Today's bonus episode of the Carbon Removal Newsroom podcast has host and Nori's head of supply and methodology, Radhika Moolgavkar, chat with her old friend and sustainability advocate, Shasta Smith, about climate and environmental policy in Washington state. They discuss the new cap and trade bill that recently passed and former state climate and carbon bills, and some of the general ideas and concerns that relate to this legislation.
Some of the bills mentioned:
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Welcome to a special episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom. My name is Radhika Moolgavkar. I run the Supply and Methodology Group at Nori, and I’m here today with a really good friend of mine, Shasta Smith. Hey, Shasta.
Shasta Smith: Hi.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Nice to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining. The main reason I invited Shasta along is she is a local Washingtonian like I am, and she is heavily involved in... Public advocacy around sustainability in Washington state. So Washington this month passed some bills, did not pass some bills around sustainability. And I kind of wanted to get Shasta’s thinking on it as a non-legislative person, but a person who’s seriously committed to the environment. So Shasta, thanks for coming and joining me today. You know, let’s talk about the cap and trade bill and what your impressions were about that.
My inclination is that those Bills are a little bit flawed, but what are you thinking? And what do you think about what Washington did?
Shasta Smith: I would concur highly. And I think a lot of the environmental community would agree highly as well. I don’t think it had the backing of the environmental community at all. And by that, I mean sort of the core cohorts of groups that typically get along pretty well in this space. It did have the backing, as you know, of British Petroleum, who was a sponsor of the bill. So I find that a little incongruous with a sustainability bill when your primary sponsor is British Petroleum. But I digress.
Radhika Moolgavkar: But the argument, right, is you’ve got to bring that industry along. If you want them to participate, they’ve got to be part of the conversation. Do you not think that’s what’s going on here?
Shasta Smith: Yeah, they just can’t drive the conversation.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So what happened? I mean, our governor is known as a strong sustainability advocate, ran for president on that very idea. And yet he backed this quite highly. And it got a lot of press around here on how amazing it was for carbon emissions. So what do you think? Why? Why did that happen?
Shasta Smith: We had a good headline and a good splash that says something positive with the word green and climate commitment in it. Who wouldn’t go for that as a politician?
Radhika Moolgavkar: So I think, and you can correct me if you disagree, which I know you will do, I appreciate that about you, is I think, right, this is going to end up much like California, where you have a bunch of credits that aren’t really worth anything. I don’t know if you’ve been following recently what’s been happening in the ag or the forestry space in California, but essentially they’re, you know, getting panned by ProPublica for creating emission reductions that are false. Do you think there’s any hope that Washington could do something a little different?
Shasta Smith: You know, it’s funny you ask that because I think in the environmental space, at least, I mean, this is not my topic, but, you know, the groups that I’m a part of, a big part of the conversation was, here’s what California did wrong. And so when we would speak to our legislators about it, they would say, well, here’s our response to what California did wrong. And so I think in our legislators’ minds, they’ve written enough into the bill to make them feel like they’ve, I guess, at least answered some of the pitfalls of California.
For example, I mean, there was a study at some point that I saw where they determined that the California cap and trade policy actually led to more pollution in communities of color.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yep, that’s what I want to talk about.
Shasta Smith: So I don’t think that study was conclusive in terms of a direct causal link. So I’m not sure if the bill caused it, cap and trade caused it, or if it just occurred, because it just occurs naturally, as you know, regardless of cap and trade. So I think that was the primary reason why a lot of the environmental community was against it. Cap and trade, not only that, but just the message, right? Cap and trade by definition is allowing pollution to continue at a price. I mean, regardless of whether it works or not, it’s a messaging where we’re saying, we’re going to give you certain allowances, you can pollute certain amount.
