Friday, March 29, 2024

The state's environmental policy has failed

Posted
One sentence sums up the last 10 years of Washington's environmental policy.
"I will stay away from the math and instead tell you all a short story about my son."
That is how former Washington State Department of Ecology Director and President of the Washington Environmental Council Jay Manning began his e-mail to legislators justifying more taxpayer subsidies for electric vehicles.
As one of the leaders on the environmental left, his choice of words reveals how environmental policy decisions have been made for more than a decade: forget the math and science and listen to an emotionally satisfying story.
Ironically, the story he told contradicts the point he was trying to make.
Manning noted that his son recently leased a Nissan Leaf thanks to taxpayer subsidies. He wrote:
"...he leased a brand new Nissan Leaf. His first new car and boy is he excited. He doesn't make a lot of money - he's 25 and just getting started.
"Nevertheless, he made this purchase without our help and without borrowing money. He simply could not have done it without the benefit of the federal tax credit and the sales tax exemption he received as part of the lease." 
Manning assumes that without subsides, the car would not have been purchased. 
People face this problem every day, however. They take out car loans.
They save their money for a bit, take the bus for a while, and pay for the car themselves.
Manning's assumption is that the desire of buyers to buy an electric car is so weak they won't tolerate any delay or pay for the car out of their own pocket.
Why borrow from a bank, however, when you can get the money for free from taxpayers?
Another option, of course, is to borrow money from your parents.
In this case, however, subsidies from state taxpayers saved Manning from having to help out.
Indeed, as we noted previously, state data show that nearly half of the tax subsidies go to people living in the wealthiest ten percent of zip codes.
The subsidies go to wealthy car buyers (and their children) instead of generating new car sales. These are the very people who have many options to purchase the cars they desire.
Manning, however, sees the bright side of this, saying that half of the subsidies also go to people in the bottom 90 percent.
Imagine for a moment left-wing politicians praising a tax cut because although half of the cuts went to the top ten percent, the other half didn't.
That demonstrates how much the environmental left has to suspend their own values to justify the policies they want.
From "green" schools that use more energy, to the Puget Sound Partnership which isn't on track to meet any of its goals, the record of the last ten years of environmental policy - guided largely by Manning himself - has been abysmal.
It should not come as a surprise, then, when the architect of environmental policy during that period says he prefers telling happy stories to dealing with the reality of math and science.
Todd Myers is the director of the Center for the Environment at the Washington Policy Center.
Opinion

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