Welcome back to joining us now is Todd Myers. We've talked to Todd before. He's with a think tank policy institute in Washington State. He's vice president for research at the Washington Policy Center, and this is in Washington State. Thank you for joining us, sir.
Yeah, it's always nice to show with you.
Great to have you on. I saw your press release about what is happening in Washington State with CO two emissions. Tell us a little bit about what is happening there in terms of their emissions actually going up. And I don't think that everything is melting there in Washington yet, is it?
Probably I'm stilling outside my window right now.
So even though even though the CO two emissions went up, so tell us what's happening in Washington with Washington State with their measuring emissions, they've gone up over a ten year period, I guess nine year period twenty twelve to twenty twenty one.
So for those not in Washington State are probably wondering, why do I care about Washington State CO two emissions? And the answer is is that Washington in the West Coast has seen itself as a leader on climate change. You know, say, oh, here are the policies that we need to implement to reduce the risk from CO two emissions and climate change. Our governor, Governor Insley, actually ran for president, albeit briefly, in twenty nineteen, on the platform
of addressing climate change. And his whole argument was that he was going to bring the policies that we've had in Washington State to the federal level to fight climate change.
And we constantly call ourselves a leader so.
Across the country, these are the kinds of policies that are in Washington State that you know, many particularly on the left, want to implement, and what is notable is is that they simply have failed to achieve their goal. A lot of focuses on, you know, the cost of the CO two policies and climate change and things like that, but the simple fact is they don't work. And so Washington State this week released CO two data through twenty
twenty one. And so when you look at twenty twelve, which was just before Governor Ansley took office, through twenty twenty one, the ninth year of his administration, CO two emissions actually increased five percent over that period of time, and that's after COVID, So you know, considering that even COVID couldn't cause the emissions to go down. It's pretty remarkable, wow, Durre. At that same time, the United States CO two emissions went down. And so the message for people who aren't
in Washington State is these policies simply don't work. And if you care about CO two emissions, if you care about the risk from climate change, don't do what Washington State has done. Look for more innovative ways that put people, not politicians in charge.
Yeah, and when we look at all this stuff in terms of CO two, we got the Paris Climate Accord, which is hanging over everybody's head. China is putting in two power plants coal power plants a week, and supposedly it's not a problem the stuff comes from China, But the same as CO two if it's emitted in the United States or in Europe or other places like that, or it's going to kill us all that to me,
that is the key thing about this. And it's kind of interesting that even in some of the places where they have scrupulously tried to reduce, CO two has actually gone up and it hasn't been a catastrophe either, as it Yeah, and.
I think that The challenge is is that the exaggeration and sort of dishonesty has made it so that people simply write off climate change as an issue. You know, there have been so much exaggeration about the impact, about the.
Harm and that sort of thing that people get very tired of it.
Yeah, we do know that CO two does track heat to some extent and there is some risk. But the problem is these adjuration makes people to sort of roll their eyes. And then when you see the policies that cost a lot, raise energy prices, make things more expensive and then don't work, the natural reaction of people is
to say, this whole thing is a farce. This whole thing is about ideology, And you know, it's hard to disagree in a lot of cases because you know, even Al Gore, when he won the Nobel Prize for his work on climate change, said that climate change is an excuse to do things we should.
Be doing anyway.
Right, So he said, you know, it's a good way to implement our ideology, and that's what you see in Washington State. But I think that for those on the center right, like myself, we do need to recognize that there are things that we're doing to impact ecosystems to wildlife and things like that. And if you look, and what I always point out to people is look at a map, look at where nature is, and look at
where conservative voters are. They are overlapped. Conservatives live surrounded by the environment because they love it and they want to be good stewards. But what the failure of Washington State shows is that top down political policies fail, and bottom up efforts to save energy, to save money too, are much better way to be good stewards of the planet.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I talked to this week about you know, the classic case at the turn of the century, we're in big cities like in New York or Seattle or London. They had so much horse manure and horse urine that were accumulating in the streets, and it's like, and what saved that? Was it a government designed program that dictated solutions to people or was it a free market where
people got to try things? And of course you're talking about this from the standpoint of Washington State, and you said, how does this affect everybody else? You know, it's the federalism that we have, the fact that different states can try different things. And the beauty of that is that we can see what works. But the beauty of it is we can see what also see what does not work, and I guess the state has fallen into the latter category. Tell us a little bit about some of these regulations.