And that just seems antithetical to sustainability, in my opinion.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, you know, I am, and I think we both are pragmatists. So you have to, in my mind, you have to design a system where Yes, you bring those people along. You can’t cut it off immediately. But cap and trade is not the system to do that. So it just doesn’t achieve the end goal, which is forcing pollution reductions. It seems like all it does is disperse the pollution to other locations. And that’s the concern, right? And I’m particularly intrigued by this idea that it impacts people of color a lot more than it impacts others.
And why that is, and what is your impression of why that’s happening through cap and trade? Because on the face of it, it wouldn’t appear that would be the result, right? But my feeling is because of the way we site things, right? It’s where the utilities are cited, which doesn’t get impacted by cap and trade. Would you agree with that?
Shasta Smith: Yeah, I mean, again, I don’t know if it’s causal. And I’m not sure if the study that I even saw, which I saw sort of haphazardly, I didn’t read the entire scientific piece or the statistics, but I think that was the conclusion that there had been an increase. Now, whether or not that was causally related to cap and trade is a different issue. But again, with or without cap and trade, communities of color are just what people go to pollute. I mean, part and parcel. Well, I mean, that’s not my assertion.
That’s not my opinion. That’s a fact. I mean, you look at the map that the Department of Health in Washington passed, right? And this, when I see this map, it just, it tears me apart because The reddest areas are the brownest areas of our state, right? That’s not accidental, right? Not one iota. It tracks I-5 all the way down. It tracks the Duwamish, all the pollution in that area. It gets redder and redder the more in the south sound that you traverse south. And then you go over to the areas where you have traditional farm workers and what have you, more brown people.
It’s not accidental that the map lines up with where traditionally BIPOC communities have been located. Now that’s for a variety of reasons. I mean, you have historic redlining where the best parts of the city were totally black and brown people were just excluded. And a lot of Asian people too were excluded. I’ve seen deeds. I mean, I work in real estate. My own house has a racial covenant against it, which I’ve seen personally.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, I did not know that Shasta. That’s insane. Yes.
Shasta Smith: It actually did. And Seattle has a history of racial exclusion covenants. So if you force people into areas that are more run down than others traditionally, because your main populations want the nice areas, right? They don’t want to be located next to the Boeing plant in the Duwamish. They don’t want to be located next to the historic people who were there in that area. So then you get kind of stuck and trapped in these areas, not because people are I don’t think people are, right? People want to live in nice neighborhoods.
Other people get stuck in areas they can afford, and those neighborhoods are traditionally along the I-5 corridor where you have more pollution. They’re in the SeaTac runways, you know, landing zone where there’s more pollution. They’re closer to typical industrial areas where there’s more pollution. And so then by default, you know, you have... This correlation, because of historic American practices, which Seattle is not immune from, no matter how far left we think we are, it lines up here well. Just take the DOH map and put it on top of the traditional redlining map and it lines up one to one.
These are not just maps, right? If you look at the DOH website, because I’ve been on the website, D-O-H is, for those who don’t know. Department of Health website and the environmental disparities map that they produced, you know, which came out, I think, two or three years ago. It’s an interactive map. You can move the state around and zoom in and see. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist. Blue is good. Red is bad. And there’s a continuum of blues to pinks to reds to dark reds. And there’s no, there’s no, it’s not a coincidence that continuum, it gets greater and greater the more and more diverse a community gets, but that has direct impacts, right?
Like the average lifespan from the worst to the best is six years, the loss of life. That’s not, that’s not a map. That’s a life.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s life. And that’s what I think bothers me about the cap and trade, that system, like I don’t actually know whether fundamentally it’s a flawed system. I feel like the way it’s implemented is highly flawed and nobody is being creative enough to implement it in a better way, which might be cutting off, not like reducing emissions, but reducing the source of the emission, like the carbon you bring in. I don’t know. Something like that might make more sense. But what I really find disappointing is that in a state that’s so purports to be Looking out for BIPOC people, they passed legislation that the environmental community, the equity and social justice community, all agree is not good for Correct.
In brown people. I just don’t understand it.
