Washington Post - Brady Dennis | Dino Grandoni
From Arizona to Colorado, voters reject measures to ramp up renewables and limit drilling.
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| A pump works in a residential development in Frederick, Colo. (David Zalubowski/AP) |
In Arizona, voters said no to accelerating the shift
to renewable energy. In Colorado, they said no to an effort to sharply
limit drilling on state-owned land. And a measure to make Washington the
first state to tax carbon emissions appears to have fallen short.
The
failure of environmental ballot measures in Arizona, Colorado -- and
the likely defeat of a proposal to impose fees on carbon emissions in
Washington state -- underscore the difficulty of tackling a global
problem like climate change at the state and local level, where huge
sums of money poured in on both sides.
Even as a United Nations-backed panel of scientists
recently warned
that the world has barely a decade to radically cut its emissions of
greenhouse gases that fuel global warming, the Trump administration has
been busy expanding oil and gas drilling and rolling back Obama-era
efforts to mitigate climate change. Environmental advocates and
Democratic lawmakers have placed much hope in state and local
governments to counter those policies.
But while Tuesday saw the election of numerous
candidates dedicated to climate action, individual ballot measures aimed
at the same goal largely floundered.
“What we
learned from this election, in states like Colorado, Arizona, and
Washington, is that voters reject policies that would make energy more
expensive and less reliable,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the
American Energy Alliance, an industry-backed, free-market advocacy
group.
Richard Newell, president of the non-partisan think tank, Resources for the Future, drew a different conclusion.
“The
complexities and politics of the clean energy transition are best
navigated through a legislative process, which has been the basis for
virtually all significant state level climate and renewable energy
policy,” Newell said in an email. “I would not take this as a
repudiation of public desire to address climate change, including
through carbon pricing or clean energy standards, but rather that the
details and who is engaged in the policy formulation matter, a lot.
That’s tough to do through a ballot initiative.”
Even in the solidly blue state of Washington,
initial results
looked grim for perhaps the most consequential climate-related ballot
measure in the country this fall: a statewide initiative that would have
imposed a first-in-the-nation fee on emissions of carbon dioxide, the
most prevalent of the greenhouse gases that drive global warming. While
voters in King County, home to Seattle, turned out heavily in favor of
the measure, residents across the rest of the state largely opposed it.
One bright spot for environmental advocates came in Nevada, where voters
appeared poised
to pass a measure similar to the one Arizonans rejected. It would
require utilities to generate 50 percent of their electricity from
renewables by 2030. The proposal was leading handily with most votes
tallied Wednesday. But before the measure could become law, it has to
survive a second vote in 2020.
Since President
Trump took office, a handful of states — notably California — have vowed
to serve as a counterweight on energy and environmental policy to a
president who frequently dismisses the
government’s own findings that human activity is warming the globe. In September, California
codified into law a commitment to produce 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free courses by 2045.
But
Tuesday’s ballot-question results demonstrate the limits to which other
states are willing to follow California’s lead — particularly when
campaigners against the proposals emphasize the potential impact on
pocketbooks.
Supporters and proponents poured
an eye-popping amount of money,
more than $54 million, into the fight over the future of energy in
Arizona. Only two Senate races in the country — in Florida and Texas —
saw more spending this year.
The influx of cash
underscores how much both sides believed was at stake. The ballot
initiative would have amended the Arizona constitution to require
electric utilities to use renewable energy for 50 percent of its power
generation by 2035. That might seem easily within reach in sunny
Arizona. But the state now gets only about 6 percent of its energy from
the sun.
The
state’s biggest utility, Arizona Public Service, or APS, emerged as the
most fervent opponent of the proposal, pouring more than $30 million
into a political action committee called Arizonans for Affordable
Electricity. In an aggressive ad campaign, the group argued that the
measure would cost households an additional $1,000 a year.
“We’ve
said throughout this campaign there is a better way to create a
clean-energy future for Arizona that is also affordable and reliable,”
APS chief executive Don Brandt said in a statement Tuesday evening.
Meanwhile,
an alliance of dozens of organizations called Clean Energy for a
Healthy Arizona, argued that the shift toward cleaner energy will
improve public health and create good jobs in the state. The group got a
huge assist from California billionaire investor and political activist
Tom Steyer, who donated the lion’s share of the nearly $23.6 million
raised through the end of September.
