate experts.  There is a reason 38 Washington state economists endorsed the far simpler revenue-neutral carbon tax forwarded in CarbonWA’s I-732.  Carbon trading markets hold many potentials for gaming, as has been documented with the European Union system.  Even the best systems require complex verification to prove that a offset purchased in a carbon market is actually reducing carbon.  Verification costs typically are in the 30 percent range. 

Yes, as the governor argues, we have learned from Europe and the California system with which Washington would align averts the pitfalls.  A logical case can be made, but reason does not rule political debate.  In politics, perception is reality, and a cap-and-trade initiative opens the door to creating all kinds of misperceptions. 

My last blog post on tensions between competing initiative efforts drew many positive comments and exactly two negative responses. One came from one of the governor’s closest climate policy advisors.  “If your interest is establishing carbon pricing in Washington, this blog post is in no way helpful," he wrote. "But, on the bright side, I’m sure Frank Holmes enjoyed it immensely."

Holmes is Northwest regional director for Western States Petroleum Association, the lead oil industry lobby group in Olympia, and a devious and cunning bunch they are.  My response to the governor’s advisor was that a cap-and-trade initiative would be a gift to Frank Holmes and the Koch Brothers.   The opposition forces will have the “job-killing energy tax” charge to use against any carbon pricing measure.  With cap-and-trade they will have an additional attack vector. They will also be able to paint the carbon trading market as a Goldman Sachs-friendly vampire squid in the face of climate policy, a blood funnel to suck money to Wall Street.  They will use neo-populist arguments to wedge off the many progressive constituencies already skeptical about cap-and-trade.   All they other side has to do is create confusion.  The oil industry and the Kochs are world-class masters in the dark art of throwing shade, and cap-and-trade presents many juicy opportunities to do just this. 

I think if we get anywhere it’s with something simple like I-732, a straight-up tax on carbon pollution that recycles the revenues to reduce sales taxes one percent, fund a credit for working families and eliminate business & occupation taxes on manufacturers, helping them defray competitive pressures from higher energy prices. 

I understand the attraction of a cap-and-trade initiative framed as “Polluters Pay,” putting costs on major industrial and institutional carbon emitters as the governor’s bill does and an initiative would likely do.  But voters are not fools.  They realize that costs will be passed on.  We all use fossil fuels, and it is indeed the effect of generally higher prices that spurs a shift to efficiency and clean energy alternatives. We can’t pretend otherwise. As well, polluters are also employers, and people are nervous about their jobs. 

So let me make a modest proposal to thread this needle, one that allows different initiative efforts to proceed in a complementary rather than competitive fashion.  First, I am told by one of the state process insiders that their initiative is “not necessarily” cap and trade.  That is good because it opens the door to other options. 

One might be a cap-and-auction in which polluters must buy permits for all carbon they emit.  There is no trading market, just an auction that sets the price.  Revenues can be recycled back to taxpayers or devoted to other expenditures such as clean energy.  Sen. Maria Cantwell’s CLEAR Act does both.

The problem is it still sets up a competition among different policy designs.  Even experts find the hermeneutics of policy design a brain twister.  Voters will simply boggle on it and fossil fuel interests will use it to create confusion. 

Instead, here is my suggestion – Have the carbon pricing policy design of a second initiative mimic I-732.  Make it a carbon tax that starts at $15/ton, goes up to $25/ton in the second year and then rises with inflation.  Let the contrast between the two initiatives not be in policy design, but in how carbon revenues are spent – fully recycled to a tax shift, or partially recycled with some of the money going to public investments, perhaps in education, transit and green jobs. Don’t argue about policy design. Make it a referendum that lets Washington citizens choose between two sets of objectives based on the merits.  If both win, make the initiative with the higher margin the one that is implemented.

Yes, I agree with the governor that Washington needs a binding carbon cap.  A carbon tax is one pricing system that can meet a cap.  The British Columbia revenue-neutral carbon tax has achieved something like a 10 percent emissions reduction, which the governor’s proposal would not reach until the mid-2020s.  So we have some time to give carbon taxes a test drive to see how they work in Washington.  As people become comfortable with carbon pricing and see that it works and produces economic benefits for them, the political atmosphere to pass a binding state carbon cap will improve.  Then it can be done in the legislature, where such a complex measure should be handled, not at the ballot box. 

There is an argument that carbon taxes will have to be dialed up very high to meet state carbon goals by the 2030s.  The CERT report contains modeling that indicates this.  But the modeling does not take into account technology change in a clean energy field that is racing forward beyond all expectations.  We are on the threshold of truly cost-competitive solar and wind power, energy storage and electric vehicles.  These developments could well magnify the price-tipping effects of carbon taxes beyond what is projected. Let's at least give it a try. 

It is time to draw back from a potentially destructive competition between initiative processes and work in a complementary fashion.  There are genuinely good arguments to be made for different options, and we should give voters a chance to weigh those arguments.  A friendly competition around destinations for carbon revenues is far preferable to a mind-boggling debate over policy design that will turn off voters.  Let’s go for a simple design that can be easily explained to voters, and work for a legislatively-enacted carbon cap in the longer term, based on success at the ballot box.  Since CarbonWA’s signature gathering is taking place in 2015, while a second initiative would stage that process in 2016, it is even conceivable the same citizens will be carrying signature boards for both.

If all the participants in the process care about stabilizing the climate and leaving a habitable world for our children and theirs, and I know you all do, it’s time to work out a mutual pathway that addresses all concerns.  Please consider my modest proposal.