Shasta Smith: And then you have some anecdotal evidence out of California. Again, I don’t know if it’s linked, you know, it’s not the cause or not, but you have anecdotal evidence that the cap and trade in California led to an increase, whether that was for five different reasons or just cap and trade or cap and trade had nothing to do with it. The point is there’s some kind of increase, right? And why would we take that model and build on it without exploring why that is? Again, I don’t know why, but we should explore it.
And if you have From what I’ve seen, almost all of the BIPOC environmental communities were against cap and trade. That’s a sign.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, and it’s also a sign, as we’ve talked about outside of this podcast, getting communities like that engaged on environmental issues is so important and critical because they have a million competing interests that they’re dealing with. So when they speak, I feel like the state legislature should have listened, right? I agree.
Shasta Smith: Yeah.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, I know we’re just, I’m just speaking to the choir here, but I just couldn’t more, I can’t stress more to anyone who listens to this, how disappointing it is to hear that the state legislature in the name of sustainability actually did something that probably doesn’t meet the sustainability goals they’ve set out and hurts communities who have been historically hurt by government initiatives. It just seems like such a backwards look at things.
Shasta Smith: Well, I think it was an opportune time, right? You have the three branches of government. All controlled by the Dems. So if we don’t pass it now, and they’ve been trying for some version of capital trade for 10, 12 years or more, right? So I feel like you kind of make this compromise with your values. And there was a sister bill that the frontline communities Agreed with Washington Strong that no one wanted to push and no one wanted to touch. And quite frankly, a lot of Democratic senators and representatives would not even allow to get out on a vote.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, let’s talk about Washington Strong. Let’s pivot to that because it’s a nice link. Explain to people what Washington Strong is for those who don’t know.
Shasta Smith: I mean, it’s more or less a tax.
Radhika Moolgavkar: A carbon tax.
Shasta Smith: Yeah, a carbon tax as opposed to an allowance to pollute. I don’t know if either one of them work, quite frankly, but at least one sends a message from the top that we’re not allowing you to pollute.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. So do you think the word tax scared off the legislative folks?
Shasta Smith: I don’t really know. I know for a fact, based upon what I’ve been told and watching some hearings, listening to representatives speak and senators speak, it was intentionally not given a vote. Intentionally.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Because they would have had to probably go on the record supporting the tax and they would have had a hard time going back to their constituents potentially.
Shasta Smith: Well, particularly when if you look at the Washington Strong Bill and people who signed in and support, you know, you can sign in pro or con on the legislative website, which is the simplest thing to do because it takes 30 seconds as opposed to written testimony or testifying. There was so much support for it. Right. And the environmental communities at some point switched, or at least a lot of them switched to opposing cap and trade entirely.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. Right. Yes. Yes. But they supported the carbon tax.
Shasta Smith: They supported the carbon tax. And again, I don’t know the technicalities of whether either of them work, quite frankly, because the best solution is just not taking carbon out of the ground to begin with. We’re way past that point. We’re way past that point. So I guess A, Messaging-wise, British Petroleum’s not involved. B, you have all your, I call them frontline communities or your ENJ, sorry, environmental justice communities and BIPOC community groups supporting Washington Strong. And it just seemed more equitable from the way it was drafted. I mean, you have money coming in upfront and not this cap and trade system on the back end.
I think there was some hesitancy, at least from what I heard, that some representatives Didn’t like the sort of, it was very nebulous as to how the funds would be spent.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I had that concern. I read that bill and you and I actually talked about it. And my, you know, fundamentally, I was worried that it could end up being much worse for certain communities because there was so little detail in the bill about, and so much was going to fall on the regulation, on the administrative state to write the right types of rules to that. To that bill. And I, you know, my worry was that you would create something unintentionally or intentionally that actually hurt the poorest people. Like, you know, at a high level, I don’t have an issue with a carbon tax.
I think my concern has been that often taxes hurt the people who are most vulnerable because they don’t, especially in this state with such a regressive tax system, they have to buy gas, you know, they can’t go and buy an electric car. And so are we unintentionally We’re going to hurt them more than we benefit them. And that was always my concern. I don’t know if that’s a valid one, but that’s when I read it, I was thinking about, you know?
