Despite state law, Washington takes 3+ years to reveal its climate pollution

Washington state disclosed its impact on the global climate on Monday, two years later than required by state law.

The Department of Ecology’s new report on Washington’s greenhouse gas emissions covers the years 2020 and 2021.

State law has required timely disclosure of Washington’s climate pollution every two years since 2010, with heat-trapping emissions for 2022 and 2023 to be reported by Dec. 31, 2024. The deadline for reporting 2020 and 2021 pollution was Dec. 31, 2022.

The same law also requires the state to lower planet-heating emissions below 1990 levels by the year 2020, with further reductions mandated by 2030, 2040, and 2050.

“The big takeaway is that Washington met the 2020 legal limit on greenhouse gas emissions that's laid out in law,” Joel Creswell with the Washington Department of Ecology said of the latest pollution inventory.

“I think we all remember 2020, perhaps not so fondly, as a time when people were not going to the office, people were not going out in their cars, they were not getting on airplanes and trains and boats,” he said.

Emissions rebounded above the 2020 legal limit in 2021 but remained below the levels they hit in 2019, according to the new report.

State-level data released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in September and analyzed by KUOW in November showed Washington’s emissions rising further in 2022.

While Washington state has only tracked its climate pollution through 2021, data published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in September shows the state's pollution continuing to increase in 2022.

When it comes to climate change, speed matters: Climate scientists say the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels and other sources of planet-heating pollution as urgently as possible to fend off catastrophic warming.

Scientists expect 2024 to be the Earth’s hottest year on record, with that global temperature data coming out by mid-January 2025.

How well Washington state is doing in the race to save the climate is mostly unknown, with results revealed years after the fact.

“The state law appropriately says that data has to be released fairly quickly,” said Todd Myers with the conservative Washington Policy Center. “Instead, we're getting data that are three years old, which makes it virtually impossible to use as a guide to determine if our policies are working or whether we're on the right track.”

“We produce the most current data available, and that's in line with how just about every state in the country does this,” Creswell said.

Ecology officials said the state’s inventory largely relies on data from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Creswell said the federal agency is expected to provide 2022 emissions data, publicly released in September, in a form that Ecology can use later in January.

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Ecology officials say they have hired more staff to produce future inventories more promptly, but not within a year as required. Ecology now has a staff of five working on greenhouse gas inventories, up from one in 2024.

“We don't anticipate being able to reduce that lag time to less than two years because it just takes a significant amount of time for the data to be collected and go through quality assurance,” Creswell said.

“The excuse that they can't do it is just another way of saying that they don't want to put the resources toward taking the steps that are necessary,” Myers said.

Major carbon emitters including Microsoft and Amazon are much faster to provide transparency around their planetary impacts.

Microsoft disclosed emissions from its 2023 global operations May 2024, while Amazon did so in July 2024.

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While the Washington state and federal pollution inventories largely overlap, some of their techniques and results differ. The federal tally only includes pollution from electricity generated inside each state’s borders, while Ecology includes out-of-state power plants.

Puget Sound Energy, Washington’s largest utility, got nearly one-fourth of its electricity from coal power, mostly from Montana, in 2022.

Both inventories fail to account for leaks of methane, a climate superpollutant, from imports of natural gas. In western Canada, where most of Washington state’s gas supply originates, enough unburned methane leaks from gas wells and pipes to make the fuel as harmful to the climate as coal.