Twenty-nine states and the District
already have programs, known as Renewable Portfolio Standards, or RPS,
that require utilities to ensure a certain amount of the electricity
they sell comes from renewable resources. But only a fraction of those
have targets as ambitious as the ones proposed this year in Arizona and
Nevada. For instance, New York and New Jersey also have targets of 50
percent renewable energy by 2050. Hawaii would require 100 percent of
its energy to be from renewable sources by 2045.
During
the 2018 campaign, however, 11 Democratic candidates for governor vowed
to try to get all of their respective states’ electricity from “clean”
energy sources by the middle of the century, according to surveys done
by the state affiliates of the League of Conservation Voters. Several of
those candidates, including Jared Polis in Colorado, won their races.
In
Colorado, environmental advocates failed to pass a measure known as
Proposition 112. The initiative would have required new wells to be at
least 2,500 feet from occupied buildings and other “vulnerable areas”
such as parks and irrigation canals — a distance several times that of
existing regulations. It also allows local governments to require even
longer setbacks.
As
oil production has soared in Colorado in recent years and the
population has grown, more and more residents are living near oil and
gas facilities. Those who supported the ballot measure argued it was
necessary to reduce potential health risks and the noise and other
nuisances of living near drilling sites. Opponents countered that the
proposal would virtually eliminate new oil and gas drilling on
nonfederal land in the state — they have derided it as an
“anti-fracking” push — and claimed it would cost jobs and deprive local
governments of tax revenue.
The industry-backed
group, Protect Colorado, raised roughly $38 million this year as it
opposed the controversial measure, which it says would “wipe out
thousands of jobs and devastate Colorado’s economy for years to come.”
By contrast, the main group backing the proposal, known as Colorado
Rising for Health and Safety, raised about $1 million.
“We
appreciate Colorado voters who realized what a devastating impact this
measure would have had on our state’s economy, school funding, public
safety and other local services, ” Karen Crummy, spokeswoman for Protect
Colorado, said in an email late Tuesday.
Separately,
Chip Rimer, chairman of the board for the Colorado Oil and Gas
Association, called Proposition 112 “an extreme proposal” that would
have devastated the state’s economy. “Moving forward we will continue
working together with all stakeholders to develop solutions that ensure
we can continue to deliver the energy we need, the economy we want and
the environment we value,” he said in a statement.
Coloradans
also rejected a separate but related measure Tuesday that would have
amended the Colorado constitution to allow property owners to seek
compensation if government actions devalue their property. The proposal
has been sharply criticized by dozens of city councils and panned by
Gov. John Hickenlooper (D), who called it “a dangerous idea” in which
“unscrupulous developers and speculators could make claims on local
governments for literally anything they think has hurt the value of
their land.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, the
effort to put a price on carbon emissions appeared on the verge of
defeat early Wednesday, with 56.3 percent of voters rejecting the
measure and 43.7 percent supporting it with two-thirds of votes counted.
An official at the Washington secretary of state’s office said the
vote-by-mail system in the state means it could take several days for a
final vote tally.
Known
as Initiative 1631, the measure would have made Washington the first
state in the nation to tax carbon dioxide — an approach many scientists,
environmental advocates and policymakers argue will be essential on a
broad scale to nudge the world away from its reliance on fossil fuels.
But
that proposal, like other environmental initiatives across the country,
faced a bitter fight, pitting Big Oil refiners against a collection of
advocates that includes unions, Native American groups, business leaders
like Bill Gates and former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as well
as the state’s Democratic governor, Jay Inslee.
It
also has set a state spending record along the way for a state ballot
initiative. The group pressing for the carbon fee, known as the Clean
Air, Clean Energy coalition, has raised more than $15 million.
Meanwhile, oil companies belonging to the Western States Petroleum
Association pumped more than $31 million into opposing the measure.
The
initial $15-a-ton fee would have kicked in beginning in 2020, then
increased $2 per ton (plus inflation) each year until 2035, when it
would either freeze or rise, depending on whether the state had met its
targets to slash greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate
campaigners did win at least one victory Tuesday in the Sunshine State.
Florida voters, perhaps with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill still
fresh in mind, overwhelmingly decided to amend the state’s constitution
to ban offshore oil and gas in state waters.
But
even then, it was unclear whether offshore drilling alone motivated 69
percent of voters to support the measure. It was paired, oddly, with a
proposal to prohibit indoor vaping.
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