The states where climate progress is on the ballot

This story was originally published by Grist.

After a decade of failed attempts to charge polluters for emitting carbon dioxide, Washington state’s landmark cap-and-trade program finally started up last year, raising billions of dollars for electric school buses, energy-efficient heat pumps, and free transit for young people, among other projects. But now the Climate Commitment Act’s entire existence is in question. Opponents of the law—namely, the hedge fund manager Brian Heywood—have argued that it amounts to a “hidden gas tax” and managed to get an initiative to repeal it on the November ballot. 

As climate change has been dragged into the culture wars, a shift in the political winds can put established efforts to reduce emissions in peril. In Minnesota, a law to move the state to 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040, signed last year by Governor Tim Walz—now the Democratic vice presidential candidate—could lose momentum. Democrats hold narrow majorities in the state legislature, and Republicans could gain enough seats to stall efforts to expand renewable power and derail plans to ensure that disadvantaged communities see the benefits of green projects.

“There would be efforts to undo all of it,” said Patty Acomb, a Democratic state representative in Minnesota who chairs the House Climate and Energy Finance and Policy committee. “And we don’t have time to waste for that. Even with the momentum that we have, you know, 2040 is coming pretty quickly.” 

Unless Democrats somehow manage to take both chambers of Congress at the same time that Vice President Kamala Harris wins the White House, the best hope for climate action is likely to be at the state level. The November election could tilt state legislatures to the left, allowing Democrats to enact new policies to reduce emissions, or to the right, enabling Republicans to challenge established programs. 

“With Congress in gridlock, meaningful climate policy is moving through state legislatures, making state legislative elections absolutely crucial this year for advancing climate action,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. In states such as Arizona and New Hampshire, Democratic legislators have been waiting for an opportunity to take control and pass their climate agenda. It would only take flipping two seats in each of Arizona’s chambers to give Democrats a majority, opening the door to enact Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs’ plan to address the state’s water crisis and expand clean energy.

The work of eliminating carbon emissions will take decades of sustained political will no matter the country, but the fractured nature of U.S. politics makes this challenge even harder. Take the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the landmark climate law signed by President Joe Biden in 2022, which has already put more than $360 billion toward clean energy and green technologies, like electric vehicle and battery projects. Republicans in Congress have tried to roll back provisions of the law dozens of times—even though most of its money is going to districts represented by Republicans, benefiting their constituents. Those threats have made some investors hesitant to put their weight behind cleantech projects. And if former President Donald Trump wins the presidential race in November, his administration could hamper the rollout of the funds, potentially making some projects unviable.

At the state level, however, even narrow majorities can deliver a lot of legislation. Since the 2022 election, Minnesota Democrats have had a “trifecta”—holding the governor’s seat and both legislative chambers—paving the way for long-planned climate policies to pass after years of waiting. “We had been pushing forward initiatives over several years, but they were being blocked by the Republican-controlled Senate,” Acomb said. “And so there was a glut of things that had been vetted, that had been worked on, that were ready to pass.” 

In the past two years, legislators created a program to help utilities and local governments secure IRA funding, established a “green bank” to provide financial assistance for clean energy projects along with another measure to speed up their permitting process, and allocated $38 million for weatherizing homes to improve energy efficiency.

Democrats currently control the Minnesota state Senate by a single seat, and a special election in November will decide which party gets the majority. The Republican candidate for that Senate seat, Kathleen Fowke, is married to the former CEO of Xcel Energy, a utility and natural gas company. Fowke is facing off against former state senator Ann Johnson Stewart, whose platform calls for “comprehensive solutions to our climate crisis.” While Fowke also champions “clean, affordable energy solutions,” Acomb said that the heavily utility-funded candidate “probably wouldn’t be working toward the same [climate] goals” that Democrats would want.

Another state that managed to pass meaningful climate legislation in the past two years is Michigan, where Democrats also got a trifecta in 2022 and soon passed a law requiring the state to get 100 percent of its electricity from clean sources by 2040. “We’ve seen really just resounding and massive progress on clean energy and climate policy in Michigan,” said Nick Dodge, the communications director for the Michigan League of Conservation Voters. Similar to Minnesota, the state also passed measures to promote energy efficiency and streamline the process for approving large-scale renewable energy projects. According to a recent report from the consulting firm 5 Lakes Energy, these policies, in combination with federal IRA funding, are expected to save families almost $300 on energy bills per year by 2030, as well as slash the state’s greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector by 65 percent.

In response to these efforts, Republicans in Michigan launched “immediate attacks,” according to Courtney Bourgoin, deputy director for the Midwest region with Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy organization. This spring, a campaign tied to the fossil fuel industry tried to muster support for a ballot initiative to reverse the state policy aimed at speeding up the process for approving new solar and wind projects, but failed to get enough signatures from voters.

It’s a different story in Washington state, where an initiative to repeal the Climate Commitment Act got the hundreds of thousands of signatures it needed to make the November ballot. Heywood, the millionaire Republican behind the proposal, has been promoting the measure by temporarily taking over gas stations and offering discounted prices to drivers — a tactic that has drawn accusations of violating bribery and corruption laws.

The “cap-and-invest” system establishes a statewide limit on greenhouse gas emissions that lowers over time and creates a market for businesses to buy pollution permits—a way to prod them to cut emissions and, at the same time, raise billions of dollars for installing EV chargers, improving air quality, and helping Native American tribes prepare for the effects of climate change. It requires the state to cut its emissions nearly in half by 2030, compared to 1990 levels.

Initiative 2117 would not only strike down the program—considered a model for New York and other states considering similar policies—but it would also bar Washington from capping carbon emissions in the future. 

“It would hamstring leaders in the state for a generation,” said Mark Prentice, a spokesperson for the “No on 2117” campaign. Some 475 organizations across the state have joined “No on 2117,” including businesses, tribal nations, and faith groups, in addition to the usual environmentally friendly suspects. They’ve raised more than $14 million to protect the law, and have been urging voters to reject the measure by campaigning door-to-door, airing advertisements online and on TV, and showing up at events like music festivals around the state. 

“We’ve always known this is going to be a really tough fight,” Prentice said, “and so we are communicating with voters however we can in every community.” 

While previous polls suggested the vote would be close, one conducted earlier this month found that 46 percent of voters said they’d vote to keep the Climate Commitment Act, compared to 30 percent who said they’d vote to repeal it. Even though the political rhetoric around climate change is often divisive, policies to address the problem are broadly popular—much more so than most people realize. A poll from CNN last year found that almost three-quarters of the public, including half of Republicans, wanted the U.S. to cut emissions in half by 2030.

“This isn’t just a red and blue issue. These are people’s lives,” Bourgoin said. “The politics around it just does not align with the way voters feel about these issues.”