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Washington is missing key climate goals, advocates claim state leaders lack transparency

A state agency was created to set, track, measure and publicize goals such as environmental targets, but the metrics have mostly been scrubbed from its website.

Susannah Frame

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Published: 6:53 PM PST November 10, 2023
Updated: 6:53 PM PST November 10, 2023

The state of Washington carries the reputation of being an environmental leader – a state with aggressive climate change policies championed by a governor who ran for president in 2019 on that exact platform.

“It is our moment to solve America’s most daunting challenge and make it the first, foremost and paramount duty of the United States and that is to defeat climate change,” said Governor Jay Inslee at his presidential campaign kickoff event.

But here at home in Washington, the state isn’t meeting many of the identified environmental goals.

  • Washington State Department of Ecology records show over the last 12 years, the state’s recycling less, not more. The rate was 50.7% in 2011. The latest available data shows the rate fell to 40.7% in 2021.
  • Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, the state’s biggest carbon polluter, are up, not down. Emissions in 2019, the latest data provided by the state, were at 40.3 million metric tons (MMT). That’s 4.8 MMT over the state’s goal and a 2.8% increase over the amount in 2018.
  • Overall, carbon emissions are up as well, despite a state law requiring a reduction. In 2019, the state’s greenhouse gas emissions rose 6.9% from the prior year to 102.0 MMT. That is 9.3% higher than the 93.5 MMT limit in statute.

Emissions from 2020 are expected to be down due to the drastic reduction of cars on the road during the pandemic. A spokesperson for Gov. Inslee said there’s a lag in receiving data sets from the federal government, but the information should be released in December, 2024.

“(The state Department of) Ecology thinks we will likely hit our 2020 emissions limit (which will put the state into legal compliance) but we won’t know that until the next inventory report comes out,” wrote Mike Faulk, deputy communications director and press secretary for the Office of Governor Jay Inslee, in an email. 

“A lot of areas we’re failing badly,” said Todd Myers, Environmental Director at the Washington Policy Center, a conservative Seattle-based think tank. “It is critical that state government and politicians live up to their promises and meet those goals so that the people of the state of Washington get what they voted for and get what they’re paying for, that’s critical.”

Washington is leading the way in getting electric vehicles on the road. Gov. Inslee set a goal in 2013 of increasing the number of registered electric vehicles in the state from 8,000 to 50,000 by 2020. Washington hit that target ahead of time and currently there are approximately 150,000 electric vehicles on Washington’s roads.

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