Shasta Smith: Oh, for sure. I think a lot of senators and representatives expressed that concern, but being a part of the community. So where the Climate Commitment Act, AKA cap and trade started, right? Was the environmental community was just like, we dislike it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah.
Shasta Smith: By the time it got through the Senate, Everyone was like on their soapboxes, like this is the worst thing ever. I mean, you even had Senator Nobles, right? Who’s like the black, you know, senator, one of the black woman senators, which is very rare in Washington, make a plea on the record, like please house change, do something about this when we send it back to you, right? They had spliced it up so much and made so many changes to it. But not from my understanding and just sitting at some of my meetings, the slides I would see about the amendments and the changes, it just started gutting it, right?
And to have a senator say, please, I’m going to vote for this, but please, House, when we send it back to you, please step up and make some changes.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Make it better.
Shasta Smith: Yeah, make it better. It’s problematic. It tells you it’s problematic, right? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist.
Radhika Moolgavkar: But we know cap and trade is problematic. You and I might disagree about the carbon tax. I know that you felt like the way the bill was written was a little more equitable than my concerns were, but it died. So it doesn’t really matter. I would agree that it was more equitable than cap and trade. So I would have rather seen the reverse of the two pass, honestly, and put the incentives in a different place.
Shasta Smith: Sure.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So I would say we agree on that. I wanna talk about the other one that you said goes hand in hand, which is that the Growth Management Act, which I can’t remember the name of the bill that didn’t go through. What’s that, was that called?
Shasta Smith: So there was a component of GMA rewrite that was- Growth Management Act Rewrite. Oh, sorry. Growth Management Act Rewrite. Yep. Sorry, this is like a field I work in. And so it just comes, flows off the tongue. Yeah. So the Growth Management Rewrite, Act was proposed by FutureWise. They drafted it and then our climate champion Fitzgibbon, who was everywhere, Endure, who’s everywhere, championed it through. But I’ll tell you why the growth management is important to sustainability. It doesn’t make such a sexy, splashy headline, right? You can’t say cap and trade.
You can’t say clean fuel.
Radhika Moolgavkar: This doesn’t fit into a sentence.
Shasta Smith: Growth Management Act is an extremely complex, comprehensive land use tool in the state of Washington, the most comprehensive land use framework. Right? So when you go outside your house, this is how I explain it to people. Everything you see in the as-built environment is affected by growth management. Your streets, your parks, where things are zoned, where your public facilities are sited, how tall you can build, everything. All that is controlled by the growth management, right?
Radhika Moolgavkar: And you and I would agree that the Growth Management Act was pretty revolutionary when it was passed in the state in the 1990s. And that it has overall done really good things for limiting growth in certain areas, encouraging growth in other correct areas, and then providing protection to certain parts of the state as well. So there is no development. So go ahead. I just wanted to lay that framework for our listeners.
Shasta Smith: No, sure. And to your point, what it requires you to do is plan for growth. It’s really simple, right? And Washington is one of the fastest growing states in our country. And not only that, it’s going to keep growing faster because as the climate changes, we are a temperate environment. So people will begin to move here, right? And so what you have, if growth is not planned smartly, you have what we have now, urban sprawl. So you’re talking about more vehicle miles traveled to places, longer traffic. You’re talking about public facilities that now have to be built to go out to Timbuktu to serve people in Timbuktu.
It’s just not an efficient way of serving communities. So you’re talking about more carbon emissions. You’re talking about Less green spaces because you have to tear down things, right? You’re tearing down more forests and building more subdivisions. So if growth is not planned in a smart way, you have sprawl, which contributes to CO2 emissions. It definitely deprives sustainability in a number of ways.
Radhika Moolgavkar: See Houston.
