Volts podcast: Washington Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon on the Evergreen State's excellent new climate laws

Greetings! Last week, I wrote about the ambitious slate of
climate and energy policies that the state of Washington has put
in place over the last two years — culminating, a few weeks ago,
with the passage of the Climate Commitment Act, which would cap
the state’s emissions and reduce them 95 percent by 2050.


It’s a dizzying amount of progress in a short period of time.


As I talked to those involved about how it happened, one name
came up again and again: Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon (D) of the 34th
District, which encompasses West Seattle and areas southwest of
the city.


Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American
Indians, had this to say: “Representative Joe Fitzgibbon is now a
living legend for his miraculous legislative diplomacy and pure,
selfless heart; he deserves to win every legislator of the year
award in existence.”


This is not the kind of thing one typically hears about
legislators after years of difficult negotiations, but in this
case, it was a fairly typical sentiment. So I knew I needed to
talk to Fitzgibbon — about his entry into politics, his approach,
and what enabled this burst of progress.


Please enjoy our conversation. And please consider becoming a
paid Volts subscriber, so that I can continue to do this work.


David Roberts:   


Hello, welcome to Volts. I am your host, David Roberts. 


As longtime listeners know, Volts is headquartered in Seattle, in
the great state of Washington, on the superior of America's two
coasts. As it turns out, this is the place to be for climate
policy. Over the last few years, the Democratic legislature in
Washington has been engaged in a veritable frenzy of activity,
cranking out climate and energy bills, a 100 percent clean
electricity bill, bills on hydrofluorocarbons, bills to
decarbonize buildings and boost electric vehicles – bills, bills,
bills. 


Most recently, the legislature passed what are arguably the two
key remaining pieces of the carbon policy puzzle. The first is a
clean fuel standard, or CFS, like the one in place in California,
Oregon, and BC, which will slowly ratchet down the carbon content
of liquid fuels in the state. The second, the big kahuna, is the
Climate Commitment Act, or CCA, which puts in place a cap and
invest system that will ratchet down economy-wide greenhouse-gas
emissions from 1990 levels 45 percent by 2030, 70 percent by
2040, and 95 percent by 2050. With the passage of the CCA,
Washington now has, in my opinion, the most comprehensive and
ambitious climate policy plan in the country – and yes, I have
heard of California. 


I just got done writing a big story on this, and according to
everyone I talked to, one legislator was particularly important
in shepherding the CCA and some of the other bills in question
through the House, while ensuring that they remained ambitious:
Representative Joe Fitzgibbon of the 34th Legislative District
containing West Seattle and Vashon Island.


Fitzgibbon was elected to the legislature in 2010, when he was
just 24 years old. Yes, he's a bona fide millennial. But instead
of moping around his parents’ basement and eating avocados, which
is what I'm told millennials do, he has been immersing himself in
the wonky details of climate policy, and pushing his state into
the future. So I'm happy to have him with me today to discuss
climate policy and state progress. Representative Fitzgibbon,
welcome to Volts.


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


Thanks for having me, David.


David Roberts:   


Let's start with a little bit of your history. I was thinking
back on what I was doing when I was 24. I was in grad school,
snowboarding a lot, smoking a bunch of pot, definitely not fit
for running anything. What drew you to politics at such a young
age? Is it the people aspects or the policy aspects?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


To your credit, you went to grad school. I'm a grad school
dropout.


David Roberts:   


Oh, I dropped out eventually. But I just stayed longer.


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


I've always been really motivated by environmental issues, and
that included a general concern for the direction things were
going. I don't know how much of that can be attributed to Captain
Planet and media when I was a kid. But as the climate crisis came
into focus for me, probably in college, I realized, whatever I'm
going to do with myself, whether that's nonprofit work or
government work or something else, I want it to be about doing
the most I can to make progress on the climate crisis. 


When I got out of college and looked around to figure out where I
could do the most, state or local government seemed much more
appealing to me than going to DC and being a really, really small
fish in an enormous ocean. I had enough friends who had gone and
done that and become disillusioned that I thought state seemed
more exciting to me, so I'm happy that's where I landed. 


I started out as a staffer; I worked in the legislature for my
predecessor in the House. She went on to serve in the Senate as
Senate Majority Leader, and when she ran for the Senate, I ran
for her seat in the House in 2010. It definitely was not part of
some ambitious long-term plan that I was going to run for office
when I was 24, but it turned out that was when the seat opened
up, and I had just enough experience by that point that I thought
I could make a case that I was a credible candidate. It was clear
to me at that point that we weren't going to be making climate
progress or other environmental progress at the state level
unless we had more people in office for whom that was their
motivating thing. 


The good news for me was there were few enough other legislators
at that time for whom that was their main issue that I got to
carve out a space for myself as one of the experts – not that I
was or am an expert, but in the legislative context, the bar is
grading on a curve. The downside was nobody else cared about
those issues, so we didn't make a lot of progress for those first
couple years. For five of the 11 years I've been in office, we
had a Republican Senate, and we had absolutely no climate
progress during that time. But it did mean I had the time to
become a committee chair and become what counts in the
legislature as an expert, so that when the time was right for us
to strike with some climate legislation, I was ready to go.


David Roberts:   


You were around from 2010 to 2018, which were pretty bleak years
in Washington climate-wise; there are long-standing complaints
about the Washington legislature and climate during those years.
Then you were here from 2018 to 2021, which has been a veritable
renaissance of activity and motion. What explains this? What
happened in the legislature that uncorked this burst of activity?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


The most important thing happened in November of 2018, when we
gained a substantial number of seats for the Democrats in both
chambers of the legislature. Washington has 98 House members and
49 senators, so a majority in the House is 50, and a majority in
the Senate is 25. We have a comfortable working majority, more in
the House than in the Senate, but increasingly in the Senate as
well. We don't quite have a supermajority, so we can't pass a
constitutional amendment, for example, with Democratic votes
alone. 


