It’s bad enough we have to deal with the backdoor virgins in sensible shoes at the Seattle Times editorial board, but now we have to fend off the views of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, whose recent potshots at Washington must be driven by a bout of low self-esteem from being the last conservatives left standing in New York City.
Last week, the WSJ called out Governor Jay Inslee’s carbon tax proposal under the headline “Climate of Unaccountability.” The axe to grind? One of Inslee’s top energy advisors is working remotely from Morocco while his wife has a teaching job, and another’s position is funded by a climate and sustainability think tank in D.C. called the World Resources Institute.
The lonely conservatives at the Journal called our Morocco Mole a climate hypocrite for commuting from Marrakesh to Olympia and suggested that some secret outside money from the other Washington was running our energy policy.
There is nothing illegal about either of these arrangements, as the paper acknowledges. Under the Washington Telecommuting Act, employees can work remotely, and there have been grant-funded jobs in the governor’s office before on matters like shellfish, homelessness, and aerospace. (We even have one here in city government: the salary of Chief Resilience Officer Jessica Finn Coven is paid by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative.)
I don’t know Chris Davis, our man in Marrakesh, or Reed Schuler, the one whose job is underwritten by the think tank. An Inslee spokesperson defended both arrangements and both employees as doing their jobs just fine, thank you very much.
But the bigger point? The WSJ’s arguments are a chickenshit way of undermining the push for a carbon tax. Critiquing Inslee as he rises to national prominence—Jay 2020?—is legit, but the line of attack is a bogus distraction.
Let’s dismantle it:
1) Hopping the non-existent Seattle-Marrakesh shuttle flight on a weekly or even monthly basis would be ridiculous, but Davis’ one visit to Washington in six months isn’t beyond the pale. I moved to Seattle because my fiancée got a job at Fred Hutch and goes to a lab daily, just like Davis’ wife, a teacher, has to be in a classroom. I’m fortunate that I can do journalism mostly remotely, and continued to work for my old employer from here. That’s one of the benefits of our addicted-to-the-Internet age—people don’t have to sacrifice their careers so their partners can take opportunities. The free marketeers at WSJ should be celebrating, not denigrating, that option.
2) World Resources Institute is not the Koch Brothers. There is no financial gain here for the wonks who crank out groundbreaking research on energy, climate change, cities, food, forests, and water, just, you know, a firm belief that we need to save the fucking planet. If anything, we should be grateful we can hire a few smart people to work in state government and not foot the bill. Again, the WSJ conservatives should be thrilled to save taxpayers money.
Yes, flying is every liberal’s biggest climate vice, including climate change crusaders like Inslee who travel to give speeches at the United Nations and attend international climate conferences even if his trips did more good than me taking advantage of an Alaska Airlines flash sale last weekend to enjoy a California getaway.
KUOW’s Terrestrial podcast just did a great episode on a woman who gave up flying. I applaud her, but I’m doubtful enough of us will make that individual choice to help with the climate crisis. Humans absolutely need to change their behavior, but I admit that I want to have my cake and eat it, too: Let’s de-carbonize transportation and the economy so we don’t have to return to the Middle Ages, when most European serfs rarely, if ever, traveled more than a few dozen miles from their village.
So how do we get there? By taxing the shit out of our carbon consuming ways. If I want to get in the car or hop on a plane, make me pay for it—and then put the money into helping those affected the most by climate change while making sure the lowest income people among us aren’t hosed. That’s the main argument of the Front & Centered Coalition, a POC-led climate justice advocacy group.
What’s more, the tax will be on industrial polluters in our state like Boeing and Alaska Airlines. If you believe Inslee’s innovation hype, that’s the stick to encourage our state’s aviation powerhouses to work overtime making air travel less of a climate change contributor.
If the WSJ wants to take down Inslee, they should call him out for being mum on the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Debate the finer points of a British Columbian carbon tax versus California-style cap and trade versus how to price carbon at all. But to undermine the whole enterprise on specious grounds with the bully pulpit of their editorial board smacks of climate change denialism, just cloaked in high-falutin’ prose instead of Trumpian Twitter inanity.