Shasta Smith: Yeah, and the Growth Management Act requires you to protect Um, environmentally critical areas, wetlands, um, it has a, uh, protections for forest, mining areas, conservation area. It has all these things built into it in addition to smart growth, right? So there are two bills. It started out as three, they ended up being two. House Bill 10, or House Bill 1099. Which was the climate component. And then House Bill 1220, which was the housing component, right? Again, why are climate advocates concerned with housing? A, housing’s not affordable. So people go further out.
Problem, sprawl.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And it’s just not fair.
Shasta Smith: Problem, sprawl. And then, so 1220 passed. Woohoo, yay! Good for 1220, barely. And what 1220 does is say, instead of, The climate, the GMA now says you have to provide for different types of growth, but there’s a huge hole with the housing element. So the GMA has various components. It has goals, which are very 10,000 foot policy statements. And then it has elements, which are frameworks, details for how you enact those goals, right? And then local jurisdictions have to pass a comprehensive plan with both of those things for enacting these on the ground things.
So you go outside and see parks. If you’re not happy with the park situation in your area, it might be because your comp plan, your comprehensive plan doesn’t provide for it. In any event, a hole in the GMA now is housing. So 1220 says, okay, counties and cities who have all this growth, we don’t think you’re adequately planning for all types of housing because housing is not affordable in Washington. So it further defines and specifies the types of affordable housing. Right. At all levels. It requires you to plan for growth and to accommodate housing at all income levels.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Eddie, would you agree with the statement? It’s really geared towards the parts of the state that are growing the fastest and have the most wealth, probably. So counties who are Not in as financially advantageous position, don’t get as impacted in terms of requirements. I think that’s my understanding, right? Would you say that?
Shasta Smith: So the GMA has fully planning counties and cities within them. I think there’s 28 or 29 of those. And they have elected counties that opt in, right? Right. But portions of the GMA are applicable to denser areas.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, yeah. So like King County, Pierce County, Snohomish County, this is going to impact them in ways that’s totally different from Eastern Washington.
Shasta Smith: Correct. And the other thing that 1220 did was address racially disparate impact areas in our history of redlining and people being pushed out.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, gentrification.
Shasta Smith: Yeah, and some people don’t like that word. I was trying to find a nice word. But yeah, gentrification, it addresses, or I will say this, it’s not a panacea. It includes vocabulary that allows us to have these conversations. So it does all these things and it has this non-exclusionary zoning component for emergency shelter and supportive housing, which was the biggest. Biggest fight in this bill, right?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it was. I’m sure like cities like Bellevue and Kirkland weren’t super excited about some of this language. I don’t know, just a guess.
Shasta Smith: Yeah, because what it says is if you’re going to site hotels and other things in areas, you have to let shelters be in areas. Yeah, right, exactly. More or less. So everyone was gung-ho about housing. So it’s odd when you see bills where environmental activists and the building community are hand in hand. Yeah. But they were on 1220 other than this forced- Exclusionary Zoo. Yeah, I call it non-exclusionary. So that’s what it is. You can call it what you want. It’s important, right? If people can’t live where the services are best provided and if people can’t afford housing, you will produce urban sprawl.
We have produced urban sprawl. And what’s worse is the most impacted communities live further and further out. Right. Right. So all these policies we’re talking about now, cap and trade, clean fuels, then it hit their bottom line because they’re driving further and further, impacting their lives more and more. Right. And now we have to provide services in this completely wasteful way entirely. Right. But if we plan communities smartly and people can live in them, we have better sustained communities. Right. So that’s how House Bill 1220.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yep. So we like that. We like that. We’re happy that passed. We were happy about that.
Shasta Smith: But the 1099 is the other one that kind of tanked in spectacular fashion thanks to Senator Hobbs, our arch nemesis in the Senate Transportation Committee. I’m just going to put that name on blast because that’s where good climate bill goes to die. In any event, 1099, So the current Growth Management Act does not address climate change.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It does on the fringes because it’s a climate bill.
Shasta Smith: It’s an environment bill by default.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, right. But it doesn’t directly. It’s not explicit about it.