But we went into the 2018 election with a one-seat majority in
each chamber; we had 50 in the House, 25 in the Senate exactly.
So we couldn't get a lot done then, but we weren't negotiating
bad budgets with Republican senators anymore. In 2018, we picked
up seven seats in the House and we picked up three seats in the
Senate. That broke a logjam and meant that we had enough
breathing room in both chambers that things that seemed like pipe
dreams just a short time before, like our 100 percent clean
electricity law, were actually within reach. 


There's nothing that changed in the wider political environment.
Governor Inslee obviously has elevated climate to a central role
in our discourse, but the thing that mattered the most was
picking up those seats for the Democrats in both chambers. I rue
the day that climate became this partisan of an issue, but it is,
and that's made me a very partisan legislator, because it feels
like climate progress is more correlated to the size of our
majorities than to just about anything else.


David Roberts:   


Has all that the legislature has done over the last two years –
on climate and energy, but also prison reform, capital gains tax,
a million other things – been an entirely partisan affair? At any
stage, did you get help from any Republicans? Or have they just
opted out? 


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


On climate, the answer is no. There have been good bipartisan
working relationships on issues like behavioral health funding,
some of the things that I don't work on as much. Land use is an
area where there are some unusual alliances with Republicans. On
climate, it's not that way. 


In 2019, we passed four big climate bills. We passed the 100%
Clean Electricity bill, we passed the Clean Buildings bill, we
passed my hydrofluorocarbon bill, and we passed an appliance
energy-efficiency bill, which is honestly the most no-brainer of
all of them. No Republicans in the House voted for any of those
bills. One Republican in the Senate voted for the HFC bill. Then
that, again, was true this year. The Clean Fuel Standard, which
has been my baby that I worked on for years and finally got over
the finish line this year, never got a Republican vote in either
chamber, any of the times we passed it. The Climate Commitment
Act got no Republican votes, with one asterisk: the Democratic
senator who caucuses with and normally votes with the Republicans
ended up voting yes on the bill. On the HFC bill, again, the same
one Republican senator who voted for it two years ago voted for
it this time. 


So these are Democratic achievements. We don't hear as much
straight-up climate denial in the Washington State legislature as
you hear in DC; there are some fringe Republican legislators who
will deny climate science, but their leads on these issues say
different things. They say things like, Washington's only 0.2
percent of global emissions; you're going to hurt our economy;
this isn't going to do any good, you should focus on more
cost-effective solutions like buying carbon offsets – just things
that we would never do. So it's essentially a partisan exercise
as much as anything. As much as taxes. There's not really an
issue that I could say is more partisan in the Washington
legislature than climate.


David Roberts:   


You might think that once Democrats have a sufficient majority
that these things become inevitable that Republicans might want
to get at the table to affect the outcome, to have some say at
all. But just to be saying no, and then be shut out of the
negotiations, doesn't seem even particularly smart on a
self-interested basis.


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


I keep waiting for that to happen. You see this in legislatures,
and Congress as well: when the Democratic majorities grow, the
Republicans we’re beating are the ones in the most moderate
districts, so the ones who stick around are not the ones who are
most motivated to come to the table. When California reauthorized
their cap and trade bill in 2017, I think it was, either the
Assembly or the Senate Minority Leader for the Republicans ended
up supporting the compromise, and the next day, there were RNC
people flying out from DC to California to find his primary
challenger. There's not a lot of breathing room, especially if
you're in one of those dark red districts, to be collaborating
with Democrats on climate.


David Roberts:   


It's not as though having a Democratic majority is entirely the
key to the kingdom, either. Even this time around, the CFS and
the CCA were arguably weakened in the Senate by Democrats.
Presumably there are not climate denialists among the Democratic
caucus, but there are issues that cause tensions, areas they push
back, and things they tried to take out of the CFS and CCA. What
are the internal tensions to the Democratic caucus? What are the
issues that surface disagreements?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


In both the House Democratic Caucus and the Senate Democratic
Caucus, we lost votes on the Climate Commitment Act on both the
left and the middle. We had two House Democrats from pretty
moderate districts vote no, and one very progressive member from
South Seattle vote no. Then the bill passed the House with 54 yes
votes, which is a lot for a bill like this. In the Senate, they
lost two votes from more progressive senators and one vote from a
more moderate senator. 


On that bill in particular, the dynamics were multifaceted,
because you have opposition from some of the environmental
justice organizations like Front and Centered or Puget Sound
Sage, and you also had, of course, opposition from the Chamber of
Commerce, the Association of Washington Business, the Farm
Bureau, and organizations like that. So it's taking fire from
both directions, which is part of what makes it feel miraculous
that it passed.


David Roberts:   


Let's focus for now on the fire coming from the right. For the
Chamber, is it just, “This will cost a lot of money and we don't
like stuff that costs a lot of money?” Or is there something more
specific than that?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


The fire from the right is stronger in the Senate, generally. The
Senate has an organized caucus of moderate Senate Democrats who
tend to stick together if they think that the progressive Senate
Democratic center of gravity is overreaching. The Clean Fuel
Standard did not have opposition on the left; all the opposition
was coming from the middle and the right and from the oil
industry. Their argument on that was all about costs: How much is
this going to make a gallon of gas more expensive? Every argument
they had stemmed from that. 


The hard thing about that critique is there's not a crystal clear
answer. It's a speculative answer based on a lot of factors that
go into how much gas costs. It tends to be that the price of gas
is much more influenced by the political situation in Venezuela
or Saudi Arabia than it is by what kinds of emission standards
are in place for gas and diesel. So that was the main one
there. 


