By Gregory Scruggs
SEATTLE, Jan 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – On a recent winter beach walk, Washington state Governor Jay Inslee’s 5-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 U.S. 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 told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.
The Washington Democrat, from one of the country’s greenest-leaning states, would likely face a tough uphill climb to the presidency, and plenty of analysts are skeptical of his chances to win the Democratic nomination, much less the Oval Office.
But Inslee, 67, believes fighting climate change should be the top priority for the White House – a dramatic shift from the views of the current occupant, who has called global warming a hoax and plans to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
“It requires a concerted national will and the political capital of the President of the United States to put their shoulder to this wheel,” he said. “We have to do climate first.”
A host of Democratic challengers to Republican President Donald Trump are expected to join the political fray this year, from U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to former Vice President Joe Biden.
How much any of them would make action on climate change a priority in a new Democratic administration remains unclear.
But Inslee believes there is an economic as well as environmental case for embarking on a “Green New Deal” that would transition the U.S. economy off fossil fuels and toward cleaner, renewable power.
He likens such a change to other major historical shifts, from the United States’ build up of World War Two industrial might to the research and development program behind the Apollo space program 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, decarbonizing the U.S. 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 today is for solar installer and number two is for wind maintenance engineer,” he said. “These jobs are growing twice as fast as the rest of the economy.”
