On the same day last week when Gov. Jay Inslee stood in front of solar panels and announced his presidential bid on an almost exclusively climate-change platform, the Washington Legislature passed not one but two Inslee-backed climate-change bills.
Coincidence or orchestrated effort?
Who’s to say?
But it does bring to mind what impact, if any, Inslee’s long shot bid for the Democratic nomination in 2020 will have on the state — beyond the fact that he figures to be flying back and forth from far-flung locales such as Nashua and Dubuque (and hey, how big a carbon footprint will that make?) while wooing voters and arm-twisting Olympia legislators.
We don’t mean the cost that Washington State Patrol security will rack up protecting Inslee’s person — though that’s a valid concern and one this editorial board addressed last November; read here at http://bit.ly/2Uf1Luf. And we don’t fret so much that he’ll neglect his home state’s affairs as much as he might pressure the Democratic-controlled House and Senate to go full bore in passing the myriad climate-change bills hovering in the ozone-depleted ether to burnish the governor’s green bona fides.
Some of those bills have positive aspects Washingtonians of all political persuasions can get behind — who doesn’t want to phase out those nasty hydrofluorocarbons, offering safer alternatives at little extra cost? — but other proposals are contentious and may not get full, prudent vetting before being put to votes.
Take last Friday’s easy passage of SB 5116, less than two hours after Inslee left the podium to thunderous applause from hometown supporters already spouting the official campaign slogan, “Our Moment.” That bill requires the state to be running at 100 percent clean energy (solar, wind, hydroelectricity, perhaps nuclear) by 2045.
Such a fundamental reshaping of the energy grid, including offsets paid by utility companies, needs a thorough review to examine the consequences to the state’s economy — will there be, for instance, electricity “brownouts” in the future if natural gas power were to be eliminated? — as well as its ecology. Utility companies will be on the hook for penalties ($60 per megawatt hour for carbon-emitting sources after 2039 in the Senate bill, $100 per megawatt hour in the House measure), and there’s no guarantee the offsets they could buy through clean-energy projects will keep utilities from passing along higher rates to users.
So, if lawmakers are intent to get it and other bills — such as the carbon fee that would raise the state’s gas prices by 15 cents per gallon — in the books in this session, before Inslee’s heavy presidential campaigning commences, there might be pressure to ram it through.
Then again, because Democrats have a comfortable majority in both legislative bodies, it’s safe to say the Inslee-backed climate proposals have a good chance of passing this session even if he had declined to run for president. Still, the Legislature’s motives in the wake of the governor’s decision need to be examined.
As for Inslee’s motives, it would be churlish to doubt the sincerity of his clean-energy evangelism. If you watched the campaign video released last week, you can see a montage of Inslee’s decadeslong commitment to the cause — as well as the incremental graying of his coiffure.
State Republican leaders have called Inslee’s candidacy a “vanity” project. We cannot discern the governor’s true motives, but we wonder if he realizes what a long shot his bid figures to be. Yes, two little-known Democratic governors have ascended to the oval office — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — but the 2020 field is packed with high-profile, strong personalities with major political pedigree.
It doesn’t bode well for Inslee that in a poll released two days before he threw his hat in the ring he polled dead last, 0 percent, among 19 other names included on a survey of 15,600 likely Democratic primary voters. Even declared candidate Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind. (pop. 102,245), is polling higher than Inslee.
Yet, stranger things than an Inslee insurgence have happened in the political arena. If the governor gets an infusion of cash from a big donor (paging Mr. Tom Steyer), and if no other candidate picks up the climate-change torch with as much gusto, and if a diverse Democratic voter base is willing to support a 68-year-old white, male candidate not named Sanders or Biden, this could conceivably be Inslee’s “Moment.”
Or he could come back to Olympia somewhat humbled and perhaps eying a third gubernatorial term. Whatever the outcome, it’s incumbent on the Legislature to remove Inslee’s presidential ambitions from the equation and act in the best interests of all Washingtonians when considering climate-change proposals.
Members of the Yakima Herald-Republic editorial board are Bob Crider and Sam McManis