The criticisms mostly revolve around energy-intensive,
trade-exposed manufacturing. I've always felt like in carbon
pricing debates, it's about 10 percent of the emissions and about
90 percent of the pain.


David Roberts:   


Which is why so many systems exempt them just to avoid that. But
you didn't exempt them. They're getting free allowances that ramp
down over time to nothing, is my understanding. Is that a
compromise? Was that hard-fought?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


It was hard-fought, and it was hard-fought in the sense that we
actually don't want them to leave. It is a legitimately economic
and environmental failure for the steel mill in my district to
close and us to import all the steel from China or Ohio instead.
That will also serve as a political failure, because every future
climate bill will be critiqued based on the closure of the steel
mill. 


The pulp and paper industry in particular in Washington is
politically influential, because it’s a legacy industry. They're
not new high-tech mills; they're operating on fairly old, fairly
inefficient technology, and they tend to be located in parts of
the state that are economically struggling more than the Seattle
area is. Losing 500 pulp mill jobs in Longview or Port Angeles
would be a huge blow to those communities. So there's a lot of
political sensitivity around those folks in particular. I would
say it was a victory to have them covered at all. The last couple
carbon pricing efforts, including the cap and trade bill I
sponsored in 2015 and the carbon tax initiative that the
progressive left, including labor and environmental justice and
environmental organizations, rallied around in 2018, Initiative
1631 – both of those efforts totally exempted EITE manufacturing.
So the fact that we were able to keep them under the cap was a
big deal that they weren't thrilled about. They accepted that
they were going to be under the cap, but they essentially wanted
free allowances that didn't decline in perpetuity. So getting
allowances to decline at all was the compromise that the EITEs
grudgingly accepted toward the end. 


This is somewhere where actually playing industry against each
other was impactful, and that's because most of the rest of the
coverage under the cap – essentially electric utilities, gas
utilities, and oil refiners – felt that EITEs were getting too
good of a deal and that the EITEs were getting a treatment that
was more generous than they really deserve. They recognized that
as the cap comes down, if the EITEs are still getting free
allowances, that means there's that many fewer, and it's going to
be that much more expensive for those who have to buy allowances,
essentially oil refiners, to have to go to the market and buy
theirs. So that was somewhere where it was useful to be able to
say, well, every other industry thinks that they should maybe not
complain quite so much.


The other element of that, and I know that linkage with
California is a controversial prospect for this program in the
future, but if we don't cover the same sectors that California
covers, California won't link with us. So BP, our largest oil
refiner, Puget Sound Energy, our largest electric utility: their
worst-case scenario, as they said many times, would be a cap and
trade program that cannot link with California. If we exempted
the EITEs entirely, we'd be looking at a program that was an
island, where allowance prices actually probably would get more
expensive than we could really bear. That is where being able to
play some of the direct emitters against the EITE manufacturers
came in really handy. 


David Roberts:   


To clarify, EITE industries are industries that are thought to be
particularly sensitive to changes in energy prices, and
particularly mobile, such that a boost in energy prices in
Washington could either shut them down or send them to a
different state. So if we exempted them entirely, we couldn't
link with California because California doesn't exempt them
entirely? Is that what you're saying?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


Pretty much. California doesn't have really clear rules about
this, but probably the most important consideration that they
would take into account when evaluating whether linkage was
practical is, are you covering the same sectors as us? They don't
have pulp mills in California, so there maybe is a question of
whether we could have exempted pulp mills, but by and large,
aerospace, steel, aluminum, cement, which are the other main
sectors besides pulp and paper, California would almost certainly
have said, we can't link markets if you exempt them.


David Roberts:   


So for them, the loss of having to pay for allowances is more
than offset by the benefits of linkage. 


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


Yes, particularly for BP and Shell, who were the oil majors who
were in a largely supportive position.


David Roberts:   


You mentioned that fire came from both right and left within the
Democratic caucus. Let's talk a little bit about the left and the
pushback you got from them. I’m curious how productive you felt
the climate movement was throughout this process. There are a lot
of discussions within climate circles about the demand for
ideological purity that comes from some quarters, and whether
that's appropriate, whether that’s activists’ role, and whether
it actually helps politicians. What was your relationship with
the climate left as all this came together?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


Big question. To start with, you learn very quickly with a bill
this expansive and this controversial how much the climate
movement is not monolithic. That seems self-evident, but it was
really true in this case. Part of our task in the House was to
take a bill that came over from the Senate in a more
business-friendly posture, and the Sierra Club was one step away
from coming out in opposition to the bill. The Washington
Environmental Council, which is like the center of gravity of the
environmental movement in Washington, was not willing to say that
they supported it, but they weren't opposed to it, they were just
asking for some specific changes. So part of our challenge was to
try to reel those folks back in, keep the Sierra Club from coming
out in opposition.


The most troubling piece, to them, that came out of the Senate
was provisions exempting from environmental review law any
ability for local governments or state agencies to deny a project
a permit based on its greenhouse-gas emissions. The theory there
was, if we're covering greenhouse-gas emissions under cap and
trade, then we shouldn't also be evaluating it on a
project-by-project basis. Now – and they were somewhat right, I
largely agree – some of this concern was that not all emissions
are covered under the cap. What if they're exporting fuel to
China? That's not going to be covered by our cap. For example,
the methanol plant, which is very controversial and is strongly
opposed by the environmental movement, would have had to be cited
under the bill that came out of the Senate, even though all of
the methanol they were going to export to China was not going to
be under our cap. So that, in particular, was something that we
had to work a lot in order to rein in that provision, and in
doing so, keep Sierra Club, Washington Environmental Council,
tribal nations comfortable with the bill. 


