US’s new climate hawk in chief?
Governor vying for presidency says fighting climate change should be a priority – a major shift from Trump’s view
ON A RECENT winter beach walk, Washington state Governor Jay Inslee’s five-year-old grandson beamed with delight as he spotted a crab.
Protecting such moments of connection with nature are one of the motivations driving Inslee to consider running for the US presidency, with action on climate change as his major campaign platform.
“That type of experience in nature is what is so threatened and I want my grandkids to continue to have those experiences,” Inslee said.
The Washington Democrat, from one of the country’s greenest-leaning states, would probably face a tough uphill climb to the presidency, and plenty of analysts are sceptical about chances of winning the Democratic nomination, much less the Oval Office.
But Inslee, 67, believes fighting climate change should be the White House’s priority – a dramatic shift from the views of the current occupant, who has called global warming a hoax and plans to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
“It requires a concerted national will and the political capital of the president to put their shoulder to this wheel,” he said.
A host of Democratic challengers to Republican President Donald Trump are expected to join the political fray this year, from US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to former vice-president Joe Biden.
Inslee says there is an economic as well as environmental case for embarking on a “Green New Deal” that would transition the US economy off fossil fuels and toward cleaner, renewable power. He likens such a change to other major historical shifts, from the US’s build-up of World War II industrial might to the research and development programme behind the Apollo space programme that landed Americans on the moon.
“We have to change our economy so it does not run on oil and diesel and instead runs on clean energy,” Inslee said. “That is the largest economic transition perhaps in human history, since we went from pulling a travois to having a wheel.”
If done well, the governor said, decarbonising the US economy could spark plenty of new jobs in emerging clean energy industries, a view he outlined in his 2007 book Apollo’s Fire.
“The number one job growth rate in America is for solar installer and number two is for wind maintenance engineer. These jobs are growing twice as fast as the rest of the economy.”
Inslee sees his state, which he has governed since 2012, as a model of environmentally-friendly legislation and strong economic growth.
In recent years, Washington has reviewed its energy portfolio to boost renewables and encouraged cities and towns to buy electric buses.
The state has also installed a network of electric vehicle charging stations and seeded a clean energy research and development fund.
In the state legislative session, Inslee is pushing for 100% clean electricity statewide by 2045 and a clean fuel standard in line with other West Coast states. But efforts to put in place carbon pricing in the state have failed three times under his watch.
Inslee has not yet announced his candidacy for president. But in October, he started a political action committee and has raised $112 000 through November for a potential run, according to federal election filings.
Inslee says support for clean energy was a successful campaign issue in the seven governerships that Democrats won from Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections.
But a Yale University poll from last March suggested global warming ranks 15th out of 28 issues of importance for voters. Political scientists say it will probably hinder Inslee’s prospects for taking his green campaign national.
“The brutal reality is that the electorate does not care about environmental issues,” said Aseem Prakash, the director of the University of Washington Centre for Environmental Politics. Prakash gives Inslee little to no chance of winning the presidency but believes a bid would boost his visibility and make him a viable candidate for a cabinet-level post, such as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
In such a role, Prakash said, “he would be able to translate a lot of policies he has been talking about into concrete outcomes.”
An Inslee candidacy on a climate change platform also could encourage other Democratic candidates to talk about the issue.
The former congressman remains undeterred about his possibly slim chances of winning the top job.
“Pollsters be damned,” he said. “You’ve got to go with your gut.”
| Reuters African News Agency (ANA)