‘How sloppy our climate accounting is’: WA Policy Center uncovers massive error in CCA report
Jan 7, 2026, 5:01 AM | Updated: 3:01 pm
The Washington State Department of Commerce made a 7.5-million-ton mistake regarding the benefits of the Climate Commitment Act (CCA).
The department reported Tuesday that, due to a clerical error, it vastly inflated the projected emission reductions from eight rebate programs — claiming 7.5 million metric tons instead of the actual 78,000.
Todd Myers, Vice President for Research at the Washington Policy Center, was reviewing a Washington State Department of Ecology news release that touted $1.5 billion in CCA investments when a number caught his attention.
“When they sent out the report, they made a claim that the CO2 that had been reduced in the first two years was equivalent to taking 40% of all gas and diesel cars in the state off the road for an entire year,” Myers explained on “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio.
“The other thing, and this is a data point that’s only interesting to geeks like me, which is that it costs $40 per metric ton to do that. Now that was when my eyebrows went up, and I have very bushy eyebrows, and I said that price is way too low,” he continued. “There’s something wrong with this, because in the previous report, it wasn’t $40, it was $1,400 per metric ton. So I knew something was wrong, and I dug into it, and what I found was that there are eight projects in the state that account for 86% of the CO2 reductions that they claimed. And the numbers for those eight projects are almost completely wrong.”
The news release, published in November 2025 and updated Tuesday, detailed how $1.5 billion of CCA revenue was invested in local communities during the 2023-25 biennium. Ecology stated that it is the “most comprehensive accounting of CCA spending to date.”
Myers argues state prioritizes politics over effectiveness
Myers argued the state doesn’t prioritize based on what is most effective, but instead on what is political.
“In this case, the problem was that the eight projects are designed to help people buy heat pumps, replace gas stoves with heat pumps, which reduce less CO2 emissions, but the amount of reduction is very small, and that was what I realized: the numbers being claimed on this are so high,” he said.
Myers reached out to the City of Ellensburg, one of the recipients, to ask where the CO2 emission projections came from. The city told Myers they had no idea where the number came from, but believed it was the Department of Commerce. Ellensburg city officials then reached out to the Department of Commerce, which told them the number came from the Department of Ecology and that the number was wrong and that the department knew it was wrong.
“So it’s not just me saying that these numbers are wrong. They know that they’re wrong,” Myers said. “And what I think this goes to show is that I just think how sloppy our climate accounting is. People talk about climate change being a crisis. There is risk. We need to do something about it, but if the more serious you think it is, the more frustrated you should be with how sloppy our climate accounting is and how frivolously we spend some of this money on things that don’t really do anything for the planet.”
Watch the full discussion in the video above.
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