The other part was, there's a fundamental rejection of cap and
trade from environmental justice organizations, particularly if
they have close ties with environmental justice organizations out
of California. I think a lot of this comes from the fact that
when cap and trade passed in California, it was oversold as,
“This is going to solve air pollution. We're going to see huge
improvements in air quality in the most polluted parts of our
state.” That isn't actually what it is designed to do. It's
designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. If I can cut
emissions by 5 million tons over here, but then they grow by 2
million tons over here, that's a win for the climate, but it's
not a win for the co-pollutants that are emitted in the place
that the 2 million tons are increasing, and the neighbors of that
plant. 


So the people focused on protecting environmental justice as a
part of this bill decided, we need a separate policy for air
quality. We need a policy that says, here's how Department of
Ecology is going to focus its Clean Air Act authority,
monitoring, enforcement tools on the communities that are most
overburdened with pollution. That's on top of cap and trade,
that's not a part of it. It was in the same bill, but it's not
doing justice to environmental health disparities to just claim,
trust us, it's all going to get better over time. I do think it
actually will, in the long term, get better over time as the cap
comes down, but that's not a satisfying explanation to a
community that's currently experiencing much worse fine
particulate matter than a wealthy community down the road.


David Roberts:   


California's cap and trade system doesn’t have anything like this
in it, right? They have air quality regulations elsewhere in law,
but nothing meant to integrate with the cap and trade system.


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


That's my understanding. California also just has much dirtier
air than Washington, and that's a baseline problem. Washington,
other than one tiny little community next to an oil refinery, is
in attainment with the national ambient air quality standards
everywhere in the state. Los Angeles County is in non-attainment
for all six criteria air pollutants. So we have a little
different context there already. But the California experience
colors how everybody showed up to this debate, whether from the
oil industry saying, “This actually worked better than we thought
it would,” to EITE manufacturers on the right and environmental
justice proponents on the left saying, “This did not work as well
as we thought it would.” From beginning to end, we had to be
asking, how are we going to do better than California on this
particular question?


David Roberts:   


It ended up with air quality standards that say to air regulators
that every community either has to be in accordance with NAAQS or
equal to the best air quality of neighboring communities,
whichever is more protective. As you say, all of Washington more
or less meets NAAQS standards, which means that a lot of these
communities, even if they meet NAAQS standards, are going to get
help getting better air if they are close by other communities
with better air than them. It really seems like it's specifically
targeting racial and class disparities in air quality. That's the
first I've heard of that kind of policy, and it struck me as
pretty bold. Were you involved in that particular bit?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


I wasn't involved in coming up with the idea, but I was involved
in trying to make sure it was worked in the best way possible,
that communities worried about health disparities were going to
see some benefit there. One of the things that some of our
community-based environmental justice groups have been asking for
for a long time is more monitoring. They just want to know, what
are the air pollutants that are harming our community? Where are
they coming from, so that we can then think about, what do we do
about them? That was where this provision started: Let's get more
resources into monitoring in communities that we know are
experiencing heavier pollution burdens, but what are those
pollution burdens? 


What I think we're going to find there is that the pollutant that
we can improve people's health the most by targeting is fine
particulate matter, because that's one for which there's no safe
level. Many of the NAAQS standards are probably too high, for
ozone, and others, but fine particulate matter is the one that
there's no amount that you can breathe that doesn't harm your
health. That's also one where the communities that are
experiencing the greatest pollution burdens tend to be in
proximity to transportation infrastructure. This is not, largely,
in Washington, coming from large stationary sources. It's
highways, seaports, airports, diesel-burning trucks. So I think
that's part of what we're going to find. There was a lot of fear
about this provision from the same EITE manufacturers, until they
understood that this was not really about, how are we going to
ratchet down on you stationary sources even more than we already
do. They're largely not producing a lot of fine particulate
matter. The pollutants that they're most regulated for are NOx,
SOx, ozone to some degree. 


We're going to have to watch how Ecology and the local area
authorities implement this to make sure that this is not just a
cosmetic thing, not just new data that goes into a hole
somewhere, but actually guides some policymaking. I do think it
was really critical in taking some of the intensity down from the
environmental justice standpoint, even if those same
organizations didn't necessarily get to a neutral or supportive
posture.


David Roberts:   


I read the Front and Centered essay against this bill, and it was
a little weird, because it would say, cap and trade harms local
air quality – but there's a specific provision in the bill
addressing that. Then it would say, environmental justice
communities have traditionally been locked out of these processes
and not been at the table when these things are decided – the
bill has a specific provision saying environmental justice
communities have to be at the table when these things are
decided. It seemed to me as though all their specific objections
had been answered directly by the bill, and yet it hadn't seemed
to change their orientation toward the bill at all. The
overwhelming impression I got from that is that I must be missing
something, or there must be history, or something going on here
that's not clear on the surface. Do you have any understanding of
why they have stuck to their position despite efforts to address
those things?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


I would not presume to speak for Front and Centered, their
coalition members, or their steering committee members. I had a
lot of conversations with Front and Centered in the runup to
session about, what would it take to get you guys to feel good
about this policy? Their answer was basically, “Nothing.” It was
a respectful conversation. It was like, “We have very clear
directions from our board that this is not a policy that we are
engaging on, but thanks for asking,” essentially. 


