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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, MARCH 2, 2018
Washington state’s carbon tax bill dies
By PHUONG LE
Associated Press
SEATTLE — Another
ambitious effort to pass a car-
bon tax in Washington state
has faltered as both Gov. Jay
Inslee and the bill’s prime
sponsor said Thursday that
there weren’t enough votes to
pass the measure out of the
state Senate.
Washington would have
been the first U.S. state to
impose a straight tax on car-
bon dioxide emissions from
fossil fuels like gasoline and
electricity and the legisla-
tion has been closely watched
nationally.
But Inslee told The Associ-
ated Press Thursday they were
still “one or two votes shy” of
passing it out of the Demo-
crat-controlled Senate. The bill
also needed to clear the House,
also controlled by Democrats,
before the short 60-day legis-
lative session ends March 8.
“I would consider this a sea
change in the climate fight.
It’s come a long way from
where we’ve been. We’ve
basically shown that carbon
policy is within reach,” said
the Democratic governor. He
noted the bill cleared key pol-
icy and fiscal committees —
advancing farther than pre-
vious measures — but didn’t
have the votes to bring it to a
floor vote.
“On the arc of history,
we’re not quite far along
enough on the arc,” Inslee
said. “That day will come but
it wasn’t quite here yet.”
The bill’s sponsor, state
Sen. Reuven Carlyle, a Seat-
tle Democrat, said in coming
years, “we’re going to see a
price on carbon in this state.”
Washington state has been
on the forefront of policy to
curb greenhouse gas emissions
blamed for global warming.
A coalition of environmen-
tal, tribal and other groups
In 2020, the carbon tax
would mean a 10 cent
hike in gasoline prices,
or nearly 4 percent
higher than it otherwise
would be, according to
legislative analysts.
have vowed to bring a car-
bon initiative to the ballot in
November should the Legisla-
ture fail to act.
Barry Rabe, a professor at
the Gerald R. Ford School of
Public Policy at the Univer-
sity of Michigan, said if the
bill is defeated it underscores
“that political support for a
carbon tax does remain one of
the heaviest lifts in American
politics.”
“Even in a state like Wash-
ington where you have a gov-
ernor who is enthusiastically
in favor, a Legislature that
seems to lean to the idea, this
proves difficult to do at least at
this point,” he said.
Washington voters rejected
a carbon tax initiative in 2016,
with many major environmen-
tal groups surprisingly lin-
ing up against the bill partly
over disagreements about how
money raised would be spent.
Senate Bill 6023 would
have imposed a new tax of $12
per metric ton of carbon emis-
sions on the sale or use of fos-
sil fuels such as gasoline and
natural gas.
The tax would have started
in 2019 and in 2021 would
have increased $1.80 per ton
each year until it hit $30 a ton.
The tax was projected to raise
$766 million in the first two
years.
Businesses such as REI and
Microsoft Corp. voiced sup-
port for the measure. But other
business groups, lawmakers
and critics called it an energy
tax that would be paid mostly
by families and those who
could least afford it. They crit-
icized the numerous exemp-
tions in the bill.
In 2020, the carbon tax
would mean a 10 cent hike
in gasoline prices, or nearly
4 percent higher than it oth-
erwise would be, according to
legislative analysts.
Todd Myers with the Wash-
ington Policy Center said the
bill would not achieve the
promised carbon reductions.
He said too much money goes
to carve outs, special inter-
ests and expensive projects
that won’t actually reduce
greenhouse gas emissions as
promised.
“I don’t think that the fail-
ure to pass this year is going to
stop other states,” said Charles
Komanoff, who directs the
New York-based Carbon Tax
Center.
Carbon-pricing
bills
have been introduced in
states, including Massachu-
setts, Oregon, New York and
Rhode Island, but none have
advanced as far as in Washing-
ton, experts noted.
Inslee said several bills are
still pending in the Legislature
that would reduce greenhouse
gas emissions, including one
that moves the state’s electri-
cal grid away from fossil fuels
and another that sets higher
targets for reducing carbon
pollution.
For king salmon, an incredible shrinking feeling
Giant Chinook
may be a thing
of the past
‘There is a large number
of resident killer whales
out there that really target
Chinook, and they target
the large Chinook.’
By JOHN RYAN
KUOW
While the orcas of Puget
Sound are sliding toward
extinction, orcas farther north
have been expanding their
numbers. Their burgeon-
ing hunger for big fish may
be causing the killer whales’
main prey, Chinook salmon,
to shrink up and down the
West Coast.
