Although life in the other Washington is a shitshow of unimaginable proportions at present, our dear governor has his eyes set on an upgrade from Olympia to DC. While he has not yet officially announced, Governor Jay Inslee has shifted his answer from “no comment” to “here are all the things I would do if I were elected president” when asked if he is running for president.
That change in tune, plus his formation of a PAC, early-stage fundraising, and trips to early voting states are all obvious signs that Inslee will declare his candidacy, likely after the state legislative session wraps up in April.
He will be running as the climate change candidate, as he made abundantly clear (again) yesterday in his State of the State address at the capitol building. The speech was a dress rehearsal for Inslee’s stump on the national stage, where he will tell us over and over: “This is the 11th hour, but it is [insert appropriate noun’s] hour to shine.”
Yesterday it was “Washington’s hour.” In Nashua it will be “New Hampshire’s hour.” And in any televised debate, it will be “America’s hour.”
He’s right about it being the 11th hour, what with all the heat records that were broken last year on land and at sea. He could also be right about it being our hour. I generally like Inslee’s vision that the federal government will spearhead green energy R&D just like it did during World War II and the Space Race—two moments of industrial might that spawned many of the petroleum-based products currently clogging our Amazon shopping carts and fortifying the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We might as well put the insatiable U.S. thirst for new stuff (what people like Inslee prefer to call “innovation”) to a nobler use.
But he’s wrong about thinking it’s all gain and no pain.
True, Inslee does not underestimate the challenge. "We have to change our economy so it does not run on oil and diesel and instead runs on clean energy," he told me in a recent interview. "That is the largest economic transition perhaps in human history, since we went from pulling a travois to having a wheel."
The problem is that Jay’s eternal sunshine obfuscates the sticks that should come along with the carrots of energy retrofit incentives, electric vehicle tax breaks, and green job training programs.
For example, Inslee told me that his personal motivation to be a leader on climate change stems from a fervent hope that his grandchildren can live a Great Northwest storybook life like he did: “I want them to be able to go ski, clamming, have a job, less asthma,” he said. Reflecting on the devastation in Paradise, California last year, he said, “I want them to have a house in a nice subdivision that doesn’t burn down.”
There’s the rub. That nice subdivision? It probably shouldn’t have been built in the first place, especially if it butts up against a wildfire-prone forest area like so much of the West. According to the U.S. Forest Service, 60 percent of new home construction since 1990 is located in this dangerous zone. Inslee should envision his grandkids living in a dense urban area and allowing the wildfire ecology of Western forests to run their natural cycle unimpeded by human activity. But Jay’s suburban nation vision doesn’t seem to accommodate such strict—but necessary—land use regulations.
Inslee has also dialed back from his signature climate initiative: carbon pricing. He failed big time to deliver on this proposal. That failure can and should come back to bite him in the ass if he is going to run for president on his climate record. If he couldn’t pass a carbon tax in Washington after six tries, what in the hell makes him think he can shepherd anything of that magnitude through Congress?
So Inslee has stopped talking about it. It didn’t come up once when I asked him what his Green New Deal looks like. Once he was done extolling the virtues of solar installation and wind turbine maintenance jobs, I asked him if carbon pricing—an idea which just netted Yale economist Bill Nordhaus a Nobel Prize for economics and even has the neoliberal World Bank all hot and bothered—was necessary nationally.
“Possibly but not necessarily,” he said. “The vast carbon savings one would get is from the investment side not the price side.”
He said that a 100% clean electric grid rule—like the kind he hopes to pass this legislative session as part of his Clean Energy Smart Deal—would be enough to generate demand for low-carbon energy even without pricing carbon.
This backpedaling matters not because Jay Inslee is going to become president—he’s not—but because when if the Democrats win in 2020 (it’s superstition not to make assumptions about the U.S. electorate anymore), he has a decent shot of being named EPA administrator. And when he sits behind Scott Pruitt’s expensive desk and ducks into Scott Pruitt’s soundproof booth for phone calls, his current tone casts doubt on whether he will be the kind of Green Czar that climate change crusaders want him to be.