So the approach that I took there – recognizing that they had
legitimate concerns, not all of which I agreed with – was a
similar outlook to how I thought about some of the business
groups: How do we address as many of their specific objections as
are addressable? Knowing that they're still not going to get to
yes, and they're not going to get to neutral, but that to the
legislators who are responsive to those concerns, we can say: if
you are anxious about allowance trading with California, or if
you are anxious about air quality getting worse in
disproportionately overburdened communities, here's what I can
point you to in the bill that we've done to address that. But to
be clear, that doesn't mean Front and Centered is okay with this
bill. Ultimately, the legislators are the ones who are making
those decisions, and we answered those questions to the
satisfaction of enough legislators that were motivated by
environmental justice that we got the bill.


David Roberts:   


Another thing that has seemed weird to me is they seem to really
view carbon taxes as fundamentally different in some way than cap
and trade. But all the same dynamics are there: you're still
paying to pollute, you still have to do something with the
revenue, you're still exempting some businesses and not
others. 


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


I can’t fully explain that one. That was a frustration of mine as
well. Does a cap and trade allow polluters to continue to
pollute? Well, carbon tax does that even more.


David Roberts:   


I've been in dialogue with far-left activists for 15 years now,
and there's this tension between being productive and helpful and
being the loyal opposition always pushing further. I’ve talked to
a lot of people who think, it's our job to say, “This isn't good
enough” and to demand more, no matter what. Often I talk to
legislators who say, “When you complain about X,Y, and Z, and we
respond by doing stuff that addresses those complaints, it would
be nice to hear a kind word, or get some support occasionally
from the movement, instead of just an immediate pivot to ‘this
isn't good enough’ and demanding more.” Is that resolvable? Is it
healthy, the net effect the climate left loyal-opposition
approach is having on the legislative process?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


At a problem of this magnitude, the answer always has to include
“and you need to do more.” We're not close to having solved the
problem. I do think it is helpful to creating a positive feedback
loop to take a breath and say, “It's good that we're moving this
direction.” That's what has happened with the passage of the
Climate Commitment Act; 350 Seattle was very strongly opposed to
this bill, and I think some of that was out of fidelity to
environmental justice values and Front and Centered’s position,
but some of it was an anticapitalist, “We don’t trust this
program.” I had a lot of conversations with constituents who were
activists with 350, and said, “I'm sorry, I disagree with you
about this. But I think we share an intensity of feeling around
climate.” Since the bill’s passage, I haven't seen that much in
the way of, “You all are sellouts. Why did you pass a
market-based system?” I did expect a little more of that, so
that's good. I think that it is important for people who care
about climate change to take a minute to say, this is good
progress – and we have to do more. That's largely what I've been
seeing around this. 


It's my experience that the most successful social movements are
the ones that know how to declare victory sometimes. I'd see this
in the labor world: the unions who are able to go to their
members and say, “You won this victory through your hard work,”
create an empowering feeling of “we can change things and let's
do this again.” That’s the lesson that I think the climate left
should internalize: If we never declare victory on anything,
we're going to lose momentum, and we're going to lose followers.
It’s not actually the goal with climate change to feel good about
how pure we are.


David Roberts:   


Another conventionally problematic constituency in climate and
energy matters is labor. This is subject to some anguish among
various people in the Democratic Party, because, of course, the
Democratic Party wants to be, and is, pro-labor, and wants to be,
and is, pro-climate. But then there are some elements of labor
that are, to put it frankly, big impediments to action on this;
specifically the building trades, especially in California, and
here, too. How do you navigate that tension? Do you think that
tension is resolvable; going to be resolved; on its way to being
resolved? What's your forecast for how that plays out?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


The tension is maybe not resolvable, but I think it's manageable.
On each of these individual issues there's going to be some
suspicion, particularly among the building trades, around, what's
this going to do to our jobs? What's this going to do to our cost
of gas, in particular? Not all, but many of the building trades
unions remained opposed to the Clean Fuel Standard right up until
the end. That was too bad. There was not the same intensity among
labor around the Climate Commitment Act, and that, I think, was
largely because so much of the revenue was booked for
transportation purposes. For them, more investment in
transportation, which is good-paying jobs for their members,
superseded any concern, at least as far as I could tell, about
what this was going to do for the cost of gasoline or the cost of
natural gas or so forth. 


It's a good tradeoff, because legislators also want to see
investments in transportation. One of the big changes we made to
the bill when it moved from the Senate to the House was the
Senate allowed the transportation dollars to be spent on
anything; we amended it so they had to be spent on transportation
stuff that reduces emissions, like transit, or electrification.
It's a huge bucket of money. This is maybe underappreciated on
some parts of the climate left: we essentially have cracked the
code on being able to use gas tax for transit, which is
prohibited under the Washington Constitution to use the motor
vehicle fuel tax for anything other than highway purposes. By
some measures, this is a 14- or 15-cent gas tax that's going to
be required to go to transit or electrification; that's an
enormous thing. I'm just waiting for that to sink in for folks a
little bit. 


Anyway, with labor, I think building trades cared more about
seeing those dollars invested than they did other things. They
were opposed to Clean Fuels until the end, in part because “clean
fuels,” they interpret that as going to raise the price of gas,
and it's not generating money for the state, actually, it's
generating money to lower the cost of other fuels. That was what
they were reacting to there. 


The other thing, which is probably more true in Washington than
in a lot of states, is the bigger part of our labor movement is
not building trades, it's service employees, public sector
workers. So SEIU, AFCSME, were resolutely in support of this
throughout, and that largely comes from their members saying, “We
want this to be part of our union's legislative agenda this
year.” Those are the unions that have the most clout in Olympia.
So it wasn't possible for anybody to say, “Labor doesn't support
this.” Some building trades labor was skeptical to varying
degrees about either bill; the unions with the most membership
and the most political clout, like the nurses and the teachers
and the public sector workers, were resolutely in support of
these bills.


