Washington Initiative 2117 (I-2117) is one of a series of initiatives that will appear on the ballot in November of 2024. I-2117 would revoke the 2021 Climate Commitment Act that protects the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the salmon in our streams using funds raised by making polluters pay for the damage they cause.
How should I vote on Initiative 2117?
You should vote “no.”
This measure serves to prop up big polluters and enable them to continue dumping toxins into our air and water without consequence, while making Washington residents pay for the harm they are causing. Fossil Fuel corporations are making record profits on the backs of American consumers. BP Oil alone made $80 billion last year, a 30% increase over 2022.
What would happen if Initiative 2117 passes?
The Climate Commitment Act (CCA) makes big polluters pay for the harm they cause to our communities. I-2117 would eliminate the CCA and ban Washington from ever creating something similar.
Without the funds raised by the CCA, the following programs would be terminated, threatened, or reduced:
- Increasing resilience to wildfires, improving forest health, or preserving natural lands
- Restoring and protecting estuaries, fisheries, and marine shoreline habitats
- Remediating and adapting to the impacts of ocean acidification
- Reducing flood risk and restoring natural floodplains
- Increasing the sustainable supply of water and improving marine habitats
- School-based bike programs
- Increasing the frequencies of local bus systems
- Assisting affected workers during the transition to a clean energy economy
- Putting more cash back in the pockets of working washingtonians through the Working Families Tax Credit
The revenue from the Climate Commitment Act is creating good-paying, local jobs like making homes more energy-efficient, and installing heat pumps and solar panels. Ending this program would result in losing many of these good jobs and prevent the creation of more of them.
Who is behind this initiative?
One MAGA multi-millionaire named Brian Heywood has personally spent more than $6 million bankrolling all of these initiatives in a cynical effort to buy him and his ultra-rich friends multiple tax cuts. He wants to roll back the ways our elected leaders have made life better in Washington in recent years with no care about the damage to our communities he leaves in his wake.
Each of these initiatives is sponsored in the Legislature by one of the most powerful MAGA-Republicans in Olympia. Now the Chair of Washington’s far right Republican Party, Rep. Jim Walsh is once again looking to impose his dangerous and unpopular agenda on all the people of Washington.
