Voters Said No to Electrification. Or Did They?

Berkeley, California and Washington State put the transition to all-electric buildings on the ballot last week, and in both cases, it seemed to fail the test. Voters in Berkeley overwhelmingly rejected a proposed tax on natural gas that would raise money for electrification projects. In one fell swoop, voters in Washington State repealed several of their nation-leading policies that encourage electric over gas appliances and barred cities and towns from passing similar policies in the future.

On the face of things, the results appear to show voters retreating from ambitious climate action and rejecting electrification — a concerning signal at a time when federal support for decarbonization is about to evaporate and state and local leadership to cut emissions will become paramount. But the specific circumstances behind each vote suggest that’s not the whole story.

The Berkeley proposal was submitted by a small group of activists who knew it was more ideologically driven than politically feasible, and it proved to be controversial even among diehard climate advocates in the city. The Washington State initiative slid onto the ballot just three months before the election and ultimately passed on a razor thin margin. The two cases offer distinct lessons and takeaways, but to climate advocates, a budding backlash to electrification is not one of them.

Berkeley

The Berkeley proposal, otherwise known as Measure GG, was largely written by one person. Daniel Tahara is a software engineer at Tesla by day, and a climate activist by night with 350 Bay Area, a local chapter of the national climate advocacy group 350.org. For the past few years, he’s been animated by a question that I, too, am frequently asking: How are most people going to afford the steep cost of retrofitting their homes to use electric appliances?

To Tahara, finding an answer became more pressing last year when the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, a regional authority that regulates pollution, approved rules to phase out the sale of gas appliances. Starting in 2027, Berkeley residents will no longer be able to purchase a new gas-fired water heater if their old one fails — they’ll have to go electric. The rule applies to gas-fired furnaces and boilers in 2029. “We've got a lot of old buildings,” Tahara told me. “They would need a lot of electrical work to support new appliances, and people just don't have the money for it.”

His solution was Measure GG, an ordinance that would have imposed a tax of $2.96 per therm of natural gas used by buildings larger than 15,000 square feet. The estimated $26.7 million per year raised by the tax would go into a fund to help everyone else in town pay for electrification retrofits.

Tahara rallied a number of local environmental and community groups around the idea, but he did not have the support of the bigger non-profits and advocacy orgs that work on electrification policy in California, including the Building Decarbonization Coalition, Rewiring America, RMI, the Sierra Club, or the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"Any large blanket tax hike without input from those it would impact, no plans for a managed transition to the new fees, and no analysis on who is most likely to benefit or be burdened is likely to face real challenges with voters,” Alejandra Mejia Cunningham, the senior manager of building decarbonization for the NRDC, told me via email. “It is very important for tax-based policy proposals to be robust and thoroughly socialized."

I also talked to several Berkeley-based electrification supporters who voted no on Measure GG. Tom Graly, who chairs a local electrification working group, told me part of the reason the policy proved so controversial is that it singled out some of the city’s most beloved institutions, such as the Berkeley Bowl supermarket, a local chain, and the Berkeley Repertory Theater. The theater estimated the tax would cost it up to $69,000 per year, while converting off of gas would cost millions. “This well-intentioned ballot measure with its immediate implementation would be very harmful to our struggling organization,” Tom Parrish, the theater’s managing director said in a statement for the “No on GG” campaign.

Tahara based the tax on estimates for what’s called the “social cost of carbon,” or the projected economic damage that every additional ton of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere will cause. But the number Tahara chose was on the high end — more than double the number the Biden administration uses when it weighs the costs and benefits of new regulations on carbon. If passed, the tax would more than double the cost of using natural gas in large buildings. He said some national groups gave him feedback on the proposal, like phasing in the tax over time and building in more exemptions, which he might consider for a future version. But he and his partners on the measure wanted to preserve their core thesis, which was that climate damages are already happening and are unaccounted for.

“I think part of our responsibility as local activists is to put out new ideas, to push the status quo,” he said. “I don’t think there’s been a lot of that that’s been happening in the last couple years.”

