Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is known nationally as the 2020 Democratic primary candidate almost totally focused on climate change as an existential threat to the world.

During debates and on the campaign trail during his five-month candidacy, Inslee consistently returned to that theme, sometimes even when asked about other topics.

“We are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it,” he said in a 2019 video announcing his campaign.

That message could not save Inslee’s candidacy, although President Biden embraced many of Inslee’s stances in early 2020 — far beyond former President Donald Trump, who had denied the existence of climate change.

In an interview with RTO Insider, Inslee said he did not have any major epiphany leading to his intense focus on climate change. He described his interest gradually growing since he was a child. His father was a biology teacher and basketball coach in Seattle. His mother was a sales clerk. He remembers clearing brush and planting trees with his parents around Mount Rainier. As a teen, he would visit a family beach cabin and help Tulalip tribal fishermen haul in nets filled with salmon.

Like his interest in environmental issues, Inslee’s entry into politics was gradual. He was recruited as a successful state legislative candidate in Eastern Washington at the age of 37. He represented that same conservative Washington district in Congress for one term before being unseated. He moved to a more liberal district along Puget Sound where he served seven terms as its congressman.

In 2002, Inslee wrote a column for the now-defunct Seattle Post-Intelligencer arguing that the U.S. needs to tackle global warming and a green economy on the scale of NASA’s Apollo moonshot program. Five years later, he and a collaborator expanded on those thoughts in a book called “Apollo’s Fire.”

‘Unromantic Things’

Inslee has just begun his third term as Washington’s governor. He has been pursuing a climate change-oriented agenda for the past eight years but has clashed with a Republican majority in the state Senate. Meanwhile, Inslee always had a slight Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, a coalition that had to walk a tightrope between urban liberals who embrace most measures to combat climate change and more environmentally cautious suburban and rural Democrats who live in more politically purple districts.

Higher temperatures in the state have harmed its shellfish; rendered inland salmon habitats more inhospitable, affecting Puget Sound orcas; altered snow melts in the Cascade Range, which has complicated irrigation in Eastern Washington; and made forests drier and more susceptible to fires. And increasing temperatures have affected the state’s wine industry, whose grapes grow best within narrow ranges of temperatures. Health officials have also linked carbon emissions in the air to increased asthma and other lung problems.

Starting in 2018, Democrats began winning several previously Republican suburban seats. Today, Democrats hold a 57-41 majority in the House and a 28-21 majority in the Senate — giving Inslee his best chance to pursue his often stalled climate change agenda.

This session, Inslee’s agenda is to:

• • • cut carbon emissions from gasoline and diesel fuel sold to Washington motor vehicles by 10% below 2017 levels by 2028 and by 20% by 2035.
    • push electrification of vehicles and ferries. Bills are in play to accomplish these goals, including encouraging an eventual switchover from gas to electric vehicles. (See Wash. EV Bills Spark Concern About Buildout.)
    • put caps on industrial carbon emissions and encourage investments in green projects, a complicated undertaking for the past few years. The bill tackling the topic this session is currently being rewritten. (See Cap-and-trade Bill Emerges in Wash. Senate.)
    • create an Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Panel to advise him and the legislature on how to allocate money from the proposed cap-and-invest program to communities burdened with pollution troubles.
    • require new commercial buildings to use carbon-free space and water heating by 2030 and start decarbonizing all existing buildings by 2050. A bill is in play to begin those efforts.

Inslee has not given detailed thought yet to which measures he should tackle in the second half of his term. “We’ve been focused just on this session so far,” he said.

However, he said many of these future efforts will be “unromantic things,” such as making buildings more energy-efficient, boosting public transportation, building charging stations, developing bike trails and tweaking water spillage over dams to prevent killing young salmon by increasing the nitrogen levels in their tissue.

“We need to reduce the per-capita use of electricity. … Most houses and buildings are not designed for a carbon-free world,” Inslee said.

Balancing Act

A common criticism of measures dealing with climate change is that they kill jobs. Washington is the home to five oil refineries. Inslee has been a big booster of creating renewable energy jobs. So far, the state has not looked at how renewable energy jobs might rise, while oil and natural gas jobs might shrink in Washington. “We have not done an algorithmic assessment on that,” Inslee said.

He added that renewable energy jobs are growing at a faster pace than average jobs.

The International Renewable Energy Agency last year reported that the renewable energy sector employed about 756,000 people in the U.S. in 2019. Another 2.38 million people hold jobs relating to energy, according to a joint report from the National Association of State Energy Officials and the Energy Futures Initiative. At the same time, slightly more than 1 million Americans are employed in the oil, gas and coal industries.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Statistics recently noted that wind turbine technicians are the fastest growing occupation in the nation, increasing by 61% from 2019 to 2020. Solar panel installers are the third-fastest growing occupation, increasing 51% in that same period. A U.K. Energy Research Centre report said that it will take two to five renewable energy jobs to produce the same power created by one fossil fuel worker.

“We know the fossil fuel industry is going to decline,” Inslee said.

Washington is the home to numerous hydroelectric dams and one nuclear reactor — both carbon-free power sources.

However, reactors nationwide have had trouble competing financially with natural gas as a source of electricity, leading to several being closed. And Puget Sound liberals have strong anti-nuclear sentiments.

In addition, the state’s relationship with its dams is complex. Though these resources provide cheap electricity and irrigation water for crops, they decimate inland Northwest runs of young salmon migrating to the Pacific Ocean. For at least 30 years, Northwest interests have clashed over whether the four Snake River dams between Lewiston, Idaho, and Pasco, Wash., should be removed.

On Feb. 6, Rep. Mike Simpson (R) proposed legislation that would remove the four dams and require the power, barging and irrigation benefits be replaced. This is the first Republican proposal to remove the four dams.

Consequently, removing dams will affect the bigger decarbonization picture in the Northwest and will provide a complicated balancing act for Washington’s leaders.

“We don’t want to wall off any potential energy source,” Inslee said.