David Roberts:   


In the clean energy transition, one of the things that unions
have said, generally speaking, is, “We have these good,
high-paying, union jobs. We'll acknowledge that transitioning our
entire energy infrastructure will create a lot of jobs; we just
think it's going to create a bunch of crappy jobs.” If you look
around at the clean energy industries today, across the country,
it's true: they pay, on average, less than the jobs they're
replacing, and are less unionized. So how important is this labor
standards piece? I know it was a big part of the Clean Energy
Transformation Act, and it's in here too. Is that something that
unions trust, and should trust? How confident are we that those
things are going to work to really create good jobs?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


That was a big part of it, too. I probably should have emphasized
that at the outset, that having provisions to say that the new
stuff that's funded by all the dollars that are going to be
generated from this program is not going to be spent on projects
that don't provide health care or pensions to their workforce. In
actual experience, many renewable energy developers are not
signing project labor agreements, do not have unionized
workforces. I think it is highly, if not motivating, at least
comforting to know the clear direction that those dollars be
spent in ways that maximize economic benefits for local workers
and diverse businesses, and have paid sick leave and pay
practices in relation to living wage indicators. Those belts and
suspenders, which very closely parallel the things that we
included in the 100% Clean Electricity law two years ago, went a
long way toward alleviating the legitimate fears from some of the
construction trades.


David Roberts:   


Does the business community push back against that? Because it's
them who will have to raise their labor standards, which will, of
course, raise labor costs, etc.


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


Yes, they do push back against that, but it's not in their top
five list of concerns. So we're able to say no.


David Roberts:   


The theme that I noticed as I'm reading through the bill and
reading the coverage is, “Let's do California's thing, but better
than California.” So what were the specific features of the
California system that y'all consciously designed around, or
designed differently?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


So, we talked about the air quality monitoring and air quality
improvement piece. Within the framework of the cap itself, a
couple of key things: One, our cap is going to decline quite
steeply relative to California’s. We're on a trajectory toward
net zero by 2050; that's going to be a steep decline. I do think
a legitimate criticism of California's program is that the cap
was set high enough in the early years that it didn't do that
much, and it generated an oversupply of allowances that could
then be used for compliance in later years. Other policies in
California were doing the heavy lifting, like their RPS and their
low carbon fuel standard, and so forth. As the cap has come down
in the last couple years, it's pulling its own weight more, but
it took a while. Ours is going to be pulling its weight from the
start. 


Another important lesson was the inclusion of offsets under the
cap. I know that you wrote about this. This is a critical piece
in the legitimate fear around offsets and what offsets are going
to do, particularly if there are bogus offsets. There was
reporting this week about questionable offset verification
protocols in California, which is timely, because Ecology hasn't
adopted any of those protocols yet for our law, so they can learn
from some of those mistakes. But including offsets under the cap
is critical. 


The regularity of the reviews that Ecology is required to do to
ensure that the allowance budget is set in the right place to
achieve the statutory limits gives not just an opportunity, but a
directive to Ecology to course correct if we do find that the
allowance budget is too generous. Those are probably the things
that are most, but none of them are more impactful than the steep
decline that the cap is going to experience.


David Roberts:   


The California system places really an enormous amount of
discretion on the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the
regulators behind the scenes. I don't think the Washington bill
puts quite as much discretion in the Department of Ecology, but
it does put a lot: the Department of Ecology is supposed to be
evaluating whether the environmental justice targets are being
met, whether the offset protocols are good. A lot of the quality
of the system presumes good decisions on the part of the
Department of Ecology for the coming decades. Should that make us
nervous? I go back and forth about this all the time, whether
it's better as a general matter for more decisions to be made
democratically through the legislature, or by purported experts
behind the scenes. Do you have a position on that? How much
confidence do you have in the Department of Ecology to maintain
quality?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


This is an example of where it's good to have Jay Inslee as
governor. Jay Inslee’s Department of Ecology is not going to be
making a more generous decision around offset protocols or
allowance budgets than the Washington State Legislature would.
They are more insulated from the political pressure that we the
legislature would be under to keep allowance prices low and to
allow the broadest ranges of offsets possible. I also think, as
it is, the bill pushed the limits of our expertise; the more
layers of detail we get into, the less confidence I have that I
know enough to make an informed decision about these
things. 


We're also up against an extremely tight clock. The Senate passed
the bill out two and a half weeks before the end of session; we
had two and a half weeks to get it through two committees and off
the floor of the House, and then it had to go back to the Senate
for a final concurrence vote. We didn't have time to make really
well-informed decisions; this is just a function of a part-time
legislature and the very strict clock that we operate under.
Ecology is going to have 18 months under the Administrative
Procedure Act to undergo their full rulemaking process. That's
going to lead to a little bit better decisionmaking than we were
really capable of. 


Now, do I have any fear that a potential future Republican
governor’s Department of Ecology might make bad decisions? Well,
that would be bad. We're lucky in Washington; we have the longest
run of Democratic control of the governorship in the nation. In
my entire life, we’ve only had Democratic governors. Our last
Republican governor lost reelection in 1984. It helps that we
elect our governors in presidential years; most states do not.
But if something changed, and we elected a Republican governor in
a future year, then I would be nervous about the Department of
Ecology’s latitude in making decisions around this program, and
you'd probably see an intensification of legislative oversight
about some of these key decisions. We're certainly going to be
conducting a lot of oversight into this, but there's just a
degree of trust with the expertise that Ecology has to make a
rational decision about, say, offset protocols.


