Washington state officials are correcting a report on the accomplishments of a major state climate law.
The state’s Climate Commitment Act Investments report details the results of programs funded by $1.5 billion from the Climate Commitment Act. Regulators hold quarterly auctions for the carbon allowances they require big polluters to obtain.
When the report was first published in late November, it said the more than 3,600 projects that the act funded statewide were expected to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 8.6 million tons over their lifespan. That’s the equivalent of taking nearly half the gas and diesel vehicles off Washington’s roads for an entire year, according to department officials.
Now, state officials have issued a correction that cuts the law's benefits to a tiny fraction of that original estimate: just 308,000 tons over their lifespan, or less than 4% of their original estimate. The release from the Washington Department of Commerce says a “data entry error significantly inflated the reported emissions reduction” for its programs.
A conservative think tank caught the error. Todd Myers, vice president for research at the Washington Policy Center, said he knew something was wrong as soon as he read the report.
“It said that it costs $40 to reduce one metric ton of CO2. The previous report had said that the cost was $1,400. So to go from $1,400 to $40 is pretty shocking,” Meyers said.
He went on to find eight projects that had this accounting error. Those projects provided rebates for heat pumps and electric appliances. They are now flagged in an explanatory paragraph that has been added to the title page of the report.
Myers said this “massive error” should motivate lawmakers to require climate spending to be more effective, result-driven and “less political."
“I'm glad that the Department of Ecology and Commerce corrected it, but this is the sort of thing that's indicative of the mistakes that we make in our climate policy and why we're not anywhere close to hitting our climate targets,” he said.
The mistake was discovered in the run-up to a new legislative session. And pressure is on lawmakers to use cash from the lucrative Climate Commitment Act for non-climate purposes, such as the governor’s request to help fund the state’s Working Family Tax credits.
The Commerce Department was unable to provide comment for this story as of Thursday afternoon. But officials said in the commerce revision notice that “corrective measures are already in place to ... prevent similar errors in the future.”
The state Department of Ecology said it is working on a full-scale review of all its data and will publish a corrected report when that review is complete, which is expected “in the coming weeks.”