Chinook salmon are also
known as kings: the biggest of
all salmon. They used to grow
so enormous that it’s hard to
believe the old photos now.
Fishermen stand next to Chi-
nooks almost as tall as they
are, sometimes weighing 100
pounds or more.
“This has been a season
of unusually large fish, and
many weighing from 60 to 70
pounds have been taken,” The
Oregonian reported in 1895.
“It’s not impossible that
we see individuals of that size
today, but it’s much, much
rarer,” University of Washing-
ton research scientist Jan Ohl-
berger said on Monday, more
than a century later.
Ohlberger has been track-
ing the downsizing of salmon
in recent decades, but salmon
have been shrinking in num-
bers and in size for a long
time. A century’s worth of
dam-building, overfishing,
habitat loss and replacement
by hatchery fish cut the aver-
age Chinook in half, size-
Jan Ohlberger
University of Washington research scientist
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Fisherman Tony Canessa with an 85-pound Chinook he
caught near Astoria in 1925.
wise, studies in the 1980s and
1990s found.
Dam-building and fishing
have tailed off, but Chinooks
have been shrinking even faster
in the past 15 years, according
to a new paper by Ohlberger
and colleagues in the journal
Fish and Fisheries. Older and
bigger fish are mostly gone.
Few fish are making it to
old age, which for a Chinook
salmon means spending five
or six years in the ocean after a
year or two in freshwater.
“The older fish, which nor-
mally come back after five
years in the ocean, they come
back earlier and earlier,” Ohl-
berger said.
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The trend is clear, the rea-
sons less so.
Two species eat more Chi-
nook salmon than any others:
orcas and humans.
The 2,300 or more resident
killer whales in the Northeast
Pacific Ocean eat about 20
million pounds of Chinook
salmon a year — roughly
equal to the annual com-
mercial catch of Chinook in
recent years, according to the
new study.
“There is a large number
of resident killer whales out
there that really target Chi-
nook, and they target the large
Chinook,” Ohlberger said.
A study from federal
researchers in November
found that orcas’ consump-
tion of Chinook salmon in the
Northeast Pacific Ocean has
doubled since 1975, surpass-
ing humans’ catches, which
have fallen by a third over
that time.
“As far as we can see,
the killer whales are taking
the older and bigger fish,”
said Craig Matkin, a whale
researcher with the North
Gulf Oceanic Society in
Homer, Alaska. Matkin, who
was not involved in Ohlberg-
er’s paper, studies Alaskan
orcas’ diets.
“We go along with the ani-
mals and scoop up fish scales
and bits of flesh from where
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they kill something,” Matkin
said. “They’re sloppy eaters.”
“They’re going to go for
the biggest, oiliest fish there
are,” Matkin continued.
“That’s Chinooks.”
Salmon born in Oregon
and Washington state spend
most of their lives out at sea,
often in Alaskan waters, where
orcas aplenty await.
“Our (orca) populations
have increased faster than any-
where else, and they’re eat-
ing Chinook from all over the
place,” Matkin said.
In short, it seems Puget
Sound orcas are having their
lunch stolen by their better-off
Alaskan relatives.
“It is an interesting twist to
blame the marine mammals,”
Ken Balcomb with the Cen-
ter for Whale Research on San
Juan Island said in an email.
“I would first ask how the
Chinook evolved to be so big
during the preceding 12,000
years in the presence of hordes
of such size-selective natu-
ral predators throughout their
range. Large size was selected
by Mother Nature for Chi-
nook salmon in spite of natu-
ral predation.”
Balcomb points to over-
fishing, habitat loss and
salmon hatcheries that have
diluted the gene pool of wild
Chinooks.
Today’s smaller Chinook
salmon lay fewer eggs than
bigger ones can. They also
have a harder time digging out
gravel nests deep enough to
protect their eggs from scour-
ing streamflows.
Chinooks’
downsizing
could spell trouble for all the
mammals who want to catch
them, whether they have fin-
gers or fins.
“Predators are also going
to adapt to this change in size
and numbers,” Matkin said.
“You can’t look at it as a static
situation.”
“Ultimately, the whales
must eat to survive, and
humans have not sufficiently
allowed for that in their fisher-
ies management calculations,”
Balcomb said.
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