Keeping our air breathable isn’t a partisan issue. Vote ‘No’ on I-2117 |Opinion

Initiative-2117, repealing Washington’s Climate Commitment Act (CCA), will be on the ballot in November. Brian Heywood, a hedge-fund tycoon, who now lives on his boutique ranch in Redmond, bankrolled I-2117 and 5 other initiatives designed to transform Washington into a tax haven for the ultra-rich. Heywood registered his ranch with the state as “Galt Valley Ranch LLC,” revealing in the prospect of unrestrained capitalism in his adopted state of Washington.

Greenhouse-gas emissions continued their steady rise since 2007 to reach 102 million metric tons in 2019 — about 15 million African elephants worth of global warming emissions. The CCA is a carefully crafted “cap and invest” program that will help reduce emissions, while ensuring that those disproportionately impacted will benefit through targeted investments.

But, because capitalists like Heywood are interested in the bottom line, here it is: climate change is an existential threat to humanity. Even now, warming and its consequences are making areas of earth uninhabitable. Even now unsheltered people and those living without air conditioning die by the dozens each year in places like Arizona, from which Heywood fled for cooler climes. At some point, Brian, you won’t have the water to grow your hay or slake the thirst of your horses, even in Washington.

Of course we’re all impacted by climate change. It’s just sometimes hard to see that. I want to ask you to vote “No”on I-2117. And I want to be honest with you.

There will be costs, as well as benefits associated with changing. Let me give you a personal example.

I grew up in Los Angles, born just five years before the first "smog day" was declared in LA in 1943. According to an article in Automotive History, “Visibility dropped to three blocks and hospital emergency rooms filled with people suffering burning eyes and lungs.”

“Smog days became more frequent as LA grew. By the time I was in high school smog was a major political issue. I went to a school on Crown Hill overlooking the downtown. We couldn’t even make out city hall on smog days, which were frequent in the summer. Invariably, it seemed that I had a cross country meet when the smog was so thick you could taste it.

I escaped from LA in 1961, when I joined the Air Force out of college. Eight years later, when Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire, air and water pollution suddenly ranked high on the list of voter issues.

Today, in our hyper-divisive political climate it might be hard to believe that it was a Republican Governor, Ronald Reagan, and a Republican President, Richard Nixon, that aggressively tackled air pollution in California, and then across the nation.

As Governor, Reagan oversaw state-level initiatives to combat air pollution, supporting stringent air quality regulations that often served as models for federal standards. In fact, California established its own automotive emission standards well before the federal government, pushing automakers to innovate emission control technologies. Governor Reagan managed to get a waiver to the coming national emissions standards to keep California’s tougher standards. That waiver still stands, despite former President Trump’s effort to revoke it.

In 1970, President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act Amendments, which drastically expanded federal oversight on air quality, mandating significant reductions in automobile emissions, particularly targeting pollutants like carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides.

These efforts by a Republican Governor and a Republican President, and the scientific and engineering know-how of a Dutch-born biochemistry professor and a French mechanical engineer, led, in 1975 to American cars being equipped with catalytic converters. It also led to the removal of tetraethyl lead — a potent neurotoxin — from automotive gasoline.

There were costs involved in the introduction of catalytic converters, but they were far outweighed by the tens of millions of lives saved. None of this happened without the loud caterwauling of people like Brian Heywood.

Please, vote “No” on I-2117, so we can save cross-country runners, and the rest of humanity.

The League of Women Voters of Benton and Franklin Counties is holding a talk on the CCA and on I-2117 at 6 p.m. on Aug. 29 in the Gallery Room at the Richland Public Library.

Richard Badalamente was a senior scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Before that he was a commissioned officer in the United States Air Force. He is currently working to address climate change, and gun violence. He lives in Kennewick.