What have they done in Washington State, that is in terms of, you know, forcing people to do this or that that hasn't really even accomplished their metric by their own paradigm. What kind of regulations have you been seeing there in Washington State over this ten year period.
Well, there's a few things, and I'll give you two examples. One, we have lots of building regulations that force buildings to be what are called green buildings. And in fact, years ago we put it, we implemented a law that required all school buildings to meet what are called green building standards. And so I started looking at these green buildings and these green schools to see if they were in fact
saving money. And what I found was is that green schools that meet these standards actually used more energy per square foot than the non green schools in those same school districts for a variety of reasons. And you see this with buildings. There has been research that in Seattle, green buildings actually do worse than almost anywhere else. So one of the things was is that these very restrictive
building standards about what you had to build Seattle. In King County, where Seattle is is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, we have a housing shortage. We have very high prices, and it's because we've added a lot of these regulations, so called green regulations, that have ended up failing. Let me give you one more example. The number one source of CO
two emissions in Washington State is transportation. So the governor and others have said, oh, well, what we need to do is to build a lot of electric vehicle charging stations. But many of those charging stations sit unused because where people tend to charge up is at home, and if they are out and they see a charging station, they will plug in, but they're not very useful in terms
of actually keeping your vehicle charged. And you know, if you're in the store, you don't get much of a charge while you're there.
So it doesn't help.
It doesn't do much to actually help reduce CO two emissions or help you know, people who have electric vehicles, And the result is we spend millions, tens of millions of dollars on you know, electric vehicle charging stations that sit there and do nothing. That's just the waste of money. And so people, you know, focus on that as a waste of tax payer dollars, which it certainly is, but it's also a waste of opportunity to do good things
for the planet. There are lots of projects that we actually could do to you know, make it energy more efficient. We're fighting you know, I used to work with salmon recovery. We have very low populations of salmon. There's things we can do there. So if you waste money on useless ev charging stations rather than doing projects that help salmon, you are harming the environment by misallocating resources in addition to wasting tax.
Paranal And of course, what we're seeing with all this stuff is that they will kind up with one solution like an electric battery car, right, and they will you know not, and they will subsidize that heavily. They will shut down any other competition. And even if it is something like another form of an electric car, let's say, a fuel cell car or a hydrogen car, even if it's something that is could also be zero mission. No, no, no, we've got this one solution and you're going to do that.
That's something that we see from the government all the time. But I want to step back and when we talk about the schools and how the ones that were green schools and they gave them regulations about how they wanted to build them and that type of thing, how what was it that caused what types of things were they having these schools do that caused them to use more energy than other schools that didn't follow this this green building regulation scheme.
Yeah, people are always when I mentioned that, they're always flabbergasted that you could make a green building and make it actually worse than the existing buildings exactly. Several things that they did. One is I never understand good this, but they repeated it again and again, which is they said, well, we're going to have big windows because big windows allow in more light, and therefore you have you need fewer lighting.
Fixtures than that will save electricity.
Well, led light bulbs are extremely efficient, very low energy, put out a lot of light, and so there's just not very much energy to be saved by reducing that amount of light. However, windows are not very efficient. Right, they let a lot of heat in. They allowed a lot of you know cold in as well, Right when during the summer it's hot or in the winter it's cold, and so you have to constantly run the HVAC to
keep that room the normal temperature. The other thing that and that more than offsets any you know, energy savings you get from wind. The other thing that they do is they say, well, we want clean air, we want fresh air. So what they do is they have requirements to have to recirculate the air to pull the old air out, put a new area. And what you got to do, You've got to heat that, You've got to cool that, whatever. And so they're constant running the hvacs.
And so I talked with several facilities directors, not just in Washington State but across the country where these were, and they just said, in order to build a green school, we would actually have to increase the size of the HVAC system to meet these new requirements.
But I want to address your point about the one size fits all.
That's the fundamental problem with government programs.
Right, should can't say the fundamental a fundamental.
