Host Daniel Raimi talks with Sharon Shewmake, a professor of environmental economics at Western Washington University. Shewmake also represents Washington's 42nd legislative district in the state's House of Representatives. Shewmake discusses Washington's plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the power sector to zero by 2045, other state policies that affect energy and the environment, and how researchers can more effectively engage with policymakers.
Listen to the Podcast
Top of the Stack
References and recommendations made during the podcast:
- "A Trailblazing Plan to Fight California Wildfires" by Nicola Twilley, The New Yorker
- "So, Should We Recycle?" Planet Money podcast
The Full Transcript
Daniel Raimi: Hello and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host Daniel Raimi. This week we talked with professor Sharon Shewmake. Not only is Sharon a professor of environmental economics at Western Washington University, she also represents Washington's 42nd legislative district in the statehouse.
I'll talk with Sharon about some of the details of Washington's plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the power sector to zero by 2045. We'll also talk about other state policies that affect energy and the environment and Sharon will give us her perspective on how researchers can more effectively engage with policymakers. Stay with us.
Okay. Sharon Shewmake from the great state of Washington, a state legislator and an energy economist at Western Washington University. Thank you so much for joining us today on Resources Radio.
Sharon Shewmake: Thanks for having me.
Daniel Raimi: It's so wonderful to have someone who has the academic experience and the environmental experience and also the political experience to talk about what we're going to talk about today, which is the confluence of all those things and energy policy and environmental policy in the state of Washington. But before we get into the details, can you tell us first how you got interested in energy and environmental topics to begin with?
Sharon Shewmake: So I was a freshman and I knew Daniel Raimi actually as a freshman college student and I really wanted to make a difference in the world. And I stumbled upon economics. I was taking environmental policy and science courses because I really liked learning about science, and I just discovered that I loved it. It was you take your intro class and it leads to so many more classes.
And I ended up doing environmental economics because I really cared about the environment, I wanted to tackle climate change. And then the other thing that I think is really important is eliminating deep levels of poverty. And economics was really wonderful because it cut through arguments that sometimes you would hear something in another discipline and you didn't really know what the right answer was or there were competing ideas, and they're still competing ideas in economics, but then we go out and we measure things and we run models and we really try and get this subjectively as possible. And I thought that was just really addictive.
Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that makes sense. And in case any listener didn't get the quick reference to you knowing me as a freshman. So I grew up in Durham, North Carolina, where Duke University is. You were a freshman at Duke and the dorm that you lived in freshman year, I think I'm getting this right, the dorm that you lived in, my parents were dorm parents in that dorm. And so I lived in that dorm when you are a freshman. Is that right?
Sharon Shewmake: Yeah and we didn't figure it out until 15 years later or something. It was a total aha moment.
Daniel Raimi: Yeah. It's pretty great. Right. And you knew our dog, William Wallace.
Sharon Shewmake: Yes. He was a good dog.
Daniel Raimi: Yes. Well, he wasn't actually a good dog, but we won't go on that.
So we're going to talk about energy policy, environmental policy in Washington state. Let me give a little bit of background on a bill that passed, I believe in the spring, late spring in Washington called the Clean Energy Transformation Act, which does a variety of things. It eliminates coal fired electricity by 2025. It encourages utilities to get to carbon neutrality by 2030, but it allows for some flexibility in there if they can't quite get to zero by 2030. And then there seems to be a pretty firm target of net zero emissions by the year 2045.
There are some exceptions for emergencies and for ensuring reliability of the power supply, but that's clearly the target is zero emissions by 2045. There's also some provisions in the bill that limits the rate of cost increases for payers, for ratepayers, I should say. And you know, there's a whole lot more in the legislation, but those are just some of the high points that stood out to me. And I was hoping Sharon, you could tell us a little bit about the policy environment that this legislation stepped into. So what major policies were in place prior to this most recent legislation and of course please feel free to add or correct me on any mistakes I may have made characterizing the most recent act.
Sharon Shewmake: Yeah. So, we've been calling this the “100 percent clean,” even if it's really 98 percent clean, which might be more economically efficient anyway. And this was really built on, we have a renewable portfolio standard, and this was an initiative that was passed in 2006 by the voters. And Washington State has this enormous resource of hydroelectricity. It's about 70 percent of our electricity production. And the renewable portfolio standard was requiring 15 percent by 2030 of non-hydro, or at least incremental hydro, to be renewable.
