SEATTLE—While big-name donors and politicians gather and spend millions against the initiative to kill Washington’s fledgling carbon market, the man behind the measure is running a guerrilla campaign to sway voters to his side.
Brian Heywood, the millionaire Republican behind Initiative 2117, figures he spends perhaps $1,000 to take over a gas station for a few hours, cut prices per gallon and use the event to glad-hand motorists and explain his position. He’s already hosted about 18 price-slashing events across the state and has more in the works as the November election approaches.
The strategy might have helped build support earlier in the campaign but the momentum appears to be waning. A September poll showed more people oppose the initiative than support it. Heywood’s takeovers are also raising eyebrows. Heywood has been accused of violating bribery and corruption laws (he has, in turn, accused state officials of violating election laws). And for all his complaints about the liberal elites who he said passed the Climate Commitment Act at the expense of the working class, he also has a past of big-money connections and opaque business dealings.
With his money, Heywood has afforded himself an outsized influence on Washington’s climate policy. His efforts could easily ripple into other states watching this election while deciding whether to enact similar policies of their own. In that way, this ballot initiative has the potential to shape the national emissions profile and, in essence, the climate itself.
The Climate Commitment Act, which 2117 seeks to repeal, launched last year and has already raised more than $2 billion for green initiatives. The program requires the state’s top polluters to pay for emissions by buying allowances at quarterly auctions. Over time, state officials will ratchet down the number of allowances sold, thereby reducing emissions.
At his core, Heywood said he disagrees with the basic premise that the state must cut carbon emissions, saying that attempts to do so are “arbitrary” and based on a “masquerade of science.”
Don’t call him a climate change denier, though. That phrase triggers the anger of the masses and their “woke ideology,” Heywood said. That’s like saying someone is a Holocaust denier, he said.
Still, Heywood said, the world is cleaner with fossil fuels.
But it isn’t.
Gas prices take center stage
Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people stopped at an innocuous Federal Way gas station in late August. Who could pass up $2.99 a gallon?
Their benefactor, Heywood, walked from car to car that morning, sporting a flannel shirt with a Kraken logo, tapping into his everyman persona rather than the more traditional suit-coat-and-tee combo he’ll wear at campaign rallies and news conferences.
Some people drive to the gas stations for the event specifically, others stop because the low prices catch their eye.
Either way, at that point, Heywood and his team have their attention for however long it takes to fill a tank.
Are you registered to vote? We can take care of that right over here, they say. Have you eaten? We’ve got food on the grill. Are you familiar with our initiatives?
The method is affordable and his audience receptive. Those who gassed up in Federal Way expressed varying levels of concern for climate change but unanimous concern for the cost of gas and the economy.
George Bersaeff, 87, waited for his tank to fill and remembered the 1970s, when the price of gas was measured in cents rather than dollars. Back then, he said, you could fill up your car, grab a hamburger and a beer for $10.
“Get that damn gas down,” he said, noting that he would vote in favor of 2117.
Others weren’t quite so sure. Like 28-year-old Angelica Gomez, who stopped by when she saw the low prices. She lamented the higher costs but still said she’d need more research before making up her mind about Heywood’s initiative.
Climate change, Gomez said, is a very big deal that can neither be ignored nor reversed past a certain point.
“I have children to think about,” she said.
Earlier in his campaign, Heywood would offer gas at the national average rate. In Federal Way, he set his prices even lower than the national average to grab more attention.
Washington’s gas prices have exceeded the national average for decades, said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. The phenomenon certainly predates the Climate Commitment Act.
Once the policy did begin, though, oil companies started passing their increased compliance costs on to customers to the tune of about 50 cents per gallon. Allowance prices were so high, they triggered multiple emergency auctions meant to act as a pressure relief valve. But the market has since calmed and lately, Kloza said, the policy is responsible for a price increase of closer to 26 cents.
That’s above Gov. Jay Inslee’s 2021 estimate that the policy would amount to “pennies” worth of difference. But still lower than the dollar-plus discount Heywood is offering.
Heywood said the price he uses is more to attract peoples’ attention rather than to lay the entire blame on the Climate Commitment Act.
Precisely how much the policy did boost gas prices is likely immaterial for the general voter, said Aseem Prakash, a political scientist at the University of Washington.
“Who cares?” Prakash said. “For a working person, they’re mad about gas prices.”
