Jan 27, 2013: WA carbon tax legislation: 1st draft

Here's the bill draft in both PDF and Word. And here's the Letter of Recommendation with comments and suggested edits from the Code Revisers Office.

A brief overview of the bill: It imposes a carbon tax of $30/ton CO2 on fossil fuels (including the carbon content of imported electricity) and puts half the funds towards tax rebates and reductions and half the funds towards public investments in transportation. The transportation investments are allocated 50% to maintenance, 25% to transit, and 25% to freight mobility projects. The tax rebates and reductions are allocated to the Working Families Rebate (similar to the Earned Income Tax Credit bump-up in many other states that benefits low-income working families), a B&O business tax reduction for manufacturers, extension of the high-tech R&D tax credits, and an across-the-board property tax rebate.

Feedback welcome, and please note that this is a very early draft... lots of work to be done! I'm excited about the prospects of putting together a coalition of business/labor/enviros/social justice to push something like this forward, so please contribute your ideas as we work on a 2nd draft! (By the way we can't formally file something for the Nov 2014 ballot until March at the earliest, so we have at least the next month to work on drafts.)

Update 2pm: A lot of good background info is at www.CarbonWA.org, especially this two-pager. And of course if you want to pledge to collect 1000 signatures (about 40 person-hours of work) please let me know!

Dec 19, 2012: A busy few days

• A great article in the Whitman College newspaper by student Sam Chapman. And David Frum on CNN.com. And Sightline's Anna Fahey says that a new poll shows that Americans are "conflicted on a carbon tax".
• Governor Gregoire's budget proposal came out yesterday; it's essentially focused on education. Despite rumors that she was going to introduce a transportation package, the only transportation element in her proposal is really about education: she wants to impose a wholesale excise tax on motor fuels that will fund pupil transport (i.e., yellow school buses). More here and here; eventually her proposal would amount to about 12 cents a gallon of gasoline.
• I think Gregoire's budget proposal emphasizes how challenging it will be for either climate folks or transportation folks to move their separate agendas forward in the months ahead. That's potentially good news for us since we're proposing that climate folks and transportation folks work together on a joint effort.
• PS. Gregoire also released a handy 5-pager that lays out her take on the state's transportation needs.

Dec 16, 2012: Why connect a carbon tax to transportation infrastructure maintenance?

First, transportation accounts for about 50% of fossil fuel CO2 in Washington State; so it makes sense to direct 50% of carbon tax revenue to transportation. For a carbon tax of $30 per tonne CO2, that means about $1.15 billion per year, which sounds like a lot but in fact is just about perfect because...

Second, there is a huge unmet need for transportation maintenance in Washington State. The 2012 Connecting Washington report identified almost $800 million a year over the next 10 years in unmet needs just for maintenance of existing highways, roads, and bridges. Restoring transit funding to 2008 levels would bring the total to $1 billion a year over the next 10 years. Additional readings here include:

• "Potholes forever: the state's transportation-funding impasse", which links to
• Governor-elect Inslee's transportation policy paper;
• "The Transportation Crisis Facing Washington’s Next Governor";
• "Washington Governor to Propose Major Investment in Transportation", which refers to outgoing Governor Gregoire's plan, to be released the week of Dec 17, 2012;
• the Association of Washington Business legislative agenda, which "opposes state carbon tax pricing policies" but simultaneously acknowledges that current transportation funding sources are “inadequate” and boldly makes the case for investment in system maintenance, freight mobility, and new capacity, and then degenerates into mumbling about paying for this with “funding strategies” that the legislature should “clearly articulate”;
• and this summary of the McCleary decision by the state Supreme Court about how the state needs to do more to fund K-12 education; note the graph on page 2 showing approximately $200 million per year in required funding for "student transport".

Finally, it makes political sense to connect carbon taxes and transportation infrastructure. Business, organized labor, and voters across the state place a high priority on maintaining the transportation system; but voters (especially in Western Washington) are concerned about the environmental impact of transportation spending, meaning that this is one of the few areas where environmental groups have political clout. We can leverage that political clout into a win-win outcome.

Dec 11, 2012: Carbon taxes and coal export

There continues to be a lot of talk about carbon taxes at the state level in Washington (and in Oregon and maybe even in California) and also a lot of play at the national level, including this Elizabeth Kobert piece in the New Yorker, plus David Frum and this terrific Tom Toles cartoon. Nothing more definitive to report---and there probably won't be until legislatures come back into session in January---but we should keep pushing!

