WashACE Blog

Greens priority would cost Lewis County 300 jobs

State revenues are slow, but environmentalists and healthcare advocates with their legislative partners, still want to tax more, layoff workers, increase energy prices, and jeopardize the rural economy of Lewis County area.

Katie Schmidt posted on the TNT political blog that a bill sponsored by Senator Phil Rockefeller (D, Bainbridge Island) would phase out TransAlta’s coal-fired plant in Lewis County by 2020. 

Environmental groups and healthcare workers said coal-fired electricity is too harmful to go on...

Workers at TransAlta and residents of Lewis County, though, pointed out that the plant provides about 300 well-paying jobs in an area plagued by unemployment...

TransAlta USA president, Lou Florence, said the plant pays an average salary of about $88,000 per year. According to the Office of Financial Management, the median household income in Lewis County is about $42,000 per year.

This is one of the environmental community’s top four objectives for this legislative session. 

Am I missing something?

TNT: Reject "pie-in-the-sky" Ref. 52

The News Tribune urges a no vote on Ref. 52.

Referendum 52 bets fiscal prudence on the ability of green jobs to help revive Washington’s economy and save school districts buckets of money.

It’s a gamble voters ought not to take.

Read the whole thing. It's the right call.

The Washington Research Council's brief on Ref. 52 is here.

Good Reasons Not to Raise the Hazardous Substance Tax

Don't miss this op-ed in the Herald of Everett by Don Sorensen on the Hazardous Substance Tax. We've written previously on it (see here and here). Sorensen writes:

First, increasing the tax will increase the price Washington consumers pay for gas and diesel at the pump. This will hit low-income families, already struggling with the recession, extra hard. These increases will also hit many other businesses, from truckers to farmers to retailers...

Second, increasing the tax puts good, family-wage jobs at risk. Proponents are touting the new jobs that could be created by the tax...But they conveniently fail to talk about the existing good jobs threatened by this major tax increase. The Tesoro Anacortes refinery that I manage is a prime example. These are tough times for the refining industry and our continued viability would be put at risk by this massive tax increase.

Read the op-ed. This potential tax increase has long-term negative consequences for families and businesses in the state.

Environmental and Labor Agendas Reported This Morning

Unsurprisingly, they both think higher taxes are necessary.

In The News Tribune, John Dodge writes of a modest environmental agenda that doesn't look all that modest to me.

Once again, the state environmental coalition of 25 nonprofit groups will push a bill to impose a fee on petroleum products that contribute to stormwater pollution, which is the number one urban pollution problem in Puget Sound, said Dave Peeler, director of programs for People for Puget Sound.

That's a huge cost passed on to consumers and diverting gas tax dollars - calling it a "fee on petroleum products" doesn't change it's character - from highway construction. A bad idea in good times, it's a terrible idea now.

And the Washington State Labor Council released its 2010 agenda, not bothering to pretend that the WSLC ambitions are at all modest. While claiming to be "focused on jobs, jobs, jobs," it's mostly old wine in old bottles.

Some snippets drawn from the agenda, which I urge you to read in full. (BTW, they also like the "petroleum fee.")

    •    Opposing the deregulation of public services, including state liquor stores.
    •    Extending collective bargaining rights to teachers, musicians, interpreters, and child care workers, allowing them a voice in decisions in the workplace.
    •    Codifying rest and meal breaks, protecting the health and safety of workers.
    •    Filling the Washington’s state budget gap by closing tax loopholes and raising revenue, thus protecting critical services and institutions as well as 23,000 state employee jobs and an additional 14,000 private sector jobs.
    •    Repealing I-960 to allow legislators the opportunity to do the jobs they were elected to do: making decisions on how we finance state services and employment.
    •    Paying prevailing wages on all public-private partnership projects and federally funded projects, ensuring our tax dollars create quality jobs that create quality results.
    •    Requiring all corporations that receive state tax breaks to pledge that they are committed to creating jobs and economic prosperity in Washington state.
    •    Capturing $98 million in federal Unemployment Insurance modernization funds by extending unemployment eligibility to part-time workers and to workers facing undue hardship; extending 2009 U.I. stimulus package through 2010 ($45 weekly benefits and higher minimum benefits).
    •    Protecting vulnerable injured workers against unfounded attacks on the workers’ compensation system. 


Labor's "jobs agenda," then, focuses on making it easier to increase taxes, expanding UI benefits, opposing contracting out, battling workers' compensation reforms, pushing for more collective bargaining and workplace regulation, preserving the status quo for state workers and boosting employer costs.

How would an agenda focused on job destruction differ?

More on the CRU Climate Scandal

Here's my column on the scandal spreading from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (England).

Events continue to unfold. On the Commentary blog, John Steele Gordon notes that Phil Jones, the CRU director, has stepped down pending an investigation, according to AP. And Michael Mann, he of the wobbly hockey stick, is under investigation at Penn State.