Problem, which is is that there is one size and if it doesn't work, then you've lost time. We need a diversity of efforts. So, you know, I would be a horrible book author if I didn't mention my book Time to Think Small, which focuses on exactly this issue, which is lots of small efforts and a diversity of efforts are better ways to find not only solutions that work,
but solutions that fit people's lives. Rather than have government impose restrictions on people that make their lives more difficult. A diversity of solutions, especially with technology, allows them to find ways to save energy, save money, do things that fit their lifestyle, make their life better while also making a planet better. And so I think that's the real key is is that we need a diversity of things.
What I'm hoping is is that, you know, during the upcoming Trump administration, rather than just simply saying all of these environmental you know, this focus is ridiculous to say we need a new approach, We need to diversified approach, federalism, local power rather than top down government power. To show that this way works better than the one size fits all government approach.
Oh yeah, absolutely. When we're talking about federalism and the fact that you know, we can see what works and what doesn't work based on different states and everything. And unfortunately, there's this idea that is taken hold in America across a political spectrum. It doesn't seem to me the matter whether people on the left or the right, Republican Democrat, everybody thinks that a solution needs to come from Washington. And one of the results of that is that we
get this one size fits all. We're going to have a dictated solution and that's the way this is going to work. And we need to be able to experiment to find out what works and what doesn't work. That's a key thing.
You know.
It's kind of interesting, and you address this in your press release. The fact that the most recent data that they just released is twenty twenty one. Why is that If this is something such a high priority for them, why aren't they Maybe it's because it's not working, they don't want people looking at it. Why are they three years behind and all this stuff?
So another problem with I mean more evidence this is I think more evidence that simply bureaucracy is not up to the task, certainly of addressing environmental issues as well as other issues. And the fact that here we are in twenty twenty five, and the most recent data we have for Washington state two missions is twenty twenty one. Interestingly,
that is actually in violation of state law. State law says that by the end of even numbered years, like twenty twenty four, they are to release emissions data for the preceding two years, which would have been twenty twenty two in twenty twenty three. So I pointed this out and said that the state is actually in violation of
its own law and being two years behind. And the problem with that is that twenty twenty one data is useless if you are a policy maker and trying to figure out what works and what doesn't, because you can say, oh, and what they do say is, oh, yes, we didn't meet those targets, but the policies we adopted after that are working. Well. It's like, well, how do you know you don't have any data, You're just making it up.
And so when I pointed this out that they were in violation of their law of bit, the governor's press secretary sent out a snarky email saying, you know what Todd doesn't understand is how difficult it is to gather this information. Well, exactly, the government doesn't have the capacity to get the information and to do the job in a way that will work. That's what they are admitting is it's like, look, we can't do this. The other irony is is that we actually have very ownerous restrictions
in Washington State about electric vehicles. You can't basically sell a recreational vehicle or a semi in Washington State because there aren't enough electric vehicles.
To sell because you have to sell a certain percentage of that. So we stopped. So the argument has been to the same agency who put these numbers out, look, we would like to comply.
We can't. It's physically not possible to comply. And the response to the agency is sorry, that's the law. So you know, when it's other people, it's the law that you have to follow. When it's them, they whine about the fact that it's not possible for.
Them to actually comply with the law.
And I think that just shows you that, you know, how incapable bureaucracy is of addressing these serious challenges, but also how an image, their own image is more important than actually reducing CO two emissions. As much as they talk about it's an existential crisis. When the choice is between admitting failure and saying yes, we need to do better or making excuses. They make excuses to say their own.
And that's something that we see all the time, you know, I talk about the fact that you know, when you look at let's say a command control economies socialism, you know, look at East Germany versus West Germany, or North Korea versus South Korea. Why is it that they don't have any goods in the story? So well, they don't really
because they don't have a market system. Even if you had the smartest people in control, and we know that's not what happens, even if you had the smartest people in control, they don't have sufficient information to be able to make decisions about what is going to work the best. That's what a marketplace does. And so as you point out, they're making this confession that yeah, it's not possible for
us to get all this information together. It's not possible for them to get enough information together to make an intelligent decision. That's that's what the whole free market is about, everybody, And that's what your book is about as well, you know, thinking getting small and pulling back instead of having central planning and dictates and mandates and bans that are being put on all kinds of things. And I imagine you
probably have that as well. I mean we're looking at Biden going out the door banning hot water heaters and other things like that. I'm sure you guys are way ahead of that right at state level.
