A good overview of the session.
Even with Democrats in charge of the Legislature, environmentalists struggled on climate, clean water and orca protection.
You won’t pay an extra dime to fight climate change for every gallon of gasoline you buy. Puget Sound stands to be a tad better protected from oil spills when oil-tanker traffic jumps sevenfold, increasing the risk of a spill. And while your current microwave popcorn bag or burger wrapper likely contains a cancer-causing chemical today, your future purchases — starting in 2022, or perhaps later — aren’t supposed to.
Those are among the mixed environmental results from this year’s whirlwind 60-day session of the Washington state Legislature — marked by a few environmental firsts but also some significant losses for the greens on climate change that go beyond their inability to pass a carbon tax.