A geeky, but interesting, discussion on the software & IT issues at Dude, with Keyboard. (h/t Instapundit)

And, in Australia, as today's Wall Street Journal reports, proposed cap-and-trade legislation sparks a parliamentary revolt. 

Interesting times.

Change in Business Climate Needed

Don Brunell's Columbian column highlights an issue deserving much more attention: lawsuits filed over climate change.

Global warming is about to create an avalanche of lawsuits against the federal government and private industry.

He gives a number of frightening examples. Then this:

Congress is wading in as well. The 1,427-page energy bill passed by the House of Representatives gives enforcement powers over greenhouse gas emissions to "… citizens, states, Indian tribes and all levels of government."

Simply put, that means everybody can sue everybody.

His conclusion:

Ironically, all this litigation could end up harming the environment rather than helping it. Rather than face a future of endless litigation, companies that employ millions of Americans will simply move to countries with less stringent environmental regulations — and jobs will go with them.

If we are to have any chance of putting millions of Americans back to work, we need climate change all right. We need to change the business climate in this country to encourage, rather than discourage, employers to do business here.

Precisely right.

A Sampling of Writing on the Climate Change Scandal

I spent part of the holiday weekend working on a column on what some folks are calling Climategate, the release of thousands of emails and other documents revealing a pattern of bad behavior at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England. (Having taken a vow to resist the "gate" suffix for political mischief and misdeeds, I'll just call it the climate change scandal.) As the holiday weekend wore on, the commentary and analysis piled up, along with great links to the leaked information.

The coverage in local papers has been limited, so I thought I'd put some of the best of what I'd read up here.

In the Wall Street Journal, Kim Strassel writes that the scandal has sunk any remaining prospects for Senate passage of a cap-and-trade bill.

One of the best headlines appears over a good WSJ editorial: Rigging a 'Climate' Consensus

Megan McCardle's Atlantic article points up the real problem with the climate science emails. She cites a perceptive assessment by CBS news reporter Declan McCullagh, widely viewed as having done the best MSM reporting on the scandal. This is from McCardle's post:

The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data.  These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings.

That is a big problem.  The IPCC report, which is the most widely relied upon in policy circles, uses this model to estimate the costs of global warming.  If those costs are unreliable, then any cost-benefit analysis is totally worthless.

The IPCC report she refers to is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments. As McCullagh writes:

That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it "relies on most heavily" when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.

Then we discover that the raw data has been dumped, making replication impossible.

What's it all mean? IChristopher Brooker, in an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph, calls it "the greatest scientific scandal of our age," with science taking a back seat to ideology.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

Michael Barone frames the question appropriately.

The more interesting question going forward is whether European and American governmental, academic and corporate elites, having embraced global warming alarmism with religious fervor, will be shaken by the scandalous CRU e-mails. They should be.

My column is scheduled to run Wednesday.

Brunell Column: State on cutting edge of clean energy sector - Columbian.com

Two studies recently confirmed what most people in Washington already know: Our state is a hotbed for green energy innovation, conservation and job creation.

Earlier this month, the green research firm Clean Edge (www.cleanedge.com) released its study of "clean-tech" jobs. It listed the top 15 metro areas in the U.S. for jobs in fields such as renewable energy and energy efficiency.The Puget Sound region (Seattle/Tacoma/Bremerton) and Portland/Salem, Ore., ranked seventh and eighth, respectively. These jobs also compete where it matters most — on pay level — offering family-wage jobs for first-time job seekers and midcareer changers alike.

Another good read on this emerging economic sector is the Pew Charitable Trusts’ study, "The Clean Energy Economy." The report breaks down where the jobs are, and again Washington state is listed as one of 12 states that have a "large and growing" clean energy economy.Historically, Washington has been a leader in green energy.

Read the whole column.

Cap and Trade Shelved ... Recession is Over

It's a pair of headlines that belong together.

From the Wall Street Journal: Boxer and Kerry Postpone Release of Cap-and-Trade Bill

From the Seattle Times: In case you missed it, recession is now over

Not sure I buy it, but if the first is right, the second is much more likely to be true.

McDermott's Effort To Breach Snake River Dams Threatens Jobs, Economy

Once again, Rep. Jim McDermott, D- Seattle, has called on Congress to remove four Snake River dams. Here's how Les Blumenthal frames its prospects for McClatchy.

... for the fifth time, the Seattle lawmaker has introduced legislation that likely will go nowhere, put his Democratic colleagues from Washington in an awkward position and sharpen the focus on Snake River dam breaching just as the Obama administration prepares its salmon-recovery plan.

I like that "go nowhere" part. AWB president Don Brunell explains the consequences in his weekly column. 

Without the dams, thousands of jobs would evaporate and an important food producing region would dry up, along with state and local government revenues. Power bills would jump again with the loss of additional hydropower facilities, which supply 70 percent of our state's electricity.

Thankfully, Gov. Chris Gregoire opposes McDermott's effort to remove the dams. She realizes that without the Snake River reservoirs, the region would become an arid wasteland.

What a strange distraction as the region continues to struggle with job creation and investment.