Time to embrace I-1631

On Oct. 9, we were informed that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just announced the staggering consequences impacting us by 2030 if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the present rate. If there weren’t already sufficient reason to vote for Initiative 1631, there certainly is now.

In a national context of denial, we in Washington state have an opportunity to create a model of hope. Initiative 1631 would impose a gradually increasing emissions fee, one time on one unit of fossil fuel energy, to fund investments toward a transition to sustainable clean energy. Significantly, it also is crafted so that those currently employed in the fossil fuel industry have a viable way to get from here to there over time, with job retraining and wage and benefit protections for those workers.

Meanwhile the fossil fuel companies (apparently not Shell) have contributed, the last I heard, $21 million to defeat this measure.

According to the IPCC report we have 12 years to reduce by about half the amount of carbon pollution (from 2010 levels) to have a reasonable chance of keeping the increase in atmospheric warming below 2.7 F, a threshold beyond which it appears the accumulating effects become irreversible. Please ignore the glut of deceptive and misleading ads, read summaries of the IPPC report and the initiative, and vote for Initiative Measure 1631. There will undoubtedly be unanticipated problems or inequities when the measure is enacted. Those things can be fixed; a planet beyond the tipping point can’t.