A ballot fight over cap-and-trade

Plus a new rulebook on straight-to-your door booze

An initiative to throw out Washington’s cap-and-trade system for reducing carbon emissions appears headed for your ballot next year.

The alliance of Restore Washington — a homegrown attempt to reinvent Tim Eyman’s populist initiative machine — and Let’s Go Washington — a related committee fueled by cash from Republican megadonor Brian Heywood — has a date at the Secretary of State’s office on Tuesday to turn in signatures¹ for Initiative 2117, which would repeal the Climate Commitment Act.

That law requires major polluters to buy allowances from the state to emit carbon. It’s extracting an absolute boatload of cash from those companies, which is getting plowed into various programs aimed at greening up the economy. Most significantly for the consumer — and for this story — some of those companies are oil refineries, and they’re passing those costs on to the consumer in the form of higher prices at the pump.

Downtown Anacortes’ refineries-and-mountains view. (Image by Shutterstock.)

Let’s be clear here: Just turning in signatures doesn’t necessarily mean the measure is going to qualify for the ballot. It takes 324,516 valid signatures of registered Washington State voters to make the ballot. Expect extended fights on this front.

Here’s why you should care about this. A: No initiative of any kind has qualified since 2018 because COVID dramatically raised the cost and difficulty of collecting signatures. B. This measure would eliminate one of the three landmark achievements of the state’s environmental community in recent years. Should it succeed, expect gunsights on the other two.²