Yes. In fact, we just in Washington State, the state tried to ban natural gas hookups, not just the heaters, not just the stoves or anything like that, but actually running natural gas to new homes. They tried to ban it. The voters overturned that in this lend this last election because they recognized that it was so excuse me, extreme.
Yeah, and we're seeing that in the UK as well. You know, they've done the same thing there. They want to ban natural gas and stuff. And you know, heat pump in a really cold climate like you've got in Washington State, only they've got in the UK heat pumps just don't make it handle it very well during the winter, and so but they don't care, and they want to in the UK, they even want to remove the exist thing infrastructure. I mean, they want to rewild is one
of the terms that they've used. They want to rewild the infrastructure that's been built. In other words, you know, just just take everything back down to nothing, that's what you're saying everywhere.
Yeah, well, in fact, you mentioned heat pumps. So I live in the mountains and we have a heat pump. Well last January it was negative ten where I was. Fortunately, I have a propane backup, and so I have a propane tank that when it gets that low, that we can heat our house. Because the heat pump, when it gets you know, in the teens and certainly negative temperatures,
it doesn't work. I also have a smart thermostatum. My smart thermostat would come up and say, we think that your heat pump is broken because it's just turning and not generating the heats, and I was like that, yes, because it's negative ten. And so that I think is the challenge of these one size fits all approaches. But you made a really good point about local control, and
I think there's two things. One is that you need to have the information, and bureaucrats simply don't have the information necessary to make those good decisions because it's not in front of them, and everybody's circumstances are a little bit different. The second thing is is that you need accountability so that when something goes wrong or when it goes right, you get that feedback. When you fail, you say, okay, we got to change bueroquests don't have that feedback, they
don't have that accountability. There's a fantastic example here at Washington State.
So the Quinault tribe, which is out on the coast, had.
Been as these beautiful forests, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been doing all of the timber harvesting on the land on behalf of the tribe. And what did they do. They cut clear cut massive areas and then left slash on the ground. They said, don't worry, it will decompose and trees will regrow between them. But what they didn't realize was that cedar has a chemical in
it that slows decomposition. So what was left was these massive areas where there was just all of this timber slash and no regrowth at all for decades, literally for decades.
So the tribe said, look, why.
Don't we take over the forest tree on our own land, because they were the ones who are paying the price. They lived there, not the BIA, right the BIA was making decisions from Washington, d C. So they took it over. And what was the first thing they did. They forested, They removed the slash, and they started a harvest rotations that were sustainable that would bring back those forests. Now, critically,
they harvested for revenue. They want that money because they recognized that it's a valuable resource, and they use it to fund part of the tribe's budget. So they didn't just leave the trees, but they were better stewards because they had the information about how cedar worked as opposed to other trees.
And then they also had the accountability.
And my favorite part of the story was is that when the tribe took over forests in the early two thousands completely from the BIA, the BIA said the BIA had been harvesting without any environmental assessments at all.
They said, well, we have a general plan, go harvest. The tribe took.
Over, the BIA said you have to do environmental assessments. You could imagine the tribe's reaction when they said, you haven't been doing it, but we have to, And the BIA said yes. I think that's the arrogance sometimes of government overseeing and in this case, I mean, really treating the tribe badly who had been doing a better job than the BIA.
Accountability is just so much better for the environment.
Oh yeah, I guess my question is do they have some special status that we don't have that they could take back control from this bureaucracy, Because that's the biggest problem. We can't get control back from these bureaucracies that are doing a bad job. How did they get it back? Was it because of their status as Indians there?
