Some common sense just isn't

When deciding on hot issues in current politics, it’s best to keep a discerning eye on bloated rhetoric, even when it purports to support “common sense.”

Everybody is all for commons sense, of course, but often when two sides differ greatly, they’ll each genuinely believe the other side shows none. That’s rarely true.

A case in point lies on this page when our man in Congress uses this rhetoric. We support part of Rep. Dan Newhouse’s argument, not the other.

Police agencies, including local ones, of all sizes across the state have complained about the Legislature’s overreach in the last session when state lawmakers tied their hands with unintended consequences by restricting when police could or could not pursue someone who may have committed a crime. Now they need to fix it, and proposed legislation would do that (see the story in our Jan. 17 issue). Or voters could do so under Initiative No. 2113 if the Legislature fails to act.

Another purported common-sense solution to our inflation problems would be to encourage more gas and diesel consumption, Newhouse argues, and throw out all concerns about the warming of the planet that scientists around the world keep reporting spells future doom if more action isn’t taken faster.

OK, Rep. Newhouse didn’t put it like that, but he does repeat an oft-heard claim that our carbon tax is hurting Washington state and making our inflation problems much worse — an argument that absolutely seems to make common sense.

But it’s also not the only consideration.

We thought it would be back when Gov. Jay Inslee first said he supported charging for carbon usage in the state and using the proceeds to pay for climate change necessities, which would seem to require increasing the price of gas. That might be workable if it was done across the nation all at once, some of us reasoned, but not state by state.

Yet GasBuddy, which updates 288 times every day from a diverse list of sources covering nearly 150,000 gas stations nationwide, said on Monday that gas prices in this state range from $5.19 per gallon to $2.20. That range just highlights the fact that in a free market the price is determined by what we’ll pay as much as by the total base cost. The average across the country on Monday was $3.03, some 84 cents cheaper than Washington’s.

That’s not because this state’s lawmakers are stupid. It’s because the rest of the country needs to catch up with us.

For decades, we have not been paying the price that our pollution has been costing our children and grandchildren, and even us. Much of what we’ve always known as normal in our weather and its consequences has been creeping climate change, gradually getting warmer. That creeping, gradual change pollutes our “common sense,” like that of the frog slowly boiling to death in the proverbial pot as the heat is turned up.

But it’s not so gradual anymore; in fact, it’s increasing exponentially. We need to act now, not when it’s convenient, because it never will be. And politicians continuing to pretend that their downplaying or ignoring climate change is all about common sense need to either wake up or be voted out.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher