Washington state’s climate-fighting claim is hot air, officials admit

Washington state officials have issued a correction after they were caught exaggerating the benefits of state spending to curb climate change.

Proceeds from the state’s quarterly auctions of carbon dioxide permits are keeping far less pollution out of the air than officials have been claiming.

Since the first auction in February 2023, major polluters in Washington have paid $5 billion for the right to keep heating the planet under the state’s cap-and-invest program.

Auction proceeds have gone to projects that fight climate-harming emissions, help communities prepare for impacts like fires and extreme heat, or otherwise help communities hard hit by pollution.

In November, a report from the Washington Department of Ecology said the first two years of auction proceeds would keep more than 8.6 million metric tons of pollution out of the air.

“That’s the equivalent of taking 40% of all gas and diesel vehicles in Washington off the road for a whole year,” an Ecology press release stated.

Yet that claimed carbon benefit was 28 times higher than the reality. According to revised calculations by Ecology, the projects will only keep about 300,000 metric tons of heat-trapping gas out of the air over their lifespans.

That’s less than one-half of 1% of the state’s annual emissions.

Washington’s emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases have been climbing after dipping with the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020. EPA data, shown above, excludes emissions outside the state from electricity consumed inside the state.

Data-entry errors on eight projects that subsidized heat pumps and other energy-efficient appliances for low- and moderate-income homes and small businesses led to the overstated claims.

The Washington Policy Center, a free-market think tank, discovered the errors, and the Washington Department of Commerce, which contributed data to the Ecology report, acknowledged them on Tuesday.

“Those errors overwhelmingly inflate the program’s apparent success,” Washington Policy Center Vice President Todd Myers said in a press release. “When a handful of dubious projects account for the vast majority of claimed emissions reductions, basic credibility collapses.”

Washington Department of Commerce Assistant Director Jennifer Grove said in a press release that the state had “made an error in reporting data for this program.”

“Corrective measures are already in place to strengthen our processes and prevent similar errors in the future,” Grove said.

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Ecology officials are conducting a review of data submitted for 3,600 auction-funded projects and plan to release a corrected report when the review is done.

Myers said the majority of projects funded by the carbon auctions were “simply irresponsible,” costing several times more than the benefits they provide.

State officials say the projects provide benefits beyond carbon reduction, including improving equity, improving air quality, and lowering energy costs for those who can least afford big energy bills.

Republican legislators and Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson have set their eyes on the deep pool of carbon-auction cash.

They're proposing to spend much or most of it on non-climate purposes, including lowering families' sales tax payments and schools' utility bills.