Yeah, it was because they have sovereignty. Now that's what sovereignty means on on tribal lands. Is sort of interesting because the BIA is supposed to hold the land and trust and manage it for the benefit of the tribes. It's an incredibly paternalistic system, I think. But as the point that you make is is that in the tribes they have the opportunity to do that. They can at least make an argument that they are sovereign and can do that. You and I we can't say, hey, we
would rather have control. Let us figure a way to be better stewards. The federal and state agencies don't do that for us. So I think it's funny. It's because I've started studying tribal stewardship of natural resources for this
very reason, which is that they have more control. And I think that in many ways they provide a really good model for how we should care for natural resources because they have that local control, local knowledge, and the accountability, and when it comes from forests, fisheries, wildlife habitat, wildlife management,
they do a better job. May be one more fun example, which is in Washington State, the wolf is considered a threatened species, but on the Callville Reservation, which is right in the area where the wolves are, they consider the wolf recovered because the populations are very high and they
actually hand out hunting permits. That's the tribe. So when they have authority and when it affects them, they can say, look, we're using the information we have, we have the accountability, we have the control to do a better job than the sort of bureaucratic systems from the government.
Well that's interesting, you know, and but you know, part of it is and again it is the status of the Indians. But regular Americans have sovereignty that they're not
using as well. And I think that they need to start using the Tenth Amendment and some of these other things, because federal policy, especially when you talk about forests, and we were talking about that earlier in the program, with the fires that are happening in La seen it over and over again, poor forestry management because they're not doing stewardship anymore. They're doing environmentalism, and it's kind of just, you know, don't touch anything type of thing rather than
actually doing stewardship. And it has been disastrous for the last fifty years, and it's getting worse all the time. And so I think everybody needs to start getting together and seeing how we're going to increase our sovereignty so that we can start addressing some of these problems ourselves. And of course that's what your book is focused, not not the political aspect of it, but the beauty of
having smaller local decisions. Tell us little bit about your book again, I know we talked about last time you were on and the title of it.
Is Time to Think Small, How nimble environmental How nimble environmental technology.
Can solve the plant's biggest problems.
And there are a lot of folks on the center right who care about the environment, but very skeptical about environmental issues because they feel that it's a trojan horse for policies that they don't like, and in many cases, as we discussed, it is but they want to find an alternative that they can support to be, you know, to protect the natural resources. Like I said, conservative live
around that. The other sources that I've had a lot of people say, is my college age son or daughter comes back, it lectures me about.
The environment and why don't we care about the environment.
And so I said, we'll give them my book.
It'll explain a better way to help the environment.
But what it shows is is that in the nineteen seventies when we created the EPA, you didn't have the technology, you didn't have the control for individuals to make a big difference in environmental stewardship. That's just simply not true anymore. We now have the technology. We now have the ability to do really remarkable things, to be good stewards of
the environment in ways that bureaucracies fail. And so what we recognize, what we need to recognize, is that we need to change the way that we do environmental stewardship. Put the power in the hands of individuals, people's innovative companies, and less in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who tend to focus on their own interests rather than the
interests of the planet. In Washington State's failure on reducing CO two emissions that we saw this week is really just the perfect example of where an issue that the politicians say is critical and existential crisis, and yet even they fail and then make excuses for that fail rather than saying we need to find a better way for them, it's about political image. It should be about for the planet.
For conservatives and those in the center right who live near nature every day, that's what thinking small, That's what these new technologies, That's what my book is about. It's about ways to do that actually lived, that help us live the lives of the way we want while being good stewards of the planet.
That's really well said. And again the book is Time to Think Small by Todd Myers. And I guess I can find that Amazon and where books are sold right, Yep, absolutely, that's great. Yeah, I've seen that same type of thing. As a matter of fact, I worked with a guy at a think tank who had been with the EPA at the time he had just retired. He was with
him for about thirty years. Right after their creation and to see that it had kind of changed his whole mission statement, you know, and the EPA has not really been about pollution anymore. It's all about the environmentalism. And so that's what we see with the bureaucracies. And it's really by design because it allows these people who have to stand for election to not have any accountability either, because they can always push it on to the bureaucracy.
Thank you so much for joining us, Todd Myers. And again the book is Think Time to Think Small by Todd Myers, and he works there at the Washington Policy Center. Thank you all of you, and thank you Sandy Hayes. I appreciate that. Thank you for the tip. Have a good day. The common man, they created common Core, dumbed down our children. They created common Past to track and control us, their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common
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