Since the moment President Donald Trump announced he would pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, we have been assured that states are going to take the lead on climate policy. There have been declarations, alliances, and delegations formed to send the message that the US is still in the game. In the absence of federal leadership, state leadership will fill the gap.

So how’s that going? As reporter Ben Storrow recounts in a recent ClimateWire piece, it’s ... harder than it looks. What the piece describes but never quite comes out and says plainly is that climate action has a hope primarily in states where Democrats have the power to implement it over Republican objections. In states where Republicans control the governor’s office or a house of the state legislature, climate momentum is hard to come by.

So let’s take a closer look at two states where Democrats are in charge, where many think climate action is most likely to spread next: Oregon and Washington.

Both are part of the Pacific Coast Collaborative, a group of West Coast states and provinces (California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia; Alaska is “observing”) dedicated to fighting climate change and moving the clean energy economy forward.

Pacific Coast Collaborative is now on Twitter! Follow @PCCleads for great examples of climate leadership from #statesandregions — The Climate Group (@ClimateGroup) April 8, 2015

Both states are square in the midst of attempts to put serious climate policy in place, a process that will reveal a great deal about the ability of Dem-led states to harness anti-Trump momentum.

And both states are playing catch-up. Their neighbors in the collaborative, California and British Columbia, are ratcheting up already-ambitious climate programs. Each year that passes, Washington and Oregon fall farther behind the vanguard, and the whole situation gets more, well, embarrassing.

Oregon and Washington are bracketed by climate exemplars

Up north, BC has had a carbon tax in place since 2008. It’s been capped at $30 a metric ton for the past five years. Last year, however, the center-left New Democratic Party (NDP) took power. In September, it released a four-year budget that will have the tax rising by $5 a year to $50 a ton in 2021. (The Green Party was pushing for $10 a year; the BC Liberal Party, which had controlled the province since 2001, vowed to keep the tax capped.)

If it keeps going up at that rate, Northwest sustainability think tank Sightline reports, “it will reach $120 in 2035 and $195 in 2050.” That won’t be enough, in and of itself, to get the province to its ambitious long-term goal of 80 percent below 2007 levels by 2050, but it’s a huge step.

Significantly, the NDP also released the tax from its requirement of revenue neutrality. Previously, all revenue had gone directly to reducing other personal and business taxes. Going forward, the government will be able to spend some of the revenue on investments in clean energy transition. From Sightline:

The tax increase will raise an estimated new $200 to $400 million per year. BC will spend $40 million to increase tax credits to low and modest income British Columbians. NDP Finance Minister Carole James announced her government will also use new carbon revenue to help families pay for green initiatives such as home retrofits or low carbon transportation.

Meanwhile, in California, climate policy is also barreling ahead. In 2016, the legislature passed SB 32, which committed the state to 40 percent carbon reductions below 1990 levels by 2040. In 2017, it updated its cap-and-trade program to reflect that ambitious target. A bill targeting 100 percent renewable energy narrowly failed last year, but the state has passed an enormous slate of smaller climate and climate-related bills.

BC and California are world leaders on climate. Washington and Oregon ... aren’t. At least not yet.

Washington keeps trying to price carbon, unsuccessfully

Washington is now attempting to emulate its neighbor to the north.

Democrat Jay Inslee (ardent climate hawk and co-author of an early book on the clean-energy transition) became governor of Washington in 2013. In 2014, he put forward a cap-and-trade bill. Republicans in the legislature never let it come to a vote. In 2015, he tried to put a cap on emissions using executive power, but a state judge blocked the effort. In 2016, a carbon tax initiative was put before voters; it failed. (I wrote a long story about that particular tragicomedy.) Four, count ‘em, four carbon tax bills were introduced in the 2017 session, but none went anywhere.

But what Inslee lacks in pull with the legislature, he makes up for with dogged persistence. He is a devoted fan of pricing carbon and will not be deterred. So in January, he put forward a new plan for a $20-and-rising carbon tax.

A downsized version of that plan — SB 6203, which would impose a $10 tax in 2019 and raise it by $2 a year to a $30 cap) — passed out of a key Senate committee in February, on a 6-4 vote. (As Seattle Times reporters note, it was “the first time one of [Inslee’s] major carbon proposals got any kind of vote by lawmakers.”)

The bill’s fate is uncertain, but the odds are not great. Democrats now have narrow majorities in both houses, but many, especially those representing the Eastern half of the state, have never been particularly keen on making gas and electricity more expensive.

Washington is not a lost cause, though. There are other climate-related bills floating around the legislature, most notably HB 2995, a 100-percent-clean-energy bill.

It would mandate that the state’s utilities reduce their fossil fuel energy (from a 2017 baseline) 25 percent by 2030, 50 percent by 2035, 75 percent by 2040, and 100 percent by 2045. Utilities would be instructed to prefer energy efficiency, renewable energy, and storage, and to maximize local, livable-wage jobs.