David Roberts:   


Something of passionate interest to many in Washington,
particularly in Seattle, is the connection between land use and
climate. Lots of people on the left these days are saying,
electric vehicles are great and all, but what we really need is
more public transit, better urban design, more density, more
livability, walkability; we need to get people out of their cars.
There isn't really a ton in the CCA along those lines. There was
a Growth Management Act floating around Congress this session,
but it died in the Senate. So I'm curious: What killed it in the
Senate? Having talked to a bunch of your fellow legislators about
this now, what's your sense of whether they connect those issues?
Do you think the Growth Management Act has a chance if it comes
back? What would you like to see done on these lines? 


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


I think that legislators are certainly understanding that
connection better than they used to, that land use decisions are
very impactful in emissions – generally on a longer time horizon,
though. Land use policy is important because you're building a
built environment that's going to look that way for a lot of
decades. But it doesn't reduce emissions a lot in the near term,
and we need to be doing both. So I don't see the land use stuff
as a silver bullet, because it just doesn't change the urban form
fast enough. Also, it doesn't matter how much you increase
density if you're not also increasing access to non-polluting
modes of transportation, like transit and walking and biking,
which the CCA does help do by providing new dollars for
that. 


The bill this year was an awesome effort, and it's amazing,
actually, that it made it as far as it did. We have the existing
state Growth Management Act, Washington's 30-year-old planning
framework, which requires cities and counties to have a very
robust set of things that they think about when they adopt their
zoning and development regulations and all that. It includes
protection for forest lands and wetlands and critical areas and
housing supply and transportation; think about your capital
facilities; restrict urban sprawl; if you're a county draw an
urban growth boundary, etc. Very fundamental to how local
governments have to do things in our state. 


This bill would have required that climate considerations be a
part of that planning: that when a local government is doing
their zoning updates, require that they use that process to
reduce their emissions, and also that they increase their
resiliency to changing climate, whether that's increased wildfire
risk or rising sea levels or more floods or whatever. It didn't
say this super explicitly, but it was clearly the intent that the
regulations that the Department of Commerce was going to adopt –
that cities would have to at least look at as part of their
inclusion of this consideration – were probably going to include
things like more density around transit. 


The bill made it out of the House. That was one of our livelier
floor debates this year, because the Republicans don't just hate
climate policy: they really hate the Growth Management Act.


The bill seemed to be doing well in the Senate. Unfortunately,
after it passed out of two Senate committees, it was referred to
a third committee, which is unusual. It was referred to the
Senate Transportation Committee, which is often where climate
things go to die. It's where the Clean Fuel Standard died in 2019
and 2020, because the chair there is our most moderate, least
constructive on climate and environment, Democratic senator, and
he killed the bill. 


The good news, though, is that we got into the state budget a
provision directing the Department of Commerce to do the same
things that they were going to have to do under the bill. We're
going to try to come back and pass it first thing next session,
and hopefully with a little bit more coordination with the Senate
about how to stay one step ahead of that problem in the Senate
Transportation Committee. But it would have been a big step
forward. 


The other good news, particularly for folks in Seattle, is that
the central Puget Sound counties are already doing this; maybe
not at quite the level of detail that the bill would have
required, but King, Pierce, Snohomish, and Kitsap have already
agreed as part of the multi-county planning process that climate
is something that they look at in their comp plan. So it's not
like the work isn't happening. It's just not going to be mandated
everywhere in the state until we get that bill passed, hopefully
next year.


David Roberts:   


Wasn’t that a key part of the way the CCA passed this year, by
not getting referred to the Transportation Committee?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


It did help. That senator, Senator Hobbs, did vote for the bill;
part of his price was all the money for transportation stuff. I
don't want to speculate too much about the internal workings of
the Senate, but I do think it would have been a scarier prospect
if it had had to go to that committee. 


More broadly, on land use: A lot of legislators used to be city
council members or county commissioners, so the tension that we
have on the Democratic side is people who want to see density and
housing supply and climate incorporated into big giant upzones
around light rail stations, and people who either came from local
government or just really sympathize with their local governments
who say, “Don't tell us what to do.” That's our problem. On the
Republican side, we try to make common cause with the Republicans
from a property rights standpoint, saying, “Wouldn't you like to
deny your city the big government telling me I can't build a
duplex, because that's big government?” Sometimes we can get
somewhere with that. But then there's also the base Republican
“you're trying to make everybody live in a townhouse” suspicion
too. So both parties have a little different dynamic around this
one than on the other issues. We've gotten some good land use
stuff through from time to time, but it's a much less linear
debate than you see on the other climate stuff.


David Roberts:   


The clean fuel standard and the CCA have passed, but their
implementation is contingent upon the passage of a transportation
package that has to contain a gas tax of at least 5 cents a
gallon. Some Seattle urbanists are upset about this because they
think the transportation package is full of highway spending and
highway expansions. As someone who hates highway expansions, what
is the proper level of freakout for me about this? Should I worry
about this transportation package? How much can it change before
it passes? Does this bother you at all, that this contingency got
stuck on?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


Yes, I don't like the contingency, for more than one reason. I
just think it's bad lawmaking to say this law only goes into
effect if this unrelated law also passes. I think it's
questionable whether it's even allowed under the state
constitution. But it's what we had to accept in order to get the
votes in the Senate. 


I don't think a 5 cent gas tax increase is a bad thing, though.
We have enough transportation needs, even highway needs, that we
could spend 5 cents easily without adding a new lane anywhere.
We're supposed to spend $4 billion fixing fish passage barriers
on state highways between now and 2030; you could spend all 5
cents on culverts alone and not expand a single lane mile
anywhere. We're also significantly behind on maintenance and
preservation of the existing road system.


