Why Carbon Washington Strongly Supports the Climate Commitment Act
The Climate Commitment Act is essential to achieving Washington’s climate goals and will help Washingtonians save money and lead healthier lives!
In November, Washington will vote on Initiative 2117 which would prohibit carbon tax credit trading and repeal the Climate Commitment Act (CCA). For those of us who care about smart climate action, Initiative 2117 must be defeated.
Carbon Washington fully supports the Climate Commitment Act as a great step forward in the fight to wean Washington off of fossil fuels. The Act puts a price on carbon emissions, a crucial step to meeting our climate goals that Carbon Washington has long championed, and it provides revenue to accelerate decarbonization. It also facilitates funding of important programs, like the Working Families Tax Credit, that will help lower income families meet their needs.
It has always been clear that significant investment, both public and private, is required to transform our energy system from one based on combustion of fossil fuels to one based on greenhouse gas emission-free energy. Instead of repealing the CCA, we must do more to help people and businesses quickly transition off fossil fuels, and we must especially help those in overburdened communities and people with lower incomes throughout the state. In addition to climate benefits, all investments that eliminate or reduce burning of fossil fuels anywhere in Washington will provide immediate health benefits to Washingtonians and reduce premature deaths.
The currently approved investments of CCA revenue will provide many benefits to Washingtonians. Our favorite investments include:
$935M for transportation projects (including school bus, ferry and terminal electrification)
$80M for the high-efficiency electric rebate program (limited to low-moderate income households and small businesses)
$58M for our public colleges and universities,
$83M for carbon sequestration on state-owned lands
$50M for tribal climate adaptation grants
$30M for on-farm GHG reduction grants
$21M for improving air quality in overburdened communities.
Information on these and other approved investments is available here.
Read also: The CCA is bringing real opportunity and progress to Washington State.
We look forward to future investments of CCA revenue to meet even more tough challenges. For example, we hope that CCA revenues will be used to incentivize high consumption fuel users to switch to electric vehicles and save money. High consumption fuel users are disproportionately lower income and rural and represent 10% of drivers. High consumption fuel users burn more than 35% of all gasoline, and if they all switched to electric vehicles our transportation emissions would plummet. (See http://coltura.org for more information on this.) A recent report by the WA Joint Transportation Committee, recommends four policy options to support this switch, all of which require investment.
We also hope that networked geothermal systems are explored, facilitated and incentivized where appropriate as a sustainable exit strategy for users and providers of natural gas. Gas utilities in Massachusetts and New York are currently piloting networked geothermal systems; we are sure they would share their insights. For additional information on this topic, you can go to this report from Sightline.
Credit: Genna Martin | San Francisco Chronicle | Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images
The CCA is accelerating decarbonization in Washington, and there are additional benefits. Notably, using CCA revenue for climate-smart, environmentally-just infrastructure investments frees up other sources of revenue for other purposes. We particularly applaud the establishment of the Working Families Tax Credit. While many of us can afford the increased energy costs or the upfront investment to realize the transition from fossil fuels to emission free energy, some of us cannot. The Working Families Tax Credit and the CCA funded programs targeting lower income families help many who are most in need keep up with their energy and other basic expenses.
In addition, the cost to consumers of the Climate Commitment Act is nowhere near what opponents have been saying and writing. A recent analysis by our friends at Clean and Prosperous Washington indicates that the 2023 average price increase of a gallon of gasoline in WA over Oregon (the best comparator) since the CCA was initiated was only 26 cents per gallon, not 50 cents per gallon as opponents of the CCA and proponents of I-2117 have been asserting. Indeed, average gasoline prices in WA are now only 13 cents per gallon more than in Oregon.
We need to keep moving forward.
For the reasons articulated above, we strongly urge you to vote “No” in November on I-2117. Please encourage everyone you know - colleagues, friends and family - to also vote “No.”