And so it was building on this program of renewable energy credits that we were able to push forward with “100 percent clean.” We also had some other projects that, also in part of that initiative, it required utilities to do all conservation that's cost effective, reliable, and feasible. There were some tax incentives for renewables. We have net metering in place. There's greenhouse gas emissions standards for new electricity generators. Utilities have to go through this planning process. It's an integrated resource plan, or an IRP, if people have heard this.
And then we have some other policies too. You can look around in the budget if you want to see what a state cares about. And in our state you'll see in the capital budget, we have incentives for upgrading the energy efficiency of residential homes. We have some programs for green cars and electric charging infrastructure, and we're hoping to get some electric ferries coming up soon, or at least hybrid electric ferries, which is pretty exciting for a state that has so many islands.
Daniel Raimi: Yeah.
Sharon Shewmake: So the other piece that this was really built on, “100 percent clean,” was a 2011 agreement between the governor and the last coal fired power plant in Washington State, which is in Centralia. And that was already agreed to shut down in 2025. So it was, the “100 percent clean” bill's taking credit for that, but it's building on things that had already been going on. In a lot of ways Washington State was on this path of being 100 percent clean, this act just increased that.
Daniel Raimi: Right, yeah and we're gonna come back to the coal issue in just a couple of minutes, but that's really relevant to note that actually the idea of shutting it down by 2025 was in place already and it's really interesting. I didn't know that.
Before we get into more meat of the bill itself, can you tell us a little more about the political process of bringing the bill through the legislature and then obviously getting signed by the governor. Was it a pretty partisan process? Was there a lot of collaboration across party lines? How did it unfold in the political arena?
Sharon Shewmake: So fun fact: I was elected in 2018 and all the bills that come through the 2019 legislature are things that past legislators have already worked on, right? So by the time I was sworn in, this bill was mostly baked. There was still a long process with the utilities and running it through the committees. And we talked through all of this, but I was not the lead person on, they wouldn't give a new legislator a bill this important.
Daniel Raimi: Right.
Sharon Shewmake: As to the partisanship of it. If you look at who voted for it, no Republicans voted for it. There's one state Senator who caucuses with the Republicans, but he's technically a Democrat and he voted yes. So that's as close as you can come to a Republican voting for the bill. And we had one Democrat vote no, but otherwise it broke down on party lines the entire way. And there was a lot of attempts to make this bipartisan and there were a lot of conversations between Democrats and Republicans. One of the things that really I appreciated about Olympia was how much, even when Democrats have control of both houses and the governorship, there's still a lot of attempt to make things work across party lines. And this is certainly true with climate.
Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that makes sense. And just in case anyone doesn't remember their fifth grade Capitol lesson, Olympia is the capitol of Washington. For a minute when you said that I thought about Olympia Snow and then I corrected myself in my head.
So, let's get a little bit more into the meat of the legislation itself. So I mentioned a moment ago that the bill encourages utilities to get to carbon neutrality by 2030, but it also allows for some alternative compliance methods if they can't quite reach that target. Can you talk a little bit about how that alternative compliance process is set up and how it works and how it provides flexibility?
Sharon Shewmake: So as an environmental economist, we all know that our favorite policy is a price on carbon. And so one of the alternative compliance is an administrative penalty, but it ends up being a carbon price of about a hundred dollars per ton. And there are some methods to have that increase with fiscal growth factors or inflation. It's not technically written in as a price of $100 per ton of carbon. It's per megawatt hour of electricity.
Daniel Raimi: Right.
Sharon Shewmake: But you multiply it by 1.5 if it's coming from coal and then you decrease it depending on the type of natural gas that's produced. At first it was just a hundred dollars per megawatt. I was like, "Well, why don't we at least differentiate by sources?" And I wanted to see it be on the price of carbon directly because who knows what the next technology is going to be. But that was shut down.
Daniel Raimi: Okay, great. So that's really helpful to know. So there's not a direct carbon price, but there's an implied carbon price going on in there. One of the issues that I was thinking about as I was reading the legislation, and you've already touched on this, was the idea of an energy transition, particularly for coal plants and the workers who work there and the communities where the coal plants are situated. I spoke with an official, Sarah Props, from New Mexico a couple months back on the podcast and a really big piece of the puzzle for them was working out this transition assistance for people working in coal fired power plants or working in coal mines (they have a number of coal mines in New Mexico, I don't think there are any big ones in Washington State). But can you talk a little bit about the process of working to phase out coal electricity production in the state and whether there was an energy transition angle to that process?