Shasta Smith: Correct. So 1099 would have introduced a goal. So the Growth Management Act now has 14 goals. It would have been another goal to address climate change and it would have implemented an element. So the actual implementation tool or framework For a comprehensive plans for climate and resiliency component. Right. And in all of this, it also included a definition of environmental justice.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, interesting.
Shasta Smith: Right. It required you to consider environmental justice and how you land use plan. And so that kind of ties in with the HEAL Act, which also passed. Yay for the HEAL Act, which also includes a definition of environmental justice for a bunch of state agencies. It sailed through the House. I watched every single committee hearing on this bill. We thought it’d have more friction in the Senate. It got the local government with almost no friction.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Local government is a Senate committee.
Shasta Smith: Oh, sorry. Yeah, in the Senate. And then it went to ways and means in the Senate. And it passed. Woo-hoo. And then all of a sudden- Momentum’s building. All of a sudden, in this whole process, you had all these different factions that were opposed to it, right? Washington cities and counties were opposed to it, the associations.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Interesting. But not for bad reasons, right?
Shasta Smith: For good reasons. Funding. Risks of lawsuits, et cetera, because the more regulations you have, the more people sue.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Right.
Shasta Smith: In any event, along the way, future-wise drafts all these amendments to bring them into the fold. So now they’re on board. So you have more support by the time it reaches the Senate than you did in the House. So it gets through ways and means, which everyone thinks is the last stop for this bill before it goes to the floor. And then it gets recommended to transportation and everybody halts their horses because everyone knows this is a problem. And it was because 1099 also has a component in the climate element that requires the 10 most populous counties to reduce their GHGs and their VMTs to state goals, right?
And because of that, because I think there’s a one-off A one-off, it was like a $500,000 cost or something like that to the transportation budget. There were these ways that it got funneled to transportation, which no one thought it needed to go to. It ends up in transportation. Transportation seems like they’re surprised they get it. They’re confused by watching the hearing. And it seems fine in the hearing, right? By the time it gets to transportation, the only people you have against it at this point, I mean, had overwhelming support, was like, Certain, like the Realtors Association, some home builders, but Washington Association of Counties is on board.
Washington Association of Cities is on board. Commerce testifies in favor of it. Like all these people are like, this is great. We need to do this. And then it goes into executive session two days later.
Radhika Moolgavkar: In the transportation committee. In the transportation committee.
Shasta Smith: And I’m watching every bill get talked about. They pass over it. They don’t mention it. Then they go into caucus, which means they’re breaking a talk about something on the side. Then they come back and they don’t talk about it. They go into caucus again. And I’m like, something is wrong. Something is very wrong. And then they come back and Senator Hobbs says, well, we’re going to conclude the session of the executive. I’m like, wait, wait, what? And so I’m working at the same time, right? So I think maybe I just missed it.
Yeah. And so I watched the speeches wrapping up the executive session and my senator, Senator Saldana in the 37th is visibly vexed. Something happened in caucus. She’s visibly vexed about it. And they can’t say what, but everyone’s talking around what happened in caucus. But essentially they let it die. Hobbs lets it die by just not bringing it up for a vote. Overwhelming support is what I’m saying based upon the record of who signed in.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Right, right, right, right.
Shasta Smith: The vote would have been tight in the Senate either way, I’m sure. But from what I learned afterwards, the environmental community thinks it actually had the votes to pass as well. But Hobbs just didn’t want to let it get a vote out of the committee.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s so weird. So, and you need to let the listeners know why this is so important because the Growth Management Act isn’t something you can change on a regular basis, right? Like, so what, you know, explain the whole thing about how this is impact on the counties, certain counties.
Shasta Smith: So the foremost populous county. So, well, let me back that. The Growth Management Act requires fully planning counties, i. e. bigger counties and cities to pass these things called comprehensive plans that have these lofty goals and these elements, these more detailed elements about how they’re going to comprehensively plan for growth for the next 20 years. Yep. They’re only required to do updates to these beautiful comprehensive plans every eight to 10 years, right?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Mm-hmm.
