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Burien, WA - If you've been out about town lately, you're seeing many citizens collecting signatures for I-2066 "Stop the Gas Ban" petition.
While about half of us happily heat our homes with clean, plentiful, efficient, and low-cost natural gas (it is, after all, a fossil fuel), the Biden Administration considers the threat of climate change an existential threat. To be clear, that's a threat that imperils our existence - like nuclear war or the Sun going supernova. As with much of what Joe Biden does, this doesn't really resonate with voters. Intent on following Biden's path to political popularity, Governor Jay Inslee made climate change his sole agenda item when he ran for president in 2020. With one percent of the vote, he achieved the dubious ranking of tying with skim milk.
Jay Inslee and the Washington State Legislature are keen to eliminate natural gas, or as they call it, "decarbonize" the state. After a few false starts, the Washington State Legislature passed House Bill 1589, which Governor Jay Inslee promptly signed into law in March 2024. Inslee heralded it as "a roadmap and tools for our state's largest utility to get out of the fossil fuel business."
Well, it's Puget Sound Energy - the natural gas company. To be clear, PSE desperately wants this legislation passed, and the Democrats are delighted to cater to big corporate interests. Of course, the smaller public utilities won't get the benefits and power PSE will accrue from this, and they are pointing out that it's unfair and hurts them.
PSE can clearly see that the effects of all this climate legislation from the state legislature will be ruinous to them and that the costs to construct the electrical power infrastructure needed would easily bankrupt them.
PSE wants this legislation, House Bill 1589, so they can shut off gas service area by area and force gas customers to retrofit from gas to electricity. They would then be able to force their 900,000 gas customers to pay for infrastructure expansion they neither want nor use.
The average cost, if the Washington Building Industry Association is to be believed, would be nearly $40,000 per household. These costs would also be crippling for landlords and lead to far higher rent costs in the region. Of those ratepayers, 8716 are Burien residents. The average salary in Burien is modest by Puget Sound standards at $84,583, meaning the average household would be required to spend roughly fifty percent of their annual gross income on retrofitting.
The costs for businesses, restaurants, and retail outlets would be just as bad, leading to higher prices for almost everything. They, too, would bear the enormous cost of the Washington State Legislature's climate change agenda.
Proponents of the natural gas ban claim that there will be financial aid available to help people pay for the cost of retrofitting to "all electric." However, this will cover very few people, and landlords and businesses will likely be excluded. At $40,000 per unit for about 900,000 units, meaningful aid would be well beyond the state's budget.
It's unlikely that anything will change in Olympia soon, and PSE is holding all the cards. There is something we can do right away to help stop this.
Go out there and sign the petition for Peoples' Initiative I-2066, which will then go on the November ballot. That way, the people can decide on the issue themselves, free of the influence of a big corporation with a state-granted monopoly.
633 SW 148th St.
Burien, WA 98166
206-244-7542
M-F 9am-5pm
Location Deadline: JULY 2nd at 5pm
427 SW 152nd St.
Burien, WA 98166
206-244-6000
M-F 9:30am-5pm
Location Deadline: JULY 2nd at 5pm
The Let's Go Washington website has signing locations and blank petitions available.
"Let's Go Washington" has already collected over 300,000 signatures. More are needed, and they only have another week to collect the required 420,000 signatures.
-Peter J. Butzerin
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