Washington

Fossil fuel lobbyists flout the state’s strong disclosure requirements by routinely making meaningless and misleading disclosures about their activity. F Minus’s audit of the state’s top nine fossil fuel lobbyists shows poor compliance or complete noncompliance with a new requirement to list the numbers of bills on which they are lobbying. And in some cases, lobbyists are reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation from clients like TC Energy or Chevron without ever filing activity reports.

Gov. Jay Inslee was referred to as “the nation’s greenest governor” and Washington ranked 5th in an Apr. 2024 WalletHub study of the greenest states, which considered factors such as Environmental Quality and percentage of the state’s electricity coming from renewables, a category in which Washington ranked 1st.

But Washington is one of the worst states when it comes to holding fossil fuel lobbyists accountable for their role in perpetuating our dependence on fossil fuels, playing both sides of the climate crisis, and engaging in a “double-speak dance” that lets them work for environmental interests while also working for some of the most destructive fossil fuel companies in North America.

The contrast between fossil fuel and environmental clients represented by the same lobbyists in Washington is among the most extreme in the F Minus database of 1,500 state-level fossil fuel lobbyists. Climate Change Arena shares a firm with three fossil fuel companies. Climate-stricken libraries share a lobbyist with TC Energy, and climate-stricken schools share a lobbying firm with NW Natural and Cascade Natural Gas. And as reported by the Guardian in Dec. 2023, climate philanthropy Ballmer Giving found itself in the strange position of funding climate and indigenous rights programs while sharing a lobbying firm with Puget Sound Energy, which was seeking to expand its Tacoma LNG facility over the objections of the Puyallup tribe, on whose land it sits.

Best feature: fast and intuitive website.

Worst feature: widespread noncompliance with a new 2024 rule requiring lobbyists to disclose bill numbers.

Additional Findings

The Washington lobbyist reporting system is modern and updated, with clear categories to search by: lobbyist, expenditure reporting, and clients. Each search function immediately updates with previewed data when new criteria is searched, making it easy to filter even before an export. There aren’t very many filter options, but it almost feels unneeded considering the live updates right below the search bar. Lobbying firm data is a little off, with some instead listing the name of the lobbyist. A slew of reports with links are included on their individual pages as well as employers, but these aren’t combinable in spreadsheet form for downloads; they must be cumbersomely searched one at a time.