A couple weeks ago I stood on a ridge overlooking Easton Glacier high on Mount Baker. If you’ve never seen it, the glacier is impressive—and the trip there perhaps even more so. That morning my partner and I started hiking early from our campsite in a field of mountain heather. We followed a trail along the nearly straight edge of a steep drop-off, a landscape feature known affectionately as the “Railroad Grade” because it appears straight and smooth as an artificial track. But the main force that sculpted it wasn’t humans; it was ice.
The Railroad Grade follows the edge of a glacial valley, young enough that its upper part hasn’t been reclaimed by trees. Its walls appear raw and exposed. At the top of the valley, on the slopes leading up to Mount Baker’s peak, sits the glacier. Huge icy crevasses tell a story of physical forces almost beyond my imagining: the tug and pull of ice against ice over decades and centuries, rending great cracks in the glacier’s surface.
A stream follows the glacial valley down into the trees. It’s easy to imagine how Easton and the mountain’s other glaciers serve as great repositories for water, all summer long slowly releasing it into rivers like the Nooksack, which green Washington’s farmlands, forests, and wetlands en route to the ocean.
While the glacier is enormous, it’s much smaller than it used to be. And while some of this retreat is due to natural climatic variations, much recent shrinkage can be attributed to human-caused climate change. If current carbon emission trends continue, many Washington glaciers will disappear within decades. Looking down at Easton Glacier reminded me why I’ve chosen to devote a large part of my life’s energy to fighting the biggest human-caused threat our planet has suffered: climate change. Specifically, it made me think about the campaign I joined last spring to pass ballot Initiative 1631.
This November Washington voters will have their say on 1631, which would finance clean energy and ecosystem restoration projects by charging a fee per unit of carbon on the largest polluters in the state. The money raised would pay for projects like wind and solar farms, community energy efficiency programs, accessible transit, and forest and salmon stream restoration. Each project would mitigate climate change or reduce its effects while creating jobs—and in many cases, saving consumers money by reducing fuel and electricity use. 1631 is supported by one of the largest coalitions that’s ever gotten behind a ballot initiative in Washington: environmental and health groups, unions and small businesses, faith groups and social justice organizations, and many Tribal governments are all on board.
When I learned about Initiative 1631 I knew I had to get involved in helping pass it. But while I’ve been an environmental activist for over a decade, something in me really hates electoral campaigns. I’m an introvert; initiating conversations on the street, let alone knocking on strangers’ doors, doesn’t come at all naturally to me. I’d rather stand on a picket line, organize a rally, or even sit in front of an oncoming coal train (and I’ve done all that). Yet, volunteering for Initiative 1631 was just too important for me to say no.
In spring I signed up to help gather signatures to get 1631 on the ballot. I stood outside Bellingham’s Community Food Co-op, farmer’s markets, and Whole Foods asking people to sign. Thousands of other people across Washington did the same thing and together we gathered over 300,000 signatures. In June our initiative officially qualified for the ballot.
Then, a few weeks ago, the truly hard part of the campaign began. With the start of general election season we volunteers prepared to embark on the next phase: going door-to-door talking with voters who’ve been identified as likely swing votes.
To a born introvert, knocking on strangers’ doors and asking to talk about politics sounds like about the least-fun thing ever. But I’ve actually found it’s not that bad. The large majority of people I’ve talked to have been receptive; some even express appreciation for the work I and others are doing on this exercise in grassroots democracy. I can honestly say door-knocking has been a lot more pleasant than I expected—and there’s lots more to do. You can sign up to help here.
Of course, while people like me hit the streets, Big Oil is hitting the airwaves with tens of millions of dollars in ads to defeat 1631. Virtually all the opposition to this initiative is coming from oil companies and a few big utilities married to fossil fuels. Their arguments are tired and expected. Though almost all their funding comes from mega-corporations, they pretend to be a bunch of small businesses simply concerned about gas prices.
So what about energy bills? Will they actually go up under 1631? While the price of fuel or electricity may increase minimally, this should be at least partially offset by projects that make it easier to use less fossil energy in the first place, like energy efficiency programs, accessible and affordable mass transit, and initiatives that help communities generate their own energy from renewables.
Besides, it’s not as if staying addicted to fossil fuel doesn’t have an economic price of its own. What about health bills from illness caused by car tailpipes, industrial pollution, and the devastating wildfires sweeping the Northwest with increasing frequency as summers grow hotter and drier? What about food prices, which rise when grain crops fail as agricultural lands become deserts? The happy-go-lucky future imagined by the oil companies—where we keep burning fossil fuels and have to pay not much of anything as a result—simply doesn’t exist. We’re going to pay for climate change one way or another. It’s just a matter of how we want to invest that money—in another decade of oil dependence, or in breaking free from fossil fuels.
And that, I think, is the real reason Big Oil’s so afraid of 1631: the initiative is about building the clean energy future these companies most fear. True, 1631 does charge a fee on polluters—the money to rebuild our economy has to come from somewhere—but it’s not about taxing oil companies out of existence, the fee is nowhere near large enough to do that. What it could do is build Big Oil out of existence, build it into irrelevance with a future powered by renewables.
It’s precisely because of 1631’s transformational approach that fossil fuel companies will fight it so hard. Its success in November is far from guaranteed, and if you live in Washington we need you to help by double-checking your voter registration status, then urging friends and family to do them same and talking with them about 1631. Then, if you can, sign up to volunteer by joining a door-knock event for 1631 in your community. You can search for events near you here.