Sharon Shewmake: So that was the big fight in 2011, was figuring out that phase out of coal. I had a colleague who worked on doing some of the economics of this and he was telling me that the most cost effective thing would've been to shut the coal fired power plant down much earlier and there was a coal mine in Centralia and then they worked out something that would maintain some of those jobs for longer, right? So that would be more of a transition.
As for in this particular bill, what “100 percent clean” did for the workers was they created tax credits. It's a new thing that Washington is doing where the tax credits are higher if you use union labor. And then if you pay prevailing wage, which is a wage that the labor industry sets a little bit, I don't know if they actually set it a little bit higher, but generally it's considered to be a little bit higher than what the market wage would be for these types of workers. And those are for the people in the renewable energy economy. So what it's trying to do is it’s trying to bump up those salaries to compensate for any jobs that might be lost now in mostly natural gas facilities.
Daniel Raimi: Right. As far as I could tell though, there wasn't any direct, at least in the most recent legislation, there wasn't a direct path laid out for people working in coal or natural gas to transition specifically through those solar or wind or energy efficiency jobs. But instead, provisions to encourage utilities to basically provide better working conditions for the people who end up in those jobs, whether they're from coal communities or not.
Sharon Shewmake: The coal communities, I think, are part of the 2011 legislation. So 100 percent clean, and that was already baked in, right? So anything that was happening there has already happened. There's a big reluctance to take anything out of that discussion. The environmentalists and the coal community came together and this was their compromise and nobody wants to open that can of worms again. Then the next question becomes for natural gas. And that's really what we're talking about transitioning away from with this bill. And that's where the replacement, potentially with jobs from the green energy economy, are coming from.
Daniel Raimi: Oh, okay. That makes sense. And there's also some language in the bill that focuses on assistance for low income consumers of electricity. Can you talk a little bit about that part of the legislation?
Sharon Shewmake: Yeah, so this is kind of a more fun, innovative part of the bill, is this focus on creating some low income assistance projects and then also making sure that another part of the bill that you can meet the cap are these energy transformation projects. And so I think of this as a firm specific cap and trade, right? So if you can't reduce your carbon emissions from your smokestacks, maybe what you can do is you can get people to switch to electric cars. So they're reducing their carbon emissions from what they would've been driving. You can invest in electric car infrastructure.
And part of this, what is trying to do is it's trying to make sure that that transition is equitable. So that we're not just buying electric cars and putting charging infrastructure in the wealthy neighborhoods, but putting this equity lens on it and a lot of the mechanics are going to be decided by agencies, not legislators, which is probably what you want to do.
Daniel Raimi: Okay, that makes sense. And one other question that I had, as I was thinking about Washington State relative to other states in the country that are looking at reducing their emissions, some of them very ambitiously, is the fact that you mentioned earlier, which is that Washington gets about 70 percent of its electricity today from hydro. We were talking about natural gas and coal earlier. The state in 2018 generated about 9 percent of its electricity from gas and about 5 percent from coal. So when we think about the model developed in Washington, how applicable do you think it is for other states because of Washington's unique characteristics when it comes to its access to hydro resources?
Sharon Shewmake: If you spend any time on the Energy Information Agency's website, you'll see that every state is unique. You could argue that Hawaii has some great opportunities because the price of electricity is so high so it's easier for renewables to come in and switch people away from petroleum into solar power. Washington State, we have a relatively low price of electricity because of all this hydro and I think the main lesson that people can learn from Washington State is that this really is incremental change. That we built out a renewable portfolio standard and then we used this connection of RECs, renewable electricity credits, to create these 2030 targets. That became attainable once utilities could see that pathway.
Something else that we did with this bill is we fix some of the other problems in the utility legislation. So we heard from utilities that they were, when it came to being able to pass costs onto rate payers, if they're building a renewable facility and there's some uncertainty in the technology, it's hard to make that case that they should be able to pass those costs on. And so we provided a little bit more certainty there for the utilities to have a better business environment.
And by the end of this process they came out as neutral on this bill, which I think is pretty huge for something that's really going to be changing their business climate. And that's something that I've learned so much in the legislature, is that you can get people to agree to things that may not be in their direct best interests or that might make them feel nervous about their business model, if you talk to them and you hear their concerns through it. There's so many more win-wins than we think are possible when we're an academic sitting in an office somewhere.
