‘We’ve sued them twice’: WA Policy Center forces ecology department to release climate data

After the Washington State Department of Ecology was taken to court, judges have asked it to provide data it is withholding, which should offer insight into how the state’s climate change fight is going.

Todd Myers, vice president of research at the Washington Policy Center (WPC), spoke about why the WPC sought legal action after the department failed to release its numbers years past expectation.

“We’ve sued them twice now to get them to release this data because we believe they’re in violation of the law, but they released half the data that we wanted, so we’ll take that,” Myers said on “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio. “The most recent data, until recently, for Washington’s CO2 emissions was in 2021. This data is important because we’re supposed to be reaching certain targets by 2030 for how many CO2 emissions Washington has. It’s supposed to be going down every year.”

WA’s CO2 emissions dropping at a fraction of the targeted pace

Although CO2 emissions did drop in the latest data release, Myers explained that they were nowhere near the department’s targets and that the goals it set may have been politically motivated rather than based on science.

“In order for us to know if we’re on track, we have to have the data,” Myers said. “What I argued is that there probably is a hint as to why they were so reluctant to release the data, because the 2022 statewide CO2 emissions were 0.5% below 2021. In order for us to meet our 2030 targets, they have to go down by about 5% per year. So we’re nowhere close to being on the pace to meet those 2030 targets.

“They also released preliminary data for 2023 and 2024. Those two years are interesting because they’re the first two years that the Climate Commitment Act was in effect,” Myers continued. “Over the course of those two years combined, CO2 emissions fell by less than 3%. Again, we’re supposed to be 5% per year, and over two years, it was less than 3%. We are failing very badly at reducing emissions the way they promised.”

Spike questioned whether the expectations were simply unattainable from the beginning, and the Department of Ecology is making sound progress, but it set a tougher goal than anticipated.

“Did they just overshoot from the get-go? Are they ever going to be in a position to admit that, because that will undermine the funding structure they put in place?” Spike asked.

“That’s a big part of it,” Myers responded. “The 2030 target is supposed to be 45% of the 1990 emissions level by 2030. Anything that is divisible by five or ends exactly on a decade is not science, it’s politics. They keep claiming, ‘Oh, no, this is a scientific target.’ It was never a scientific target. It was always a political target. One of the reasons we’re having difficulty is simply that the target itself was non-science.

“The other thing is, instead of being serious about reducing emissions, we’ve wasted lots of money on very frivolous things, expanding government, political projects that do almost nothing to reduce emissions,” Myers continued. “It’s not only that we have bad targets, but it’s that we’re not spending the money well to meet those bad targets. Other than that, it’s great.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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