The governor of Washington wants to make climate change the most important issue of 2020.
Jay Inslee just became the first governor to enter the 2020 presidential primary, and he’s going to try to make the race all about climate change.
He made the announcement in a video that centrally focuses on climate change. “Our country’s next mission must be to rise up to the most urgent challenge of our time — defeating climate change,” the video says.
Inslee, who is the chief executive in Washington state, served as the chair of the Democratic Governors Association during the 2018 midterms. In a field where the biggest names are almost all US senators, Inslee is planning to lean heavily on his executive experience and talk about how progressive politics can turn states like his into economic juggernauts.
“We are, according to CNBC, the best place to do business this year. And the reasons for that in part are because of our progressive policies,” Inslee told Vox last year. “We welcome computer scientists and geneticists who are helping to cure cancer instead of denying them because they’re Muslim. We have policies that protect our environment so we have a great place to live, clean water and clean air; as a result, it’s a great way to recruit people to come here.”
Inslee is making climate change his No. 1 priority, but he doesn’t want to be a single-issue candidate. Instead, Inslee is treating climate change like an umbrella issue under which other issues like the economy, health care, and national security also fit.
The Washington state governor plans to tie each issue to the broader theme of using the power of the presidency to dramatically lower America’s carbon output and scale up renewable energy.
“He’s going to use the full power of the presidency to defeat climate change,” an Inslee aide told Vox. “This is different than saying you support the Green New Deal.”
Who is Jay Inslee?
Inslee is originally from Seattle and has lived in Washington for much of his life. He’s held a number of roles in politics, serving in the Washington state legislature and a brief term in the US House in the early 1990s. After a failed run for governor in 1996, he served as a regional director for President Bill Clinton’s Department of Health and Human Services.
Inslee returned to the US House late in that decade, where he served until he was elected governor in 2012. He’s presided over a time of economic growth; Washington is consistently in the top 10 state economies, according to rankings from US News & World Report and USA Today.
Washington’s governor has argued the progressive policies he’s embraced have had a big hand in attracting people to his state. That’s been especially prescient during the Trump administration, where the federal government has made its opposition to transgender people, Latinos, and Muslim immigrants well-known. Inslee has made it a point to push back against Trump’s policies and underscore that his state is a welcoming place for all.
“A lot of people over the years have argued that environmental laws or laws involving equity and who you can marry are inimical,” Inslee said. “In fact, they’re actually crucial to economic development. Some of the hottest economies are places with these progressive policies.”
A 2020 campaign through the lens of stopping climate change
Inslee has been focused on climate change issues for many years, but he wasn’t always intending to enter a presidential race focused on the issue.
His thinking shifted when he toured the devastation wrought by the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, and read through the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that countries around the world had just 12 years to cut global emissions by 45 percent or risk catastrophic effects, per the Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere.
Inslee told Dovere he sees “an appetite for someone who has credibility and a long track record and, most importantly, a vision statement. It’s changed to show an opening in a Democratic primary, I believe.”
With the 2020 presidential primary shaping up to be a race to the left, there are already many candidates in the running who say climate change is a top priority. But few are treating it as the main plank of their candidacies.
As the Trump administration has pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord and tried to gradually undo President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, as the governor of a blue state, Inslee made it his role to push back. It’s unclear how receptive voters in his own state are to that; an Inslee-backed effort to start a new carbon fee was shot down by a majority of state voters on a ballot initiative in 2018.
Still, with both the Washington state House and Senate under Democratic control, Inslee is hoping to pass and sign a bill that would get the state fully off of coal energy and get the state completely off of carbon-producing energy sources by 2045.
“The thing that stands out for me is the largest existential threat to our homes, and that’s carbon pollution and climate change,” he told Vox last year. “That’s the one that impacts us all the most severely, in the most places, for the longest period of time. Being able to advance climate change policies, which can’t happen under Trump — who’s called it a hoax — [states] are the only place we can make progress.”
Now he wants to take that vision to the White House.
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Breaking News: Jay Inslee just launched a presidential campaign that will be all about climate change - News Paper
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