Daniel Raimi: Right. That makes sense. And I guess a broader question, stepping back from the legislation itself, is it is so fascinating, your background in energy and environmental economics going into politics. Can you talk a little bit about other things that have been particularly noteworthy in terms of your learning new things? And also in terms of, many economists, we—I shouldn't say we because I'm not a PhD economist—but economists often get accused of thinking only about first, best, or optimal solutions and may not be willing to compromise. Has your thinking about any of this, the interplay of politics and economics, has it changed much as you've actually started working in the legislature?
Sharon Shewmake: I wish economists would come to the legislature and lobby their state legislators more. I would love to have more economists in my office telling me that this is efficient or this isn't particularly efficient and hearing how things worked. There were a few times in the legislature where I would explain, say, how inflation works, and I'm not a macro economist so I don't have deep thinking on this, but that was actually helpful to the conversation. Or one of the things we tried to do was we tried to make one of our taxes a little bit more progressive, but people weren't making it marginal, right? So they were saying, it was a real estate excise tax, so the rate of your home is going to be 0.9 percent if it's less than $500,000 and then it was going to increase to 1.28 if it was $501,000, right?
So you're never going to see a house for sale for $502,000 because you'd actually take home less money as a result of this. And so I worked a little bit and I did some spreadsheet stuff using some data I had to help them figure out a better tax structure that we could still raise the money we needed while also giving better incentives and not creating this wonky discontinuity. So I think that information is really valuable and this isn't some really gigantic model that requires a special computer to run. It's just some basic economics that legislators may not be as great as we hoped they would be on it.
So I think there's tremendous opportunity in furthering this discussion. In terms of first best, second best, third best, sometimes the policies that we look at aren't necessarily available to the politician. So I ran because I'd like to see a price on carbon. We've had two failed initiatives on carbon taxes in Washington State. I was expecting the second one, that was on the ballot the same year as me, to go through. But I thought that if it didn't go through then maybe having an economist in a legislature that can respond to some of the questions people have would be helpful.
We're still working on that discussion. But one of the policies that is more likely to pass right now is a low carbon fuel standard and that is not my favorite policy. The intuition of how the low carbon fuel standard works is that you're decreasing the fuel intensity. So a gallon of gasoline produces 100 percent of the emissions of the gallon of gasoline, but maybe ethanol produces 70 percent as much. And the idea is that you would subsidize a little bit more ethanol and the people using gasoline would have to pay into that.
I tried to figure out, well does this actually reduce emissions? What are the marginal costs? And there wasn't a whole lot of research on this. And instead there's all these research on the fourth order effects of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems. And it would be really helpful to have more people working on the low carbon fuel standard, which is a policy that's being really discussed right now and we already have two States doing it. But I wasn't able to find much on that, which was frustrating.
Daniel Raimi: Interesting. Yeah, California is a state that comes to mind when I think about low carbon fuel standard. And yeah, we talk a lot at RFF about trying to do policy relevant work. And one of the challenges, less so far at RFF, but more so I think for academic economists, is the incentives aren't always aligned to do work that is relevant. Especially on the timescale that policymakers might need it to be. Do you have any thoughts about how incentives in academia might be able to be tweaked a little bit to make that more possible?
Sharon Shewmake: Here's the thing. I think most of us in academia get into this because we want to make a difference. We count our success by publications, but that is not why I do this. An extra publication that nobody reads, even if it gets cited a whole lot but isn't important to the world, doesn't mean a whole lot to me and that's never been worth the effort. So I think once you get tenure, I think a lot of people actually do want to do this. They just don't necessarily know how to engage with their policymakers. And I'd like to create and facilitate that sort of engagement between the academic economists who are on applied practical research with the people who are in the legislature that could use more of that research and better understandings of that research.
Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that makes sense. Having worked a little bit at the intersection of academia and policymaking myself, there's clearly an appetite on both sides of the equation to make that happen. It's just coordinating and bringing people together in a way that actually makes sense and aligns incentives, that's the hard part and yeah, I'm totally on board with you that it would be great to do more of it.
Sharon Shewmake: One thing that every one of us can do that's sitting at a university is you can go lobby your state legislator and say, "Look, these are my areas of expertise. I don't know what you're working on, but send me to the people who are working on these areas of expertise and I'd love to be a sounding board."
