Seattle/King County Climate News
Robin Briggs
Seattle
Council votes tomorrow on the final form of the Transportation Levy for the November ballot. When originally proposed back in April, it was $1.35B, but through advocacy it is now a larger levy with $149 million in additional funding for multi-modal transportation. Big changes in this levy over past years is money for new people streets and public spaces, additional funding for sidewalk construction, $113.5 million for bike safety, $41 million for equity focused safety improvements, and $70 million for Vision Zero projects on the most unsafe streets in the city. Many, many people spoke up along the way to get these improvements, but a lot of the work was spearheaded by Disability Rights Washington and Seattle Greenways.
I-137, the social housing initiative, turned in signatures, and is likely headed for the ballot, either in November or February. The previous initiative approved a social housing authority, and this new initiative would provide funding for social housing using an excess compensation payroll tax applied to companies with employees who are paid more than $1M. The income from the measure is expected to be about $50M/year, and would be dedicated to social housing.
King County
An audit of King County Metro finds it unlikely that Metro will be able to meet their goals for electrifying its bus fleet by 2035 (Seattle Times, paywall). Metro expressed confidence that they can do it, but it is not clear what, if anything, they are doing to mitigate the risks raised in the audit.
State
I-2066 has turned in 400,000 signatures, and is on track to appear on the November ballot. If approved, this initiative would overturn key parts of the law passed this last session to transition Puget Sound Energy away from methane (natural gas). It would also bar cities from making their own rules against methane usage, and nullify recent changes to the State's Energy Code designed to get more electric heat pumps in new housing instead of gas furnaces. The initiative was put forward by BIAW, the home building association, and managed by Let's Go Washington, which put forward 6 other conservative initiatives earlier this year. There is a coalition of environmental organizations forming to oppose the initiative.
The State has released a draft of the proposed linkage of the Washington carbon allowances market under the Climate Commitment Act to the California & Quebec market. There will be a webinar on it July 10 from 2 – 4 p.m.
BNSF has been ordered to pay the Swinonish Tribe almost $400 million for trespassing by sending crude oil through tribal land in rail cars repeatedly over years, violating a 1991 agreement.
Elsewhere
You may remember about two months ago I reported on a demonstration outside Amazon headquarters, protesting Amazon's support for a new natural gas pipeline to carry fracked gas from Canada to Idaho, Washington and Oregon. Now, Amazon has announced that it will not use gas from this pipeline for its new data center, as previously planned (Seattle Times, paywall). Kudos to the protesters for highlighting an issue that was passing under most folk's radar!
The EPA released the fifth edition of the Climate Change Indicators. It observes: "U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have decreased slightly since 1990, but still make up a sizable share of the world’s emissions." Most of Washington has experienced between 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming in the last hundred years; many of the other parts of the country have not fared as well.
Emissions from air freight is up 25% since 2019, according to a recent report from stand.earth. The US accounts for 40% of the world's air freight emissions. It observes: "Research published last year forecast that global annual parcel volume could increase to 800bn parcels a year by 2030 [PDF], compared with 315bn in 2022."