Environment ballot measures fall short
Proposals fail in Colorado, Arizona and Washington
Efforts to nudge the nation away from burning fossil fuels and toward harnessing renewable source of energy were rejected by voters Tuesday across a swath of resource-rich states in western states.
The failure of environmental ballot measures in Arizona, Colorado — and the likely defeat of a proposal to impose fees on carbon emissions in Washington state — underscore the difficulty of tackling a global problem like climate change at the state and local level, where huge sums of money poured in on both sides.
Even as a United Nations-backed panel of scientists recently warned that the world has barely a decade to radically cut its emissions of greenhouse gases that fuel global warming, the Trump administration has been busy expanding oil and gas drilling and rolling back Obama-era efforts to mitigate climate change. Environmental advocates and Democratic lawmakers have placed much hope in state and local governments to counter those policies.
But while Tuesday saw the election of numerous candidates dedicated to climate action, individual ballot measures aimed at the same goal largely floundered.
Voters in Arizona, one of the nation's most sun-soaked states, shot down a measure that would have accelerated its shift toward generating electricity from sunlight. Residents in oil- and gas-rich Colorado defeated a measure to sharply limit drilling on state-owned land.
Even in the solidly blue state of Washington, initial results looked grim for perhaps the most consequential climaterelated ballot measure in the country this fall: A statewide initiative that would have imposed a first-in-the-nation fee on emissions of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of the greenhouse gases that drive global warming.
While voters in King County, home to Seattle, turned out heavily in favour of the measure, residents across the rest of the state largely opposed it.
One bright spot for environmental advocates came in Nevada, where voters appeared poised to pass a measure similar to the one Arizonans rejected.
It would require utilities to generate 50 per cent of their electricity from renewables by 2030.
The proposal was leading handily with most votes tallied Wednesday. But before the measure could become law, it has to survive a second vote in 2020.
Since President Donald Trump took office, a handful of states — notably California — have vowed to serve as a counter weight on energy and environmental policy to the president, who frequently dismisses the government's own findings that human activity is warming the globe. In September, California codified into law a commitment to produce 100 per cent of its electricity from carbon-free courses by 2045.
But Tuesday's ballot-question results demonstrate the limits to which other states are willing to follow California's lead — particularly when campaigners against the proposals emphasize the potential impact on pocketbooks.
"What we learned from this election, in states like Colorado, Arizona, and Washington, is that voters reject policies that would make energy more expensive and less reliable," Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, an industry-backed free-market advocacy group, said in a statement.
Supporters and proponents poured an eye-popping amount of money, more than $54 million, into the fight over the future of energy in Arizona. Only two Senate races in the country — in Florida and Texas — saw more spending this year.
The influx of cash underscores how much both sides believed was at stake. The ballot initiative would have amended the Arizona constitution to require electric utilities to use renewable energy for 50 per cent of its power generation by 2035.
That might seem easily within reach in sunny Arizona. But the state now gets only about 6 per cent of its energy from the sun.
The state's biggest utility, Arizona Public Service, or APS, emerged as the most fervent opponent of the proposal, pouring more than $30 million into a political action committee called Arizonans for Affordable Electricity. In an aggressive ad campaign, the group argued that the measure would cost households an additional $1,000 a year.
"We've said throughout this campaign there is a better way to create a cleanenergy future for Arizona that is also affordable and reliable," APS chief executive Don Brandt said in a statement Tuesday evening.
Meanwhile, an alliance of dozens of organizations called Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona, argued that the shift toward cleaner energy will improve public health and create good jobs in the state. The group got a huge assist from California billionaire investor and political activist Tom Steyer, who donated the lion's share of the nearly $23.6 million raised through the end of September.
Neighbouring Nevada had a similar proposal on its ballot, though the outcome there is unclear as of Tuesday evening.
Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia already have programs, known as Renewable Portfolio Standards, or RPS, that require utilities to ensure that certain amount of the electricity they sell comes from renewable resources.
But only a fraction of those have targets as ambitious as the ones proposed this year in Arizona and Nevada. For instance, New York and New Jersey also have targets of 50 per cent renewable energy by
2050. Hawaii would require 100 per cent of its energy to be from renewable sources by
2045.
During the 2018 campaign, however, 11 Democratic candidates for governor vowed to try to get all of their respective states' electricity from "clean" energy sources by the middle of the century, according to surveys done by the state affiliates of the League of Conservation Voters. Several of those candidates, including Jared Polis in Colorado, won their races.