How Washington State’s Climate Legacy Wound Up on the Ballot

Twenty years ago, you could still get away with calling Redmond, Washington, an equestrian town. White fences parceled off ranches and hobby farms where horses grazed under dripping evergreen trees; you could buy live chicks, alfalfa, and Stetson hats in stores downtown. It wasn’t even unusual for Redmond voters to send Republicans to represent their zip code in the state legislature, despite the city being located in blue King County.

The Redmond of today, on the other hand, looks far more like what you’d expect from an affluent (and now staunchly progressive) suburb of Seattle. A cannabis dispensary with a pride flag and a “Black Lives Matter” sign in the window has replaced Work and Western Wear, and the new high-performing magnet school happens to share a name with one of the most popular cars in the neighborhood: Tesla. But Washington is a state full of contradictions, and among Redmond’s few remaining farms is one registered under the winkingly libertarian name of “Galt Valley Ranch LLC.” It belongs to a multimillionaire who has almost single-handedly bankrolled the most significant challenge yet to Washington’s standing as a national climate leader.

Andrew Villeneuve, the founder of the Northwest Progressive Institute, a left-wing think tank also based in Redmond, told me he’s struggled to get voters to pay attention to ballot measures in the past. “I’ve had no such awareness issues this year,” he said. “Nobody’s like ‘Who’s Brian Heywood?’”

A hedge fund manager, multimillionaire, and recent California transplant, Heywood has in short order made himself the supervillain of Washington’s left. His Joker arc into politics involves fleeing the liberal dystopia of the Golden State in 2010 for the no-income-tax refuge of Washington, only to discover that Olympia was progressive, too. This year, he set out to personally “fix stupid things” in his adopted state by spending $6 million out of pocket on a signature-gathering campaign that ultimately landed four conservative initiatives on Washington’s general election ballot. (His campaign, Let’s Go Washington, is also allusively named, although Heywood toldThe Seattle Times that he is not a MAGA supporter.)

Two of the four ballot measures Heywood has willed before voters this November address standard small-government gripes: One would repeal the capital gains tax, and the other would allow workers to opt out of the state’s long-term care payroll tax. Others, however, will ask Washingtonians to vote directly on whether to repeal the state’s landmark cap-and-invest carbon-trading program (I-2117) or block its transition away from natural gas (I-2066).

“We’ve faced initiatives like these before,” Villeneuve told me, “but what is different is how many of them are coming at once.”

As in many Western states, it’s relatively easy for a motivated individual with means to collect the roughly 320,000 signatures needed for a petition to end up on the ballot in Washington. (Contract workers are paid up to $5 per signature, and they often descend on ferry lines, where bored motorists can be talked into putting down their names as they wait for the next boat.) But while rich activists have leveraged this system in the past — Washingtonians may remember the name Tim Eyman — the outcome of the ballot measures before voters this fall will be closely watched by other states and legislatures to gauge how directly popular bold climate progress really is.

“What happens in Washington will certainly have an impact on what happens around the rest of the country,” Leah Missik, the Washington deputy policy director at the clean energy nonprofit Climate Solutions, who also serves on the executive board of the No on 2066 campaign, told me. She added, “If these [laws] are in any way repealed or weakened, that is a sign to other states, and I think it would be incredibly damaging and incredibly unfortunate.”

Though politics in Washington have long been conservation-minded and, shall we say, crunchy (I grew up in Redmond), the state really began to stand out as a leader in progressive climate policy with Governor Jay Inslee’s election in 2013. During Inslee’s tenure, Washington committed to one of the most aggressive 100% clean energy pathways in the country, passed a wide-ranging building emissions law that RMI described as “significantly [raising] the level of ambition on what might be possible for other states,” and in 2023 enacted its landmark cap-and-invest program, called the Climate Commitment Act, which has generated over $2 billion in state revenue so far for transit projects, decarbonization initiatives, and clean air and water programs. Washington has even been credited with inspiring some of President Biden’s climate actions in office.

