🎧 Letter: Who Really Benefits From Repealing the CCA?
Area resident Anthony Teso offers a reply to Nancy Churchill opinion
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com
Nancy Churchill’s call to repeal Washington’s Climate Commitment Act rests on a foundation she doesn’t disclose: her lead source for the “Big Climate Lie,” Willie Soon, has taken over $1.2 million from fossil fuel companies and foundations for research denying human-caused climate change — including the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, the electric utility Southern Co., Donors Trust and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Internal documents show Soon described his work as “deliverables” for his funders.
Anthony Teso
After Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center released these documents in 2015, the Smithsonian opened an investigation into Soon’s ethical conduct and reviewed its disclosure policies. Soon is not an independent scientist. He is the fossil fuel industry’s house contrarian.
Strip out the denial and what remains? A real argument over whether the CCA is working. The picture is mixed, not the slam dunk Churchill claims. The Department of Ecology’s April 2026 report shows Washington’s carbon footprint decreased by half a million metric tons from 2021 to 2022 — slow, but a real decline. Between 2000 and 2022, emissions dropped by over 13% despite the state’s population growing by a third and gross domestic product doubling.
Todd Myers at the Washington Policy Center is right that the state is nowhere near its 2030 target. He is wrong that the answer is to scrap the law.
Churchill’s cost critique deserves a serious response. Yes, the CCA passes carbon costs to consumers at the pump. That regressive burden is real — and it is a choice. A program funded instead by progressive taxation of the corporations actually causing emissions, with revenue invested in public power, transit, and weatherization for working families, would not function as a hidden gas tax. A repeal that pockets the savings for Chevron and BP, leaving wildfire smoke, salmon collapse, and crop failure unaddressed, is not relief for working families. It is a transfer to the polluters.
Ask who benefits from repeal. The answer isn’t us.
Anthony Teso
Vancouver
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