Dueling ethics complaints
Heywood is tapping into that anger in this clever bit of campaigning while Democrats struggle to communicate the clear benefits of the policy they want so desperately to defend, Prakash said. Climate change is a losing political argument; it doesn’t motivate people at the polls. The political reality is that the country must rely on a mix of fossil fuels and renewable energy for the foreseeable future, he said.
Prakash pointed to Vice President Kamala Harris as an example. She voiced her support for fracking in Pennsylvania during her presidential debate with former President Donald Trump.
Left out of most conversations, Heywood said, is the benefit that fossil fuels bring to the table.
As an example, Heywood pointed to polluted rivers in Nepal. Cleanup efforts by hand are inefficient and labor-intensive. Involve diesel machinery, however, and the process is much more effective.
Developing countries do express a need to continue using fossil fuels to improve their standard of living, generate electricity and even purify water. By comparison, these countries still emit far fewer greenhouse gasses per capita, Vox reported. Plus, it’s the wealthier countries that are driving the biggest increases in emissions. SUVs were one of the largest contributors to rising emissions from 2010 to 2018, the International Energy Agency found.
Either way the broad and long-standing consensus among scientists across the world is that greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of coal, oil and gas are the largest contributors to climate change.
Heywood still sticks to his economic arguments, noting that affordability is what people want right now, he said. And that’s what he’s offering with the gas price rollbacks.
The practice seems fishy to James Long, a political scientist with the University of Washington. He questioned the legality of paying for someone’s gas at a political event.
Heywood’s opponents filed an ethics complaint in August with the state Public Disclosure Commission, accusing him of illegally trying to sway voters. In turn, Heywood filed a complaint with the commission, accusing state officials of illegally timing their $200 rebate checks for lower-income ratepayers, funded through the Climate Commitment Act, to reach voters before the November election as a way of garnering support for the policy.
The commission rejected Heywood’s complaint in late September and has a hearing scheduled Thursday to discuss administrative charges filed by the commission in September against Herywood’s organization, Let’s Go Washington.
The war chests
Heywood has used the opportunity to paint Inslee as someone who acts like he’s above the law.
It’s a familiar populist talking point for Heywood, who likes to discuss the wealthy cabal of political elites defending the Climate Commitment Act.
Certainly the campaign against 2117 has raised much more than Heywood and in the weeks before the election appears set to ramp up spending. The five most lucrative groups campaigning against him have raised a combined $22.3 million, of which they’ve spent about a quarter.
Some of the largest donations for the cause have come from Steve and Connie Ballmer, of the Ballmer Group, Bill Gates, Microsoft, Amazon, BP (formerly British Petroleum), venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and REI.
Meanwhile, Let’s Go Washington has raised just over $6 million, the bulk of which Heywood loaned to the group personally.
Heywood is not without friends in high places as well. He manages a multibillion-dollar portfolio for the hedge fund he founded in the early 2000s with the help of billionaire investor and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who has ties to the shipping and oil and gas industries.
Heywood sold the hedge fund in 2021 but remains CEO. He and Ross served as directors of the same shell corporation located in the Cayman Islands, part of a larger web of offshore shells listing Heywood as director and linking him with investments in oil and gas companies, shipping, drilling and mineral exploration.
Heywood closed that shell company in 2017 and hasn’t partnered with or spoken to Ross since 2015, Hallie Balch, director of communications for Let’s Go Washington, said in an email. There’s no connection between his past business dealings and the ballot initiatives, she said.
Any such connections would be difficult to determine anyway, said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. There aren’t many disclosure laws requiring the scrutiny of people posing ballot initiatives.
Just by the nature of placing 2117 (and a slate of three other initiatives) on Washington’s ballot, Heywood has the potential to influence the state’s budget and climate policies for years to come.
That’s a catch with ballot initiatives like these, Long said. While they allow people to vote on specific policies, they also boil down highly complex topics into a binary choice of yes or no. And any person who has enough money, like Heywood, can pose such a question to the entire state.
At the same time, Prakash noted that Heywood is clearly tapping into the anger many feel about high prices. That’s a more salient issue for voters than the minutiae of his background or business.
Editor’s note: The Ballmer Group and the Gates Foundation support some coverage in The Seattle Times but do not have any knowledge of or influence over the work.
An initial version of this story has been updated to accurately reflect recent polling on the initiative. A September poll showed more people oppose the measure than support it.