With Inslee, a Democrat, retiring at the end of this term, Let’s Go Washington’s campaign begins to appear designed to dismantle his legacy while proposing little in the way of alternatives. Hallie Balch, the communications director, denied this allegation in an emailed statement, telling me the initiatives “promote choice and affordability.” The cap-and-invest program, for example, “has not done what the governor said it would do,” she said, and “there are no metrics in place to track [its] success.”

Though the CCA’s cap covers about 75% of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions, it’s true that we’re still a few years away from having a clear picture of the program’s results. (The law’s first compliance deadline for polluters isn’t until this November.) “The CCA has only been around for almost two years at this point, and so we haven’t yet seen the big emissions declines,” Emily Moore, the director of the climate and energy program at the Sightline Institute, a nonpartisan sustainability think tank that does not take an official position on initiatives, told me. “But what we are seeing,” she added, “is the money that it has generated for a whole suite of climate-friendly and community-friendly projects.”

There isn’t a revenue source remotely comparable to cap-and-invest available to fund the state’s transit, infrastructure, and community projects if the program goes away, meaning a repeal would have a dramatic impact on everything from bus service to salmon recovery projects to local heat pump and induction stove rebates, with most likely getting the axe. The program is also one of the main levers Washington has to reach its goal of reducing emissions 95% below 1990 levels by 2050. As one person involved in crafting the CCA described the upcoming vote on I-2117 to me, it’s “life or death for climate action in Washington.”

That’s partially because I-2117 wouldn’t only repeal the CCA; it would also bar the state and any municipality therein from implementing a new climate tax or cap-and-invest program at any point in the future. When asked what an alternative might be last week during a debate at Seattle University’s Department of Public Affairs and Nonprofit Leadership, Heywood vaguely proposed “something that works.”

“We always knew we were going to have to defend this program at the ballot box,” Joe Fitzgibbon, the majority leader of Washington’s House of Representatives and the chair of the House Environment and Energy Committee, who helped create the CCA, told me. He admitted that he’d expected such a defense to take the form of legislative elections, but 2022 came and went without a single backer of the CCA losing their seat. “I guess in hindsight, I thought we were out of the woods,” Fitzgibbon said.

Let’s Go Washington has labeled CCA a “hidden gas tax” and, bundled with its other initiatives, is running on the slogan “vote yes, pay less.” I-2117 is already the most expensive ballot measure campaign of this election cycle — and the most controversial, with Heywood campaigning at gas stations offering discounted gas, which opponents say violates vote-buying anti-bribery laws. But opposition to the initiative has also rallied a remarkable and unprecedented coalition of strange bedfellows in defense of the CCA, including over 500 businesses, environmental groups, health care organizations, faith leaders, tribes — as well as more than 30 breweries, “a very important coalition member in the state of Washington,” as No on I-2117’s communication director Kelsey Nyland quipped to me. Jane Fonda recently swung through the state to stump for I-2117; the ‘no’ campaign even has the support of the Green Jobs PAC, whose contributors include Shell and BP.

Almost all the advocates I spoke to about I-2117 were feeling optimistic ahead of Washington ballots going out at the end of this week, with the most recent Cascade PBS/Elway poll on the initiative showing support has dropped slightly since May; 46% now say they would vote no, over 30% who would vote yes. (Heywood has pointed optimistically to the number of undecided voters this leaves.) Still, it seems pretty unlikely that Washingtonians will repeal their cap-and-invest program.

I-2066 is a different story.

To the immense frustration of its opponents, Let’s Go Washington touts I-2066 as “Stop the Gas Ban.” The measure was only certified for the ballot in July, compared to January for 2117, meaning that organizers have had much less time to mobilize — several major national green groups, including Defenders of Wildlife and the Environmental Defense Action Fund, confirmed to me that they’d endorsed No on I-2117 but not considered a position on I-2066 — and are on the back foot to combat misinformation.

