The politics around Initiative 732, on the November ballot, has been a liberal pig pile. Long story summarized: The measure was modeled by some climate-change activists after British Columbia’s carbon tax. The simple idea is that if we tax what’s bad for the environment, eventually we’ll get less of it (think tobacco taxes).
But the plan was undercut a year ago by a progressive group called the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy, which disliked how I-732 didn’t raise money for job-training programs, communities of color or green-energy efforts. Instead it rebates all the money in tax cuts.
An economist wrote in The New York Times that at first he didn’t believe the headlines out of Seattle that a progressive group was torpedoing a climate-change bill.
“It is like reading ‘Democrats Rally to Cut the Minimum Wage,’ ” he wrote.
The founder of I-732, UW economics Ph.D. Yoram Bauman, then dumped a train load of fossil fuel on what had been only a simmering fire:
“I am increasingly convinced that the path to climate action is through the Republican Party,” he said. He cited two aspects of the political left: “An unyielding desire to tie everything to bigger government, and a willingness to use race and class as political weapons in order to pursue that desire.”
Kaboom! Most every liberal group around — from the unions to enviros to social-justice organizations — denounced Bauman and voted not to support I-732.
But this spring, Audubon began taking a second look at the idea. It realized it kind of agreed with part of Bauman’s critique — that the issue had been co-opted to become more about raising money than climate change.