Speaking of pushing, there's a big coal-export hearing this Thursday afternoon. I'm planning to go and drum up support for CarbonWA (in addition to adding my voice to those who think that coal exports are not a great idea), so if you're interested in joining the fun let me know or text/call me at the event: 206-351-5719.

Dec 1, 2012: Senator Kevin Ranker (D-Orcas Island) on carbon taxes

Some great carbon tax news via Crosscut about state senator Kevin Ranker from Orcas Island. We've got a meeting with him this coming Friday so hopefully we'll know more soon... but the bottom line is that carbon tax talk continues to heat up!

Nov 15, 2012: Thoughts on the Wallace/Inglis/Myers panel

Last night I moderated a panel at SPU with UW climate scientist Mike Wallace, Washington Policy Center environment director Todd Myers, and Bob Inglis, formerly R-SC and now with the Energy & Enterprise Initiative. (More on all these folks at the E&EI website.) The panelists each made a 10-minute opening statement, followed by Q&A with yours truly and the audience. Some thoughts, with the caveat that these are my recollections and not direct quotes from the participants:

1. Mike Wallace's opening statement made three main points: (1) global warming is real; (2) most of the serious impacts are decades in the future; (3) global warming is only one challenge that will face humanity at the end of this century; food production seemed to be a particular concern to Mike given unsustainable groundwater withdrawals, projected growth in human populations to 9-11 billion, etc.
2. Bob Inglis emphasized his conservative credentials and the idea that a revenue-neutral tax swap has support from other impeccably conservative folks like Art Laffer. It was easy to see that Bob had been in politics, just like it was easy to see that Mike was a scientist, in part because of their presentation styles: Bob was polished and at ease ad-libbing, while Mike read from a prepared statement and the mic had trouble picking up his voice. A somewhat deeper observation is that Bob clearly spent a good deal of time thinking about language, e.g., arguing for "tax swap" instead of "carbon tax" because it has a greater chance of resonating with conservatives who break out in hives at "carbon" and go into shock at "tax". He also emphasized repeated in his comments the hidden health costs associated with fossil fuel consumption, citing a study claiming 23,600 premature deaths from coal power plants; I believe that at least once he even referred to this as a "health tax".
3. Todd Myers argued that markets are better than political systems at dealing with environmental problems and picking winning technologies. He noted that environmentalists often argue for lifestyle changes (e.g., driving less) but that people like to live the way that the like to live and so technological progress (e.g., more fuel-efficient cars) are a more likely path to success in dealing with climate change. Like Bob Inglis he didn't have kind words for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. (Inglis voted against it.) Todd also argued that it was a good thing that climate change didn't come up in the presidential debate because it would just lead to even more politicization and polarization.
4. Mike noted that Hurricane Sandy was only modestly connected to climate change, in that (1) it probably had a little more energy because of increased ocean temperatures and (2) the storm surge came on top of something like 8 inches of climate-change-related sea level rise over the past 150 years or so.
5. Bob noted that conservative principles argued not just for internalizing externalities but also for getting rid of energy subsidies across the board: no more Solyndras, no more accelerated depreciation for oil and gas leasing rigs.
6. Both Bob and Todd pushed back against a question suggesting that conservatives weren't worried about regressivity. They both seemed somewhat open to the "dividend" idea of using carbon tax revenues to provide a per-capita check to every American (in the same way that the Alaska Permanent Fund provides oil dividends to Alaskans).
7. There was I think a general sense that recent talk about carbon taxes at the federal level was premature and that this would be a long hard slog. Bob highlighted the fact that ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson supports carbon taxes, as does the head of mining giant BHP Billiton. (BHP also has investments in uranium that could become more valuable in a carbon constrained world, and Bob argued that BHP sees coal as ultimately unattractive because the Chinese will develop concerns about local air pollutants and perhaps climate change as well.)

Nov 14, 2012: Presentation to state Labor Council

Here's the presentation (PPTx) we gave today to the executive committee of the state Labor Council. (Note that some of the slides are grayed out, and some of them---especially the pie chart---you have to view in Presentation mode to see the whole thing. Of course, the whole pie chart plus details are in the Transportation 2-pager posted previously.