For one thing, there is no gas ban: I-2066, rather, would repeal parts of a Washington law directing its largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to consider electrification alternatives before installing new gas pipes; scuttle a pilot effort to promote thermal energy networks as a gas alternative; and, most starkly, it would bar cities and towns, as well as Washington’s energy code, from “prohibiting, penalizing, or discouraging” gas appliances in buildings. “Discouraging” does a lot of work here. For example, Seattle’s building emissions performance standard, which doesn’t ban gas but nudges large developments toward a 2050 net-zero emissions target, could be in jeopardy.

Still, all of this is a lot to expect voters to sort through in the few minutes they might spend filling in the bubbles in their ballot, especially when Let’s Go Washington is making out its message to sound like one simply about energy choice. Add the opaque triple-negative climate campaigners have to sell (“vote no on a ban on banning gas”), and the messaging headaches grow more severe.

Earlier this month, the editorial board for the largest media outlet in Washington, The Seattle Times, endorsed a yes vote on I-2066, arguing for a slower transition away from fossil fuels that leans more heavily on natural gas. “Unfortunately, we are up against a network of fossil fuel corporations and their allies who have a lot of money and who are very invested in the status quo because it perpetuates their wealth and their influence,” Missik, who’s involved with the No on I-2066 campaign, told me, pointing to the Building Industry Association as well as Northwest Natural, National Propane Gas Association, and Koch Industries, who have backed the other side. I-2066 is also polling much better than I-2117; as of September, 47% of voters said they would vote yes, compared to 29% who said they’d vote no.

Rather than interpret those numbers as the electorate’s backlash to Washington’s climate progress, advocates argue they indicate how fossil fuel groups have successfully capitalized on the door propped open by Heywoods’s signature-gathering campaigns. It’s “because one guy opened his wallet; it is that simple,” Villeneuve, the founder of the Northwest Progressive Institute, said. “There is no grassroots movement to overturn these laws; it doesn’t exist. Brian Heywood brought this entire thing into being.” Or, as Missik put it: “Most Washingtons do believe in climate progress, whether or not this will be overridden by money. I sure hope not.”

All of this ultimately brings us back to the question of what Heywood’s whole deal is. With the singular exception of I-2066, his $6 million initiatives seem mostly doomed.

Some I spoke to floated the idea that Heywood and his allies are using Washington as a testing ground for dismantling climate action and seeing what sticks. “If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere: It can happen in California, it can happen in Colorado, it can happen in New York, it can happen in all these states that have passed really strong climate policies,” Caitlin Krenn, the climate and clean energy director of the nonprofit Washington Conservation Action, told me.

But there are other rumors, too. The Washington State Standard’s Jerry Cornfield recently quoted a local GOP chair calling Heywood’s initiatives “a powerful tool” that will “help get Republicans elected” — essentially, a turnout generator. (“We certainly want to see as many people as are eligible to vote exercise their right to make their voices heard, but our top priority is to educate voters about what's at stake with the initiatives this November,” Balch told me in response.) And then there is Heywood’s ranch. Republicans have long cosplayed as rural farmers and cowboys to tap into the masculine conservative fantasy of rugged individualism (what Texas Monthly once called “authenticity drag”). It’s essentially an image-building exercise — perhaps not so unlike positioning yourself as the guy who tried to rein in the state’s runaway Dems.

So far, Heywood has dodged questions about whether he plans to run for governor, and his campaign told me he “isn't using the initiatives as anything other than a way to bring broken policies directly to the people to vote on.” But with this year’s ballots going out to Washington voters today, it’s also a question for another time.

Regardless of what happens, many of the organizers I spoke to rejected the framing of Washington voters cooling on climate. One went as far as to tell me that the time, attention, and money Heywood has spent trying to roll back Washington’s progress is the highest compliment of all. “This is part of the process of doing big things,” Isaac Kastama, who was involved in enacting the CCA and now works for the advocacy group Clean and Prosperous Washington, told me. “If it’s not big and if it goes undetected, that probably means you’re not doing something serious enough.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the scope of I-2117 and correct what Let’s Go Washington has termed a “hidden gas tax.”