In Tahara’s view, the measure failed because the opposition campaign had a lot more money, and because even though Berkeley is often called the birthplace of the electrify everything movement, there’s still a lot of people in town who are completely unaware of the harm natural gas causes to the climate and to public health. On that, Graly agreed. “There's a huge education gap,” he said. “People just don't think about hot water. They turn on the faucet and the water is hot, and they're happy.”

Washington

Initiative 2066 in Washington State was a wide-ranging proposal to both roll back existing policies and preempt future ones. It was so wide-ranging, in fact, that its opponents believe it’s illegal under the state’s “single subject” rule for ballot measures, and they plan to fight it in court.

If the measure stands, it will invalidate the state’s nation-leading residential and commercial energy codes that strongly incentivize builders to forego gas hookups. It will remove a provision in state statute that requires Washington’s energy codes to gradually tighten toward zero-emissions new construction by 2031. It will repeal key parts of a law the state legislature passed earlier this year that require Washington’s biggest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to consider alternatives to replacing aging gas infrastructure or building new gas pipelines. And it will ban cities and towns from passing any local ordinances that “prohibit, penalize, or discourage” the use of gas in buildings.

The initiative was one of four put on the ballot by Let’s Go Washington, a group bankrolled by hedge fund manager and multimillionaire Brian Heywood, and had the Building Industry Association of Washington as its primary sponsor, alongside a number of other pro-gas, pro-business, and realty groups.

There’s no doubt 2066 is a significant setback in the state’s progress toward cutting carbon emissions. But when I asked climate advocates in Washington how they were interpreting the outcome, they pointed to a handful of reasons why they weren’t too concerned about public sentiment around decarbonization.

First, the vote was incredibly close, with just over 51% of voters checking “yes.” Second, another initiative Let’s Go Washington put on the ballot — 2117, which would have repealed the state’s big umbrella climate law that puts a declining cap on emissions — unambiguously failed, with 62% voting “no.” Third, they argue the split reflects confusion about what 2066 would do.

The “yes on 2066” campaign sold it as a measure to “protect energy choice” and “stop the gas ban,” warning that otherwise utility rates would increase and the state would force homeowners to pay tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit their homes. There are kernels of truth to the messaging — the state’s building codes seriously limit developers’ ability to put gas hookups in new construction without outright banning them. The new law affecting Puget Sound Energy is primarily a planning policy that requires the utility to consider alternatives to gas infrastructure, but it doesn’t force anyone to get off gas, and regulators are likely to approve only those alternatives that save ratepayers money.

“I think voters were responding to a lot of misinformation and fear-mongering,” said Leah Missik, the Washington deputy policy director for Climate Solutions, a regional nonprofit that helped spearhead the “no on 2066” campaign. She emphasized that it was put on the ballot in July, giving groups like hers only a few months to drum up their response to it, whereas they knew about 2117 for over a year, and thus had a lot more time to educate voters on what that initiative would do.

The confusion probably also wasn’t helped by the fact that the policies 2066 repealed were incredibly wonky, dealing with building codes and utility planning.

“I think that given all of those headwinds, the fact that about half of Washingtonians still voted against initiative 2066 is a testament to how popular climate action is in the state,” Emily Moore, the director of the climate and energy program at the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, told me.

Sightline didn’t campaign for or against the measure, but Moore had some takeaways from the vote. She said environmental groups spent a lot of their energy countering the narrative that there was a gas ban, which may have inadvertently reinforced the idea. One lesson for the future might be to put more emphasis on the benefits of electrification, like the fact that heat pumps provide both heating and cooling and half of the state doesn’t currently have air conditioning. The other anti-climate measure, 2117, may have failed so decisively because Washington’s emission cap policy has raised more then $2 billion in funding for projects that people are already seeing the benefits of, like free transit passes.

“Likely a no vote on that one felt like getting to keep good things,” she told me. “I think we have more to do to show that getting off of gas means getting good things too.”