Shasta Smith: All the counties are on rolling cycles because you can’t have every county in Washington updating their comp plan every year. So the next rolling cycle has the four most populous counties in the state, including King, Kitsap, Pearson, and Snohomish counties are in the 2024 cycle.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Which would have been impacted by this bill.
Shasta Smith: So the problem is, It takes forever to update a comprehensive plan. You can’t just people say, well, we have until 2024. That’s time. No, no, no, it’s not. It takes two years or so.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah.
Shasta Smith: So when 1099 failed, it was super depressing because we’re going to miss an eight year cycle.
Radhika Moolgavkar: For the biggest counties in the state, which have the disproportionate impact on the sustainability issues in the state.
Shasta Smith: Correct. But what FutureWise did amazingly was they got a proviso added to the budget so that commerce could start doing the groundwork planning.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Nice.
Shasta Smith: So that we would not miss, so what was necessary this first year was for commerce to do the planning, to put the framework in place so that the counties could abide by the law. Yeah. So they got the fund, they got a proviso in the budget so commerce would start doing that this year so that in 2022, We could pass the meat and potatoes and then we hit the ground running. So hopefully we won’t miss that 2024 cycle.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So there’s still hope. There’s still hope, which I’m glad to hear because, you know, when we first talked about it a few months ago, it was like, seemed like all hope had been dashed for these popular, for like a decade, essentially, like we were going to lose a decade planning, but now we might be able to bring it back in 2024, but such a strange story. And I just didn’t want it to bring it up because To me, it’s such a dichotomy within what we passed this year in the state legislature.
You know, we passed cap and trade. Nobody really loves it in the environmental community. And here’s this other bill 1099 that everybody seems to support and we can’t get it through. So just the weirdness of Washington state politics. I don’t know what else to call it.
Shasta Smith: No, it’s true. I mean, 1220 passed, which is a win. Yeah.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, there were some wins.
Shasta Smith: That’s a win. Cap and trade is not nothing, but... And I just fear that it will monopolize the climate reduction space because when people feel like they’ve done something, they go check right off their list.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It’s kind of almost like greenwashing as much as I don’t want to use that term, but it does feel a little bit like we’re going to give people a pass. I mean, it’s all going to be in those regs and how they write those regs. So we’ve got to keep a laser focus on that. Well, Shasta, I have one more question for you because I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, but I’m going to totally pivot to something that you and I both love. What’s the whiskey of choice this month? What are you drinking?
What’s your favorite?
Shasta Smith: I don’t have a whiskey of choice right now at the moment for this month.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I always have my preferred. What’s your preferred? What’s your preferred for the month? What are you drinking?
Shasta Smith: What am I drinking? You know, I switched, I used to be an old fashioned gal, but I switched to Sazerac’s this recently, like two weeks ago, and I’m kind of enjoying them, but it requires rye, which I’m not too, I’m just kind of like, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I like the extra bitters, but the rye is not my favorite. I’d much prefer like a straight scotch or bourbon.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. Yeah. So what’s the scotch you’re drinking, the straight scotch you’re drinking?
Shasta Smith: You know, I have a bottle I want to open now that I haven’t. I have, well, I opened last year a 20-year Pappy Van Winkle, which is an extremely rare bottle of whiskey. Yes, we had that for a while. Yeah, which was lovely. And then I got a single malt, single cast 2016 world winner from Cabot Lime. And so I’ve had it before. So I bought another bottle. It’s really tasty. It’s just really expensive. It’s so...
Radhika Moolgavkar: Shasta, you’re allowed to treat yourself. I mean, we all know, I all know how, I know how hard you work. So, well, thank you so much for joining me and hanging out and talking about these things. It was really fun and maybe we’ll do it again in the future. I hope we do. And for the people out there listening, thanks so much for listening to the podcast today. We appreciate it.
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