Inslee announces climate priorities for upcoming 2024 legislative session

Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee announced his 2024 climate policy priorities on Monday during a live event hosted by the Miller Community Center in Seattle.

Inslee said he is proposing $941 million in additional investments in climate action and clean energy, and announced three pieces of legislation that lawmakers will debate during the session starting Jan. 8.

“We’re not going to succumb to the big oil companies that are trying to destroy our pollution laws in the state of Washington,” Inslee said. “They have been causing pollution too long, they have been whip-siding us with these ridiculous gas prices, they have been standing in the way of progress, they are an artifact of a bygone era. It is time for them to be treated fairly, which means consumers get a fair break.”

The governor was joined by other climate leaders in the state such as Sen. Joe Nguyen, D-White Center, Rep. Beth Doglio, D-Olympia, House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon, D-Burien, and Leonard Forsman, Tribal Chairman of the Suquamish Tribe.

Nguyen said he will be sponsoring a transparency bill that is aimed at oil companies.

In a press conference with reporters prior to Inslee’s announcement, Becky Kelley, a senior climate policy adviser for the governor, said that the heart of the legislation sponsored by Nguyen is transparency and accountability for oil companies.

The bill seeks to find answers to questions about how oil companies set their prices and would require “opening up what is unseen,” she said, to find out who’s profiting at what level. The bill would allow the state unprecedented visibility, Kelley said.

Kelley and other advisers noted that a similar measure recently took effect in California in June. According to Kelley, California saw strange market behaviors earlier in the year, and when the law took effect, there was a “flattening” of prices.

Other legislation will be on the table this upcoming year too.

While Doglio sponsored legislation last year that would limit the state’s dependence on oil, the bill stalled in the Senate. That piece of legislation will be back on the docket again this year, Doglio said.

Inslee’s policy advisers noted to reporters that the bill continues to be a “top priority” and that the bill would provide a pathway to phasing out oil in the state entirely.

The third bill noted by the governor Monday would build on the state’s Climate Commitment Act (CCA) and will be requested by the Department of Ecology. The bill aims to align technical details of the state CCA with California and Quebec, with the intent of merging the markets by 2026. California and Quebec already have a joint market.

All three jurisdictions have a “shared objective,” said DOE Climate Policy Manager Joel Creswell, and all three jurisdictions would benefit by aligning their policies. Creswell said that the legislation would show “real benefits” such as joint allowance auctions in all three markets, as well as a more liquid market and more stable gas prices.

Inslee also talked about some of the funding from the latest proposal.

During the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers appropriated $2.1 billion from CCA revenues to address climate change for the 2023-25 biennium. Inslee’s latest proposal would be funded from additional CCA revenues, and would bring total spending to $3 billion for the 2023-25 biennium.

Most of the proposed funding for the 2024 session — a total of $366 million — would go towards advancing environmental justice to benefit “vulnerable communities and those hardest hit by pollution,” according to the governor’s office.

One of the investments the governor is hoping to make would provide low- and moderate-income residents with a one-time $200 credit on residential electricity bills to offset high oil and gas prices. Approximately 750,000 households in the state would benefit, a spokesperson for the governor’s office told reporters.

The funding would also go toward transitioning diesel school buses to electric zero-emission buses, grants for schools to replace old heating and cooling systems with energy efficient upgrades, salmon and fish passage projects, state highway electric vehicle chargers, and storm water retrofits.

The governor has recently faced criticism after a KING5 article reported that a former Washington State Department of Transportation economist accused state leaders of retaliation after he refused to lie about the effect that the state cap-and-trade program would have on gas prices.