David Roberts:   


The bill could theoretically boost the gas tax more than that,
though, right?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


Absolutely. We probably will have to. I think a lot of people
look at Senator Hobbs’ transportation package in the Senate,
which is the one that made it the furthest, and think, that must
be the template for what you guys are going to do. We're a long
way away from what that package is going to look like, and there
are a lot of opportunities for people to weigh in along the way
to say, this project is bad, and please don't pass a
transportation package that builds a new 12-lane highway in East
Snohomish County; that, we're also not going to do. 


Sometimes a highway project is actually a safety project.
Sometimes there are actually dangerous roadways that it does cost
a couple hundred million dollars to make a highway safer, and in
some parts of that roadway that might involve adding a lane. But
that's not the same as, we're going to go now open up huge swaths
of farmland to suburban sprawl with a giant new freeway. So it's
a legitimate thing for urbanist climate champions to keep their
eyes on, but also, it's not something that I would say that folks
should feel like they need to freak out about quite yet. Because
we actually do need a lot more money for transportation in the
state, even if we don't expand highways, and if we are going to
expand highways anywhere, just look at that contextually, look at
that actual project, and if it's actually the thing that you're
most worried about.


David Roberts:   


I have to say, even as someone who hates highways and wants to
ban cars, it would take a lot of new highway lanes to offset the
benefits of 95 percent carbon reductions locked in through 2050.


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


Even if we were going to spend it all on giant new highways,
there's still a cap. If a bunch of people were going to try to
move to rural places and drive a bunch more, well, then
transportation emissions would presumably eat up all the
remaining allowances and all the other pollution would have to
decline in an even greater amount. Or maybe there's a shortage of
allowances and the allowance prices get so high that people in
those rural areas actually just have to carpool or drive electric
cars. That's not a likely outcome, but even if it were, it
doesn't change the fact that the cap isn't going up.


David Roberts:   


You mentioned earlier that this being climate change, the work is
never done. It's never good enough. But on the flip side, right
now, Washington is specifically regulating electricity,
transportation, and buildings, and there’s this economy-wide cap
in the background, reducing emissions. So what are the pieces
left? When you come back next session, in terms of climate and
energy, is there a next big thing, or is it just mostly little
things filling in gaps at this point?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


We're going to have to do more big things. I don't know that the
crystal ball is quite clear enough this soon after the end of
session to know what all the next big things are, but the biggest
thing that we didn't get done this session is a law around
residential buildings. The buildings law that we passed two years
ago was really awesome; it was the first of its kind in the
country regulating the energy performance of large commercial
buildings. We don't really have a policy in place for residential
heating, particularly water heating and space heating. I think a
lot of people worry we're going to come for their gas stoves.


But the bill that was introduced this year – it passed out of my
committee, it died in the Appropriations Committee – would have
tried to put the state on track toward decarbonizing space heat
and water heat in residential buildings. As often with an
ambitious bill, it didn't make it the first session; we're going
to have to do more work on that. That one ran into a hot storm of
opposition from both building trades and gas utilities. 


We did get some pieces of it incorporated into other bills: one
piece of it into the operating budget, one piece of it into a
different bill about utility ratemaking. But we have to think
more about what policies we need in order to accelerate the
decarbonization of residential buildings, recognizing that that's
not going to change the cap either. Essentially, if you're going
to lower carbon emissions from residential buildings, that just
means that many more allowances for other sectors. But it's still
something that, of course, the faster we do it, also probably
provides some breathing room for Ecology to lower the cap more.


David Roberts:   


Are you worried about backlash to this? Because when you talk
about people being forced to do things about the way they heat
their home, it's very personal, and people have very strong
feelings. Do you feel like the climate movement, or politicians,
or anyone has done the education work to prepare people for this?
Are you worried about citizen backlash, if a regulator in the end
comes to your home and tells you to get rid of your furnace,
which is not totally implausible?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


I don't think that is something the public is ready for, even in
Seattle. I don't think that Seattle homeowners more than anyone
else want to have someone come say, “Turn off your gas.” The bill
that we considered this year wouldn't have done that. But I think
that we need to learn from how it was communicated. Most of the
proposals that I've seen, both at the local level and at the
state level, involve stopping new gas hookups, not forcing
current gas users to turn off their gas. We need to be really
good about talking about that aspect, so everybody knows, nobody
is going to be told you have to go get rid of your furnace and
buy a heat pump. 


At some point in the future – our energy codes probably are going
to require this already, without new legislation – new
construction is probably going to have to be electric only. How
do we ensure that we're ready for that? How do we ensure that
utilities are ready for that? How do we ensure that the gas
utilities are not building new gas lines that are going to be
obsolete in 10 years? Those are the policy choices we have to
make, and we have to be really, really clear about what we're
doing and what we're not doing. Because that is a recipe for
backlash, if people do think we're going to be coming in and
telling them to have cold houses.


David Roberts:   


What about your personal political plans? Are you happy doing
your work in the House, or do you have your eye on other things?


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


I don't see myself running for office at a different level of
government. I feel good about the work where I am in the House
right now. I don't see the federal government as a really
rewarding or productive place for me to be; I'm glad that good
people are there doing what they're doing. I had an open Senate
seat in my district three years ago that I chose not to run for
because I felt like I was just getting the hang of things in the
House, and I was committee chair – and I think that turned out to
be the right decision. So I plan on doing this until I get a
little more burned out on it, and that's as far into the future
as I can see.


David Roberts:   


Well, you're passing bills and seeing actual changes made – why
anyone on Earth would want to go from that situation to the US
Senate is utterly mysterious to me. I don't even know why it's
viewed as up anymore. It's more like lateral or downward.


Joe Fitzgibbon:  


That's a more clear way of saying that, for sure.


David Roberts:   


Thanks so much for taking all this time, and thanks for all the
work you're doing. 


Joe Fitzgibbon:


Thanks, David. 


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