It's the world, dear! Did you think it would be smaller?
-- Mrs. Beaver, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

It's a Small World

We've been spending this week in the Bitterroot foothills, partly for summer vacation, and partly to help out some ailing senior relatives. Like so much of this continent, it is stunningly beautiful, and I was feeling rather small while watching the sun set over the foothills to the west of the lake the other night.

This sense of smallness also had me marvelling once more at our species' ability to wreak havoc on a global scale, but this time I had a small epiphany about why so many rural people in the US are so distrustful of the science of Climate Disruption. Citified folks like me often attribute it to general distrust of outsiders (as personified by the government), but I think now that there is another reason related to my sense of smallness. Out here you can see just how big the world is, but you can't see just how many people there are on the planet.

The town we are in has less than 80 people and most of the area is similar. Contrast this with Seattle's ~500,000 people within the city limits and 2 million+ in the greater metropolitan area, and we are talking about a factor of 5,000 to 20,000. Even worse, Seattle is a relatively small city by Western industrial standards - New York and London are at least 10 times larger - and when you start to look at the non-western world, you find megacities like Sao Paulo or Shanghai where the ratio to this small town gets even worse. These sorts of ratios are difficult for people to grasp. Even if they understand them intellectually, the sheer size of the Big Sky out here can make you distrust your intellect.

Grass Fire

I'm interested in the rural perspective in this part of the world because it is very close to my home in Washington State where a bunch of grassroots activists called CarbonWA have decided to go around the political duopoly and have managed to get a revenue neutral carbon tax initiative on the ballot. It was put together by a collection of worried citizens, including a number of economists from the University of Washington and some retired politicians from both parties, and we managed to gather the signatures early enough that it was an initiative to the legislature.

What this means in Washington is that the legislature had a few months to either pass it, modify it or send it on to the voters in the fall. Needless to say, the legislature did nothing with it because the GOP is in climate denial (thanks to its donor base), and the Dems - led by Governor Jay Inslee - prefer a politically unpalatable revenue-positive approach using cap-and-trade. (By the way, cap-and-trade is working so well in California that practically no one was bidding for permits at the May action...)

This means that after this impressive display of establishment inertia, I-732 is now on the ballot this fall. What does it call for? You can read about the gory details at the web site, but here are the basics:

• Institute a tax of $25/ton on carbon, indexed to inflation;
• Increase the tax 5%/year to a maximum of $100/ton in constant dollars;
• Reduce our horrendously regressive sales tax by 1 point;
• Fund the passed (but unfunded) state supplement to the Federal Earned Income Tax Credit;
• Eliminate the B&O tax for state manufacturing to avoid pushing manufacturing out of state.

The regressive nature of a carbon tax is offset in this structure by reducing the even more regressive sales tax and supplementing the incomes of low-income families. Our calculations show that the cost to the bottom two income quintiles is essentially zero, and most of the generated revenue comes from the upper two qunitiles. In other words, it is a mildly redistributive tax that also puts an appropriate price on carbon.

I-732 is very similar to (and was based on) a successful carbon tax across the border in British Columbia, that was passed by a conservative government, so it's not like it is a strange or politically toxic idea for this area.

Cold Water

Now we get to the fun part. You might expect that the opposition statement would be written by the Koch brothers and their fossil fuel gang, but it wasn't. Instead, the opposition statement was written by a number of members of the Democratic establishment who seem to feel that we have plenty of time to mess around with this problem and route the money raised to various pet projects and constituencies. To me, this is an unfathomable betrayal of ecological values and social justice. As the climate becomes more inimical to human civilisation, the poor around the world (who are disproportionately non-white) will bear the brunt of the pain, so playing identity politics games like this will do far more harm than good.

All this infighting is especially upsetting here in Washington because our geography makes us particularly vulnerable to climate disruption, so we are ripe for bipartisan action on the problem. The state is divided in two by the Cascade mountains, and while the western part is pretty wet much of the year (that is where ecotopia Seattle is) the eastern part of the state is starting to really feel the brunt of climate disruption: Wildfires are out of control, snowpack is melting fast and temperatures are rising. The GOP leadership may be in the pocket of the Koch brothers, but their constituents in the east of the state can see the results of their climate policy by smelling the smoke that arrives like clockwork every July.

(One of the eye-opening "travel broadens the mind" moments for me this week was when the local six-o-clock news from Spokane came on and opened with the "fire report". This is far more important than the weather report is in other places. Monday was relatively quiet - there were only three fires to cover - but it took up at least 5 minutes at the start of the program.)

The Enemy of the Good

Is I-732 perfect? Of course not, but what you have to remember is that it is an initiative on a time-critical issue. You can't sit around and horse trade for six months like you can in the legislature: it's an all or nothing deal. Personally, I might prefer something more drastic and revenue positive, but we don't have time and it wouldn't fly politically. Plus, if it gets passed, it is only unmodifiable for two years, so if someone can come up with something better in that time to replace it with, then we have at least bought the time honestly.