Daniel Raimi: And practically what's the best way to do that? Send emails? Call? Physically go to the legislature?
Sharon Shewmake: Our universities have a lobby day where they go in, they usually lobby for higher ed. That would be one start. But you can call up your state legislator, you'll probably get their assistant and their assistant can schedule a time for you to come in and introduce yourself.
Daniel Raimi: Okay, great. Yeah. That's really useful to know. So we've gone away a little bit from policy specifics going on in Washington, which is great. We've talked more about how this stuff all happens and how we can make the system work better as a whole.
But let's go back to Washington State and policy for just a moment and think a little bit about sectors beyond the electricity sector. So we've been talking only about electricity today so far with the exception of the low carbon fuel standard. But are there additional plans in the works along with the LCFS to reduce emissions in Washington State? Including sectors like the residential sector or commercial sector, industrial sector, which is a big challenge, or other parts of the economy.
Sharon Shewmake: So after the failure of the last carbon tax initiative, the legislators were ready with a sector by sector strategy. The low carbon fuel standard failed. But we did see a green buildings bill. We did have some green transportation legislation, and then of course we had the “100 percent clean” that was successful. I think that a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system is still not dead. I think there were some blenders that were made with the last two initiatives, but I flipped a district from someone—my predecessor didn't believe climate change was real. And I talked to people about cost effective climate legislation that both protects the environment and we can still contain jobs, we can still enjoy a materially rich lifestyle, which I think is what economists have argued is possible. So I wouldn't count those out.
But in the meantime there will be some sector-by-sector policies that just makes sense. So one of them to tackle will be industrial natural gas, and we've been having conversations on that in the legislature. There's a lot of movement on residential natural gas. I live in a pretty progressive city, Bellingham, Washington, which is where the university is. Both Bellingham and Seattle are talking about electrifying everything but also no longer building out additional natural gas infrastructure to new homes and new subdivisions, which I think is a pretty big step.
Something else that we're seeing is we'll be seeing more transportation. So we had a green transportation bill that basically put a fee on electric vehicles and the fee is less than what you pay with a gasoline tax depending on your assumptions and about $100 of that is to contribute to all the things that our gas tax pays for. But the rest of it is also building that infrastructure. I also think that if we want to talk about transportation, then we've got to talk about land use and we've got to talk about giving people alternatives to driving around in either an electric car or an internal combustion engine and somehow figuring out a way to reduce vehicle miles traveled.
And the more I'm in the state legislature, the more I'm realizing this is a hyper-local decision and I've convinced a friend of mine to run for city council on the basis of better bike lanes and better bike PED infrastructure.
And then another thing that we're doing too is we're trying to get really in front of autonomous vehicles. So this could be something that results in a safer transportation network and a lower carbon one since autonomous vehicles, it's a little bit easier to charge them because they can just go off and charge and then come pick you up.
And then finally, the last piece that might be Washington specific is we have a whole lot of trees and trees are really good at sequestering carbon. So we had a bill that got caught up in some of the dynamics in our state capitol, Olympia. But what we'd like to do is we'd like to figure out a way to start sequestering carbon and start paying for that sequestration in both forests and on farms. And so we had two separate bills and hopefully we'll get a little bit further there and then if we ever do get some revenue generating carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, we can link that up to sequestration opportunities as well.
Daniel Raimi: Right. That makes sense. Yeah, I recently spoke with Robert Bonnie who does a lot of work on forests and we talked a lot about trying to create markets to incentivize landowners to sequester more carbon in forest land.
Sharon Shewmake: And this would be a great way to lobby your state legislators because I would love more information on that. That's easy to digest and I don't have to spend tons of time learning.
Daniel Raimi: Yeah, well we should sign up the Washington State legislature for automatic downloads of Resources Radio.
Sharon Shewmake: There you go.
Daniel Raimi: That should be the first step. Perfect. Or we can do a live episode in Olympia. That'll be good.
So, Sharon Shewmake, thank you so much for talking with us about Washington State and policies there and so many other issues. I want us to close now with our final segment, which is called Top of the Stack, which is where we ask you what you've been reading or watching or listening to that you've enjoyed and you think our listeners would also enjoy.
