The curious death of Initiative 1631 and what it says about the future of addressing climate change.
Still, it wasn’t advertising campaigns or partisanship alone that killed the tax: it got mired in the same murk that has slowed climate action for decades. The climate is too big for us to easily wrap our minds around, and so it proves to be a difficult issue to legislate. This election cycle, Jordan Stevenson was a fellow at the advocacy group Our Climate, which supported Washington’s carbon tax. A 20-year-old woman with square glasses and a knack for getting people to talk, she spent weeks knocking on doors in the Spokane area, on the far eastern side of the state, along with her husband. She also talked to her father, back home in Vancouver. “He said, ‘I’m glad you’re working on this,’ ” she told me. ” ‘I’ll take a look.’ ” But in the end, she’s not sure he even voted. When she spoke to voters in Spokane, not many people there knew what the tax was, let alone what it had to do with the wildfire smoke outside their windows. “It still didn’t seem concrete or tangible to people,” Stevenson said. Voters told her: “The money I pay in taxes, the increase at the gas pump, it will never benefit me.”
Initiative 1631’s demise might have had something to do with moments like this, where the connection between taxing carbon and more immediate fears about one’s health or one’s job becomes obscured. The initiative promised to pool funds for projects, including new bus lines, land conservation grants, and training to transition fossil fuel workers into other jobs. But when people need to choose between their day-to-day concerns and a future pot of money for projects they can’t imagine, the day-to-day wins. Our minds are better suited to immediate threats—like snarling hyenas or flammable trains—and we struggle with the abstract dangers of a changing climate.
“People don’t get worried about problems that aren’t happening today or tomorrow,” Dolšak said. Those climate hawks who believe that extreme weather events, like wildfires and hurricanes, will inspire climate inactivists are overly optimistic, Prakash said. “An extreme weather event doesn’t affect political leanings.” Ongoing, intensifying hurricanes in Florida, for example, have not necessarily driven people to vote for liberal candidates who back climate action, and extreme weather has a relatively small impact on public opinion.
“A lot of environmentalists are approaching conservation and pollution reduction from a normative perspective: We have to reduce pollution and protect the environment,” Dolšak told me. Instead, the question is over the cost required to take action: “How much is society willing to pay to reduce this problem versus another, equally important problem?”
Despite the work of scientists and researchers, whose models are getting better at explaining the chaotic relationships between climate and weather, the truth is that the destructiveness of a particular storm is hard to link straight to a changing climate—what experts call “the attribution problem.” Smoky summer days in Idaho can seem far removed from a tax, or fee, that will somehow reduce carbon emissions, somehow slow climate change, and somehow decrease wildfires. In this way, climate change can boggle the imagination. Unsurprisingly, the carbon tax found wide support among the state’s tribal nations, some of whom face the obvious possibility of displacement due to rising seas, and in Seattle’s communities of color, where air pollution already causes higher-than-average rates of asthma.