Tomorrow our Governor here in Washington, Jay Inslee is launching a race for President.
Unlike any of the other Democratic candidates, Jay is making responding to Climate Change the centerpiece of his campaign.
This comes from a brand new article at the New Yorker.
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
This past Friday afternoon, Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington, was in Washington, D.C., for a meeting of the National Governors Association, but he had additional business to conduct. Inslee, who is sixty-eight, was (and still is) widely understood to be on the verge of announcing a campaign for the Democratic nomination for President. Earlier in the day, he told me, once we’d settled into a conference room at the downtown Embassy Suites, he had met with Barack Obama.
The timing created a slightly ridiculous situation, in which Inslee would not formally acknowledge his candidacy but kept hinting at it heavily—mentioning, for example, that he might be in Iowa soon and raising his eyebrows meaningfully.
Inslee, who is tall and athletic, has an eager and direct manner: his thoughts emerge in lists (“No. 4 is . . .”) and his mind moves toward details. And though he has not been a single-issue governor, the case for his Presidential candidacy rests on his decades-long interest in political solutions to climate change. The thought of Iowa made Inslee turn not to county dinners but to wind turbines. Had I heard there was a new generation of turbines coming? “They’re humongous,” he said, with appreciation. “Three hundred feet long.”
Inslee has been in politics for a quarter century but has never become a national figure. As one of his aides, reached on the West Coast, put it, “he’s not a show horse,” and it took a moment to conceive of the unpretentious governor as a Presidential candidate. On the other hand, there are credible public-opinion polls in which Democratic voters in the early-primary states of New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, and South Carolina say that they care more about climate change and health care than any other issues. Inslee’s approach to climate policy, he told me, is “can-do, optimistic—it’s in my nature.” But in Washington, D.C., that approach, reminiscent of Gore, has, for the moment at least, been displaced by the millennial left’s, which is bleaker in tone and more transformative in program. For many years environmentalism has been shaped by technocratic liberalism’s trust in scientific expertise, and faith in the possibility of a global consensus. Now there is an unexpected situation. The climate is in crisis and liberalism is under pressure, at the same time.
Having read the book Jay authored “Apollo’s Fire” and having talked with Jay at length a couple of times at Netroots Nation 2009 in Pittsburgh, I know Inslee grasps the urgency of our present societal predicament that rapid climate change presents us with.
Back in January, Inslee told NBC News that he is no longer pushing carbon pricing. “To actually get carbon savings, you have to jack the price up so high that it becomes politically untenable,” he said. Fair enough. (An especially clumsy effort to impose carbon taxes, last year, sparked the gilets jaunes protests still consuming French politics.) If not carbon pricing, I asked Inslee, then what?
“I’m not running for President yet,” he said, which was technically true, but he went on to describe the plan he envisioned laying out shortly. It would be ambitious “to the scale of what we need to achieve.” It would create jobs; it would also emphasize the experience of front-line communities. There was no silver bullet, he explained; it was more like “silver buckshot.” Carbon pricing, through cap-and-trade or a tax, might be a theoretically elegant mechanism, but, Inslee said, the money to invest in green industries and technologies could come from anywhere, including a reversal of the Trump tax cuts. “It’s just money,” he said. He mentioned new forms of topsoil that could capture carbon, Swiss and German sequestration innovations, and the progress already made in electric cars and trucks. “I could give you twenty-four policies right now,” he said, which made me notice, fleetingly, the exactness of that number.
Please take the time to read the whole piece.
By James Hohmann
-- Inslee said he would be willing to declare a national emergency on climate change, allowing drastic federal action that could not pass Congress, if the Supreme Court upholds President Trump’s emergency declaration to build a wall on the southern border. The governor emphasized that he’s against Trump’s invocation of emergency powers and hopes it gets struck down. “But if the rules change and the circumstances change, we’re going to play by whatever rules exist to deal with this existential crisis,” he said. “So if the possibility exists, we'll say yes.”
-- Inslee has significantly more experience than most of his better-known rivals for the nomination. He got elected to the state House in 1988, won a U.S. House seat in 1992, lost reelection in 1994 because he voted for the assault weapons ban, battled his way back to Congress in 1998 and stayed there until he won the governorship in 2012. His second term wraps up at the end of 2020. Inslee also recently wrapped up a successful stint as the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.
Also: New PAC: 'Act Now On Climate' comes out in support of Jay Inslee for President
I support Jay Inslee 100%