The last act of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s public life played out like a microcosm of his 35 years in politics: two steps forward, one step back.
On the same day former President Donald Trump won reelection to the White House, signaling a new winter for federal climate action, Washington voters delivered a resounding endorsement of the state’s cap-and-invest system. Arguably the strongest climate law in the country, it easily survived a referendum seeking its repeal — due in part to the defense mounted by Inslee and his allies.
The split-screen was cold comfort to most U.S. climate hawks, who bemoaned Trump’s victory and the impending retreat of the world’s largest economy and biggest historical emitter. But Inslee saw something more hopeful: a model for entrenching climate action in the states — proving itself just in time.
“I do believe this is a titanic victory,” Inslee said in a recent interview with POLITICO’s E&E News.
“Had we lost,” the governor said, “there would have been a dampening effect on other public leaders across the country.” Instead, the referendum became an opportunity to demonstrate to other states that major climate policy can be politically durable. “We’re all feeling emboldened by this,” he said.
For Inslee, this final victory couldn’t have come at a better time. The nation’s longest-serving governor will leave office next week, after 12 years in which he made climate policy his administration’s top priority — garnering international influence on the issue, even as he sometimes struggled to sell his biggest ideas at home.
After several lackluster legislative sessions, two rejected referendums and a brief presidential campaign, Inslee’s third term finally brought the governor landmark wins on climate — followed by a chance to prove their popularity at the ballot box.
“This is a culmination of his entire career,” said state Sen. Joseph Nguyen, the outgoing chair of the Washington Senate’s energy and environment committee. “He’s been a thought leader in this space for decades. Everyone else just started catching up to him.”
While the survival of cap and invest solidifies Inslee’s legacy, the governor himself emphasizes what it means for the future.
“The state-led, state-designed and state-implemented agenda really cannot be stopped by Donald Trump,” Inslee said.
If history is any guide, he argued, the incoming Trump administration’s anti-climate agenda should encourage the public to prioritize climate action, just as the first Trump term galvanized Democrats into passing the Inflation Reduction Act and a bevy of state-level climate programs.
“I look at his election as less of a hobble and more of a spur to our efforts,” he said. “We made a lot of progress during his first rodeo.”
Inslee had a major hand in shaping that dynamic the first time around.
In 2019, he launched a presidential campaign built around climate. His candidacy never caught fire, but his influence goaded Inslee’s Democratic rivals into proposing their own multitrillion-dollar climate plans. CNN hosted a multihour town hall for the candidates to explain their climate agendas, many of which — including the one put forward by then-former Vice President Joe Biden — took cues from Inslee’s six-part, 218-page plan.
If the governor helped drag national Democrats toward climate action, it was after he’d already gotten plenty of practice in Olympia. Inslee’s persistence on climate made a real impact on the Legislature’s agenda, lawmakers said.
“Everyone knew in every meeting, on any topic, that he wanted to circle back and talk about ways to make progress on climate,” said Reuven Carlyle, former Democratic chair of the Senate environment committee and architect of the Climate Commitment Act, the 2021 law that established cap and invest.
“He connected the dots of health care, transportation, jobs, economic development,” he said. “That type of leadership has an effect on the dynamic in the Legislature and externally among the public.”
Inslee’s other climate accomplishments include a clean electricity standard that seeks net-zero power sector emissions by 2040, a clean fuels standard that requires refiners to cut their emissions and stronger building codes.
Inslee sees those policies as an attempt to fulfill the goals he identified in his 2007 book “Apollo’s Fire,” co-authored with policy researcher Bracken Hendricks. The playbook outlines a pathway to use government levers to orient the country around decarbonization with the same shared purpose as the Apollo lunar program — creating economic development while doing something big.
“The bad news is hardly anyone read my book,” Inslee said.
“The good news is it turned out to be right. Because that vision that we would rapidly decarbonize our industries is coming to pass,” he said, ticking through the “exhilarating” pace of technological advancement and deployment unfolding in Washington, such as silicon anode battery companies that are working to extend the range of electric vehicles.
“There’s so much good news out there that I feel that I was vindicated in the vision I proposed” Inslee said, “It certainly gave me confidence enough to become a three term governor and actually implement the things that were just kind of a dream when I wrote the book.”
‘You don’t become a three-term governor on accident’
One irony to Inslee’s legacy is that the policy that defines it — cap and invest — wasn’t something he proposed in his book, his presidential race or any of the other moments that made him one of the country’s most prominent climate hawks.
Washington voters rejected carbon pricing systems in 2016 and 2018, and Democrats had struggled to get major policies through the Legislature. Many environmentalists wanted to focus on narrower policies, like a fuel standard.
Along with the political considerations, some environmentalists also were wary of a market approach to climate action, said Nguyen, who co-sponsored the Climate Commitment Act.
Inslee “was skeptical that a carbon market like cap and invest could work,” he said, adding that Inslee’s political instincts were sharp. “You don’t become a three-term governor on accident.”
But in 2021, Democrats managed to move the Climate Commitment Act as part of a “grand bargain” that funded transportation projects and imposed Inslee’s clean fuels standard.
“Once he came on board,” Nguyen said, “he was the biggest champion.”
Mike Faulk, Inslee’s press secretary and deputy communications director, said the governor never gave up on passing an economywide approach to cutting emissions.
“The governor’s insistence on not giving up is part of what created the conditions for the win on cap and trade. All of his other climate policy work made it possible to pursue the CCA,” he said.
Inslee now sees the state’s cap-and-invest system as a