New Draft legislation for a carbon tax; comedy-and-carbon talks

We’ve got a new draft of our carbon tax legislation! It’s still a draft (with feedback welcomed on refinery operations and biofuels in particular), but it lays out our vision, which is to use a BC-style carbon tax to pay for a reduction of the state sales tax by a full percentage point, plus B&O tax reductions for manufacturers and small businesses and funding of the Working Families Sales Tax Rebate. Comments welcome, and thanks to Bill Appel for all his hard work on this!

In other news:

This week and next I’m doing comedy-and-carbon-tax shows around the state, starting at UW Seattle this Thursday (note that there’s a new location, details here) and then on to Everett on Saturday, Spokane on Monday and Wednesday (Whitworth and Gonzaga, respectively, including a Dean’s Breakfast with the Gonzaga School of Business), WSU Pullman on Tuesday, and Walla Walla (Whitman College) on Thursday. Most of these talks are free and open to the public, so check out the details here and please email us if you want us to give a talk at your school/church/etc!

We’ve hired Kristy Royce as our new organizer! Kristy is the co-founder of CoolMom and is going to put her business experience to use pushing the campaign forward. Those of you who have pledged to collect signatures during our window of January – June 2014 should expect to hear from Kristy in the near future (!), and those of you who haven’t pledged should make a signature pledge now. (And if you’d rather give money instead of or in addition to giving time, well, we’ve made good use of your donations so far and we need $10,000 to take it to the next level, so please help by making a donation.)

PS. You may have read about Governor Inslee joining other west coast leaders last week in signing a Pacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Clean Energy. The good news is that the Action Plan calls for Washington State to “deploy market mechanisms” to reduce carbon emissions. The bad news is that the Action Plan is not legally binding, meaning that it’s all Plan and no Action. It will take a lot of work to turn words into deeds, so that why we need your help to make a reality out of the vision described in the Huffington Post: “Carbon Tax To Spread To Washington, Oregon From B.C.” Please help spread the word and give us your support now!