Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) forced Virginia back into the secretive Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a backdoor carbon tax that sells off legal permission to emit carbon dioxide and will spike the price of everything.
Virginia recently rejoined the RGGI allowance auction tax program, an especially nasty carbon tax, as the fluctuating nature of this artificial market is inherently unpredictable and thus awful for business.
“Five years ago, RGGI’s carbon price was $9.30 a ton. Today it’s $37.65,” Glen Sturtevant, a Republican Virginia Senator told The Washington Examiner. “More than four times the price in five years. And there is no guarantee it stops there. This is exactly why the government should not be imposing an unpredictable carbon cost on the electricity Virginians depend on.”
RGGI is essentially a nonfungible token for anyone who emits carbon, or was until former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin withdrew the state from RGGI in 2023.
RGGI is naturally set up to sell fewer permits each year, with an intended 30% reduction from 2020 levels by 2030, as the cap will shrink by 840,000 tons per year. Since the supply of legal permission to emit will shrink, the price will only rise. Much like a minimum wage hike, basic economics teaches us that such costs get passed on to the consumer.
When Virginia complied with RGGI between 2021 and 2023, it only reduced emissions by 2,984,325 tons annually, according to the absurdly optimistic figures of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. To put that number into perspective, since the average human breathes out about 2.3 pounds of CO2 on an average day, Virginians exhale 3,729,978 tons a year.
A basic calculation shows that Virginians will soon be paying $140.4 million dollars a year in carbon taxes at current RGGI prices. Perhaps Spanberger thinks everyone in the state simply should take a year off exhaling? That’s just a portion of the $1.2 billion in costs being passed along directly to Virginia taxpayers. The average Virginian should expect to pay about $13 per month more.
Those charges stack on top of other increases in Old Dominion power bills already hitting consumers. Dominion’s other 2026 rate adjustment alone was estimated at about $11 more per month for a typical residential customer.
Even Spanberger’s own party finds her power price policy objectionable.
Conflict between Spanberger and Democratic Senate Finance Chairwoman Louise Lucas nearly shut down the state government over a related inflated electricity price issue that some blame on data centers. She should be blaming RGGI.
Reentering RGGIS is quite the contrast from Spanberger’s campaign pledges, which focused on making Virginia more affordable. Taxpayers are being forced back into a failed program and policy that raises costs to households.
Thirteen deep-blue U.S. states — California, Oregon, Washington, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont — have some form of carbon-pricing, credit, or tax in place. Pennsylvania’s participation in RGGI was blocked by the Commonwealth Court in 2023.
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Carbon taxes are all pain with no gain as they devastate the economy and have a literally undetectable effect on slowing global warming. They also disproportionately harm the poor. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that a carbon tax would double the tax burden of the poorest households.
By tying herself so closely to this deeply unpopular policy, Spanberger is favoring a far-left extremist environmentalist fringe over everyday Virginians. All that’s left is for her political opponents to draw attention to the error.
Andrew Follett conducts research analysis for a nonprofit organization in the Washington, D.C., area. He previously worked as a space and science reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.