Editorial: Even with flaws, I-1631 provides climate solutions
Two years ago, The Herald Editorial Board reluctantly advised a no vote on Initiative 732, which would have imposed a tax on carbon emissions of $25 per metric ton with the trade-off that its revenue would have gone toward a penny reduction in the state sales tax to 5.5 cents on a $1 purchase, from the current 6.5 cents.
The flaw, as we saw it then, was that there was no guarantee that the revenue from the carbon tax would sufficiently offset the expected losses to the state’s general fund, coming at a time when lawmakers still had not figured out how to amply fund K-12 education.
Two years on — with tens of millions more tons of carbon pumped into the air of Washington state, and the recent release of a United Nation’s scientific report on climate change — we now must weigh the need for immediate action to reduce carbon emissions against the potential flaws and consequences in the latest citizen initiative, I-1631.
The U.N. report: The United Nation’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — compiled by 91 scientists from 40 nations from more than 6,000 scientific studies — lowered the temperature threshold at which the world will see dire environmental effects from sea level rise; occurrence of drought, floods, wildfires and other severe weather events; loss of habitat and species; and reduction in crop harvests, predicting those effects at only a 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degree Fahrenheit) global increase rather than 2 degrees (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and hitting as early as 2040.
Offering some hope, the report concludes that it’s possible to achieve in relatively short time the reductions in carbon emissions that will slow and even begin to reverse the rise in temperature and the resulting impacts. To get there it recommends a near end to the use of coal and a reduction in fossil fuel consumption and a price on carbon to encourage that reduction.
What’s proposed: Initiative 1631 proposes just such a fee on carbon. It would charge some of the state’s largest polluters a fee of $15 per metric ton of carbon, increasing $2 each year, plus inflation, until the state’s existing goal for reducing greenhouse gases for 2035 is met and is on track to meet the 2050 reduction goal.
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