And I'll start us off with an article that I read just last night in The New Yorker, which from a recent issue. I'm not too far behind on my New Yorkers at the moment. And the article was about fighting wildfire in California. It was called “A Trailblazing Plan to Fight California Wildfires” by the author Nicola Twilley in the August 19th, 2019 edition of The New Yorker.
And it was a fascinating up close look at some of the prescribed burns and other techniques that firefighters are using to reduce the risks of, not wildfire per se, but catastrophic wildfire. The types that resulted in deaths last year in California and enormous property damage. So it's one of those issues that's going to become more and more important as climate change creates more challenges when it comes to wildfire and is at the intersection of a lot of fascinating issues. So I definitely recommend checking that out if you're interested in land use and wildfire. And it's great writing, of course, because it's The New Yorker. So, it's lovely. How about you, Sharon? What's on the top of your stack?
Sharon Shewmake: Well before I get to that, I just want to plug the wildfire because it's also, this is one of those issues that it's the people on the eastern part of our state that are really worried about wildfire right now. It's impacting their communities and these are the people that it typically tends to be Republicans. And I think there is some sort of compromise between the people who want to see action on climate and generating money to fight wildfires right now and do some of that prescribed burning and invest in bigger helicopters and whatnot to fight these fires. So there's a really strong climate politics angle there as well.
Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that's fascinating. My sister actually lives in Spokane, Washington, which is on the eastern side of the state and they had really horrible effects of wildfires last year. Last summer, the air quality was awful for, I think, at least a week or two and people had to stay inside. So it definitely makes sense that there's some motivation for action out there.
Sharon Shewmake: Yeah, it's bad. And then the top of my list right now is that Planet Money episode that came out a few weeks ago on recycling. It was a little bit depressing, but it also suggested that we need to find ways to deal with our waste streams that aren't counterproductive. And I thought it was just a really useful reality check on that.
Daniel Raimi: Yeah, I didn't listen to that. Can you give me the thumbnail sketch?
Sharon Shewmake: The thumbnail sketch is that recycling is difficult. We feel like we're putting things back into the consumption stream and that'll just be reused again and again. But a lot of our recycling is contaminated and so when we are shipping everything off to China, if they couldn't recycle it, if it was too contaminated because people think that they can recycle diapers and there's all these desire recycling, then it often ends up getting dumped in the ocean sometimes.
And so they made this argument that maybe you're going to put something in the recycling, it's more likely to end up in this Great Pacific Ocean Patch than if you were to just put it in the garbage. And so there's some suggestions that recycling's not as environmentally beneficial as we think, but if we were to say we'll stop recycling, then we'd have to retrain consumers once we do figure this out.
I thought it was a really important call to . . . I hear it from my constituents that people really want to see less garbage going into landfills. And whether or not this is the most environmentally beneficial thing that can happen, there's kind of an aesthetic reason, there's a value reason that people want to do it. And one of the things that I'd like to start talking to people about is burning their garbage more. So we ship our garbage south down I-5 and then over to the other side of the mountain, where it's not as rainy as it is here in Western Washington. I think that's a huge waste. I'd like to burn it more locally and not create all that congestion of trucks on I-5.
Daniel Raimi: Fascinating. So like more municipal solid waste? Like electricity generation?
Sharon Shewmake: Yeah. We can do that a lot cleaner than . . . The old incinerators aren't very popular, but now there's cleaner incinerators and it just becomes a question of, well do we have the political will to go ahead and do this? And are we going to educate the public on how this is a better alternative than shipping it across the mountains and explaining that you're probably not going to be able to recycle your yogurt containers so we might as well burn them.
Daniel Raimi: Hmm. That's really interesting. Yeah. I'll have to check that out. I hadn't really thought about that much, but fascinating. And we'll have a link to the Planet Money episode that you mentioned on our show notes so people can go listen for themselves and see what they think.
But we'll stop there and say thank you again, Sharon Shewmake, for joining us on Resources Radio and telling us all about energy and environmental policy in Washington State and so much more.
Sharon Shewmake: Thank you.
Daniel Raimi: You've been listening to Resources Radio. If you have a minute, we'd really appreciate you leaving us a rating or a comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes. Resources Radio is a podcast from Resources for the Future. RFF is an independent nonprofit research institution in Washington DC. Our mission is to improve environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research policy engagement. Learn more about us at rff.org.
The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the participants. They do not necessarily represent the views of Resources for the Future, which does not take institutional positions on public policies. Resources Radio is produced by Elizabeth Wason with music by me, Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.
