Danny Westneat: The great debate about climate and gas prices is only heating up

There’s one smidgen of good news for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Democrats, who have been getting roasted all this hot summer over the state’s sizzling gas prices.

They’re not No. 1 anymore.

California has reclaimed its spot as most expensive, with an average per-gallon cost of $5.07 as of Tuesday, according to AAA. Washington, which had surged into the national lead for the first time in June, has fallen back to second, at $5 per gallon.

The bad news: The backlash against the Democrats’ climate change policies, which experts say helped boost fuel prices here, is now out of the gate.

“This was a sneaky tax,” said Brian Heywood, a major Republican donor who was speaking on video before a recent political gathering at his ranch in Redmond, Washington. “I don’t think they were honest with voters about it, so we’ll be looking to repeal it.”

Heywood – a Harvard grad who got rich with an Asian investment firm – has launched an initiative campaign against the new climate law as well as five other Democratic policies, such as the capital gains tax.

I was surprised nobody challenged the state’s carbon cap-and-trade system two years ago when it first passed.

That’s mostly because fossil fuel companies have so much money and power. But also because voters haven’t exactly been easygoing about paying more at the pump, even when it’s to cut dangerous carbon emissions.

“Voters here recently rejected climate-change laws twice, in large part because the measures would have jacked the price of gasoline,” I wrote in 2021, when the state Legislature first passed the Climate Commitment Act over Zoom in a pandemic session. “The fight about climate change and the price of gas is probably only revving up.”

It didn’t, though, until now. Last year, when Heywood ran a quixotic campaign to try to qualify 11 conservative ballot measures simultaneously, he didn’t include repealing the climate law. All 11 measures failed to gain enough signatures, anyway.

This fall marks the fourth year in a row with zero statewide citizen initiatives on the ballot – the longest such drought in Washington politics going back to the 1920s.

Two things now have changed.

One is that gas prices thing. It’s not going to be waved away by blaming the oil companies (even if they do deserve blame).

I remain convinced, until shown otherwise, that climate change is a uniquely tricky political issue with voters. It’s the biggest problem in the world – so we sure ought to do something about it! But because it’s global, tackling it at the local level can seem futile, especially if it’s also costing you 50 cents a gallon extra at the pump.

Advocates stress that the money raised will be put to things like building electric-charging infrastructure for cars. Those benefits are off in the future, though, while the costs are very clear right here, right now. (I had an $80 fill-up this past weekend, and though I generally support climate change policies, I admit I winced.)

California and then Washington have gone first with carbon-pricing systems, hoping to set an environmental trend. It’s no coincidence, though, that California and Washington also are the two states with gas at $5 a gallon.

Will climate change laws work to bring emissions down, and so all be worth it? That’s to be determined – which is not a great place to be in politics.

The other thing that’s changed: Heywood says he’s all-in this time around. He tried to qualify his initiatives last year using only volunteer signature-gatherers. Now he’s paying them.

“I’m looking to hire up to 200 people to work full-time at this,” he said, in the same video series late last month. “We’re paying between $18 and $20 an hour.”

The old rule was a million bucks buys you a spot on the public’s ballot. The new price point is maybe $2 million to $3 million (the number of signatures required went up, for one thing). Any rich person willing to spend in that ballpark can likely qualify, in this case to put the issue before the next Legislature and then on the ballot in fall 2024. Ain’t our democracy democratic?

Heywood has put in around $200,000 so far this year, according to the state Public Disclosure Commission.

His climate measure would not only repeal the current cap-and-trade law that’s causing some of the gas-pump anxiety; it would also bar our state from ever doing another one.

I’m against it for that last part alone. We’re going to have do something to shift away from fossil fuels, eventually. That shift won’t come free. Maybe this current plan needs fixing – for starters, Inslee and the rest need to do a far better job being upfront about its obvious costs. But handcuffing future lawmakers as they struggle to address the biggest problem in the world seems foolish – reckless, even.

The pandemic acted like a lid on a lot of simmering political debates. This one, I predict, by next year will be at full boil.