Versions of that bill have cleared both House and Senate energy committees. It has some bipartisan support, along with the support of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the building trades, so it might actually have a road to passage. The environmental community has been reluctant to fully support it unless it contains a specific prohibition on new nuclear power (which is ... dumb), but those negotiations are very much ongoing. The last day of the current session is March 8, so the bill’s fate will be clear soon enough.

Final note: If the legislature doesn’t pass anything, the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy, a coalition of environmental, labor, and social-justice groups, has pledged to put another initiative on the ballot in 2018. If they don’t, Carbon Washington (the group behind the 2016 initiative) says it will.

Washingtonians want to address climate change. Someday, they might even do it.

Oregon Democrats want to link up with California, but time is short

The Oregon legislature is in the midst of a short, 35-day legislative session, with about 10 days to go. Normally abbreviated sessions are devoted to minor matters, but this time, there’s a doozy on the docket.

The Clean Energy Jobs Bill, modeled on California climate policy, is a “cap-and-invest” program. It would cap and steadily reduce the state’s carbon emissions, eventually to 75 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The state government would auction off a declining number of tradable permits each year to raise revenue; the revenue from transportation fuels would go to the Highway Trust Fund, while the rest would be invested in various climate-y things ranging from clean energy to protections for low-income residents. The system would affect facilities emitting more than 25,000 tons a year (roughly 100 businesses in the state), though obviously costs would filter down to consumers. The system would begin operations in 2021.

The bills are in their respective rules committees; from there, if they go anywhere, they will go to Ways and Means, and then to the floor for votes. The environmental community is heavily behind the effort, holding rallies, organizing small businesses, and spending millions of dollars (as are their opponents).

The issue has been discussed for 10 years in the Oregon legislature. In 2016, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) did a thorough study of cap-and-trade and its possible effects on the state. Throughout 2017, committees took testimony and consulted stakeholders. Even if the program passed tomorrow, there would be three years to hash out the details.

But Republicans (and a few Democrats) complain that it’s all going too fast. They have not seen a formal assessment of the bill as written, and argue that there isn’t enough time left in the session to do something big. They want to punt to 2019.

Recently, House Speaker Tina Kotek proposed a compromise: Lawmakers would pass a cap on emissions now and then work through the details of the trading system in the 2019 session. If a trading system were not worked out by the end of the session, the Environmental Quality Commission, a group appointed by the governor and overseen by the DEQ, would develop one.

This is a way of calling opponents’ bluff. Most of the people crying out for delay are likely to oppose the bill no matter when it comes up, but there may be a few good-faith Democratic objectors who could be peeled off.

It’s not over yet, but getting something substantial like this passed in a pressure-cooker session is a long shot. Proponents are working not just against organized special interests, but simple inertia. It’s hard to do big things quickly. (Ten days and counting!)

Still, even if the bill doesn’t pass this session, Oregon’s not a climate lost cause either. In 2016, the state passed a bill that requires its two big utilities to eliminate coal from their portfolios by 2030 and get 50 percent of their power from renewables by 2040. Oregonians, like Washingtonians, support climate action and clean energy. Even if the CEJB is bumped, supporters can and will have another go at it in 2019.

Waiting on Cascadia

Why is it taking these two states so long to join their west-coast brethren in climate leadership? Two brief observations on that.

First, Democrats in both states have, in miniature, the same problem the party faces nationally. Liberals are clustered in large, coastal cities, giving them overwhelming majorities in a few districts but putting them at a larger disadvantage against a more geographically dispersed, rural and suburban GOP. Even when Dems gain majorities, as they have currently, their thin margins depend on purple/suburban districts that are not always on board with the, ahem, Seattle/Portland agenda.

I don’t know any clever way to overcome this other than what California has done: become extremely blue, to the point that red and purple resistance can simply be outvoted.

Which brings us to the second, perhaps slightly heretical point: Maybe pricing carbon, directly raising energy costs for average consumers, just isn’t that popular as a headline policy. Maybe building up clean energy industries, familiarizing the public with the energy transition, could come first and soften the ground for a carbon price.

California got carbon pricing, but only by a) proceeding much farther down the country’s future demographic road than the states to its north, i.e., getting way more blue, b) making massive, highly visible investments in renewable energy, and c) starting with a very low carbon price (it’s still only about $13 a ton). British Columbia also started low, plus has the advantage of being reasonable and Canadian. The Northeast states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) did it, but only by starting low and foregrounding the revenue and investments that came with it.

Washington and Oregon will need prices on carbon eventually, but it’s not clear that the pursuit of a price as such is worth the disproportionate attention it receives relative to (perhaps more piecemeal) clean-energy-focused bills that might garner wider support.

Other Dem-led states are watching closely. If Pacific Northwest states fail to put carbon pricing in place (again), it may persuade others to start elsewhere, with smaller clean-energy policies. Conversely, if Washington and Oregon defy the odds, succeed, and create a unified West Coast carbon pricing regime, well then, damn. Maybe all that hype about states will have been justified.