Harger: WA’s new 394-page climate plan admits the 2030 target is ‘hard to meet,’ can’t close a 7-million-ton gap

I’m not a climate scientist. I’m a guy who pays for gas in Washington and wanted to understand what we’re getting for it.

So I looked through the state’s new Climate Commitment Action (CCA) plan. All 394 pages of it, released last month by the Department of Ecology. It’s a lot. I had questions going in. I have more coming out.

The Climate Commitment Act isn’t free. Combine it with state fuel taxes, and Washington drivers pay some of the highest gas prices in the country. When a program costs working families real money at the pump every week, it’s fair to read the state’s own report with a critical eye.

I read it. The tone is enthusiastic. Sometimes, more enthusiastic than the data underneath it warrants.

The state’s press release announcing the plan led with $17 billion in projected savings and 38,000 new jobs. It didn’t mention the 2030 target the report itself calls “hard to meet,” the 7-million-ton modeling gap the state says will be solved “in the future,” or that 40% of those clean energy jobs pay below the report’s own living wage threshold. That’s the gap I want to talk about.

The 2030 target the state already calls ‘hard to meet’

Washington passed a law requiring our emissions to drop to a certain level by 2020. We didn’t just miss it. We finished 2021 higher than we were in 1990.

Then the state passed the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) and set a new target for 2030: Reduce emissions to 55 million metric tons. The most recent count we have is from 2021, and it was 96.1 million.

So, in five years, we need to cut emissions by almost half. From a state that just missed its last target, we’re going the wrong direction.

The report’s own executive summary calls the 2030 target “hard to meet.” That’s the state grading itself. I’m taking them at their word.

The 7-million-ton hole the model can’t close

The state’s climate model can’t close a 7-million-ton gap by 2050. The report acknowledges this and states that the model “assumes that the way to address those emissions will be identified in the future.”

Those aren’t ordinary tailpipe and smokestack emissions. They’re non-CO2 greenhouse gases. Methane from dairy cows, manure lagoons, and landfills. Nitrous oxide from fertilized farmland. Hydrofluorocarbons from refrigeration and air conditioning. Process emissions from cement and chemicals.

They’re hard to cut for a simple reason. You can’t unplug a cow. You can’t run a fertilized field on electricity. There’s no clean version of the chemical reaction inside a cement kiln. Some of these will eventually come down with better refrigerants and new manufacturing processes. Some won’t.

So the plan to hit net-zero by 2050 has a 7-million-ton hole in it, and the official answer is that someone will figure it out later.

Imagine a friend laying out a household budget. They’ve got 90% of it worked out. The last 10% they’ll cover with a raise that hasn’t been offered yet, from a job they haven’t applied for. You’d ask some follow-up questions before you signed off.

The state is asking us to sign off.

Other states are cutting emissions, too. Without a CCA

Between 2005 and 2023, Washington cut per-capita CO2 emissions by about 36%. That’s real progress. The plan deserves credit where it earns it.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. Over the same stretch, Florida cut per-capita CO2 by 32%. Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, North Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware all matched or beat Washington. None of them has a cap-and-invest program. None of them has CCA-level fuel costs.

What did most of them have? Coal plants that could switch to natural gas. Washington didn’t have that lever to pull because we already had hydro. So our path was always going to be harder and more expensive.

Fine. I get that. But if the goal is lower emissions and other states are getting there without squeezing working families at the pump, it’s worth asking whether we’re paying a premium for the same outcome.

The 40% of clean energy jobs that pay below a living wage

The report says 40% of clean energy jobs in Washington pay less than $30 an hour. That’s the report’s own living wage threshold.

So what’s a clean energy job? Most of them are installation and retrofit work. Solar panel installers on residential roofs. Heat pump technicians. Weatherization crews adding insulation. EV charger installers. Battery storage assemblers. Electricians wiring buildings for the all-electric future the plan envisions.

Some of those pay well, especially union electrical work and utility-scale projects. A lot of them don’t. Residential solar and heat pump installation tends to pay trade wages without trade benefits. The state is asking working families to fund a transition that, by the report’s own numbers, won’t lift four out of 10 of the workers doing the actual transition into a living wage.

The grid has to nearly double. The plan is also talking about taking power off it

The plan projects Washington will need 83% more electricity by 2050. Heat pumps. EVs. Data centers. All of it runs on the grid.

That’s a lot of new clean power. The plan is light on where it comes from. More solar and wind, more storage, more transmission, all of which is fine on paper. Building it on the timeline the plan implies is the part I’d want to see worked out in more detail.

And while the state is planning to nearly double the grid, the same climate conversation includes removing the four Lower Snake River dams, which produce roughly 1,000 average megawatts of carbon-free power, enough to power somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 homes, depending on whose math you use.

A fair point about those dams. They’re old. Ice Harbor came online in 1961. Lower Granite, the youngest of the four, in 1975. Most hydro dams are designed for a 50 to 100-year service life, and these are getting up there. Some engineers argue that as the turbines and concrete age, removal may eventually be the practical call rather than another round of expensive overhauls. That’s a real debate, and reasonable people land on different sides of it.

But the climate plan doesn’t engage with it that way. It treats removal as a climate strategy while assuming that thousands of megawatts can be replaced without setting back the rest of the plan. Independent analyses, including studies commissioned by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and the 2022 Murray-Inslee report, have pegged replacement costs at hundreds of millions to billions of dollars annually, with public power rate increases in the double digits.

Credit where it’s due

The plan isn’t all rough edges. Wildfire resilience funding is real and useful. Air quality improvements in what the state calls “overburdened communities” are showing up in the data. Those are the neighborhoods that are closest to ports, freeways, refineries, and industrial zones. They breathe more diesel exhaust and live with more pollution than the rest of us, and they tend to be lower-income. Cleaner air there is a real win.

The October 2025 revision, following the federal Omnibus Budget Bill, is more transparent about which assumptions changed and why. Per-capita emissions are down. Nitrogen oxide pollution, the stuff that drives smog and asthma, is projected to drop more than 70% by 2050. Those are real wins, too.

One piece of actual good news

While I was reading Washington’s plan, climate modelers at the international level dropped some news. A new set of global emissions scenarios from the team led by Detlef van Vuuren, the foundation for the IPCC’s upcoming Seventh Assessment Report, replaced the old worst-case projections.

The scenarios that had the world warming 4 to 5 degrees Celsius by 2100 are now considered implausible. Not because the problem went away. Because solar and wind costs collapsed by about 90% over the last decade, real-world emissions stopped tracking the doomsday curve, and existing policies are actually doing something.

The new high-end “policy failure” scenario tops out around 3-3.5 degrees. Still bad. About a degree better than what we were staring at a few years ago.

The worst case got smaller. The world is making progress, mostly because cheap, clean energy turned out to be a better motivator than any treaty.

That’s the part that matters for Washington. The wins aren’t coming from any one state’s cap-and-invest program. They’re coming from technology getting cheap enough that the rest of the world can afford to use it.

What I’m left with

I believe emissions need to come down. I’m asking whether this particular approach, at this particular cost, is producing results we couldn’t have gotten a cheaper way.

Washington is less than 0.2% of global emissions. Even if this plan worked exactly as advertised, hit every target, closed the 7-million-ton gap, replaced the dams, doubled the grid on schedule, the global temperature curve wouldn’t be noticeable. Climate change is a national and international problem. It needs national and international solutions, and the good news is the rest of the world is finally bending the curve.

That doesn’t mean Washington sits on its hands. It does mean that a state with 0.2% of the emissions shouldn’t ask working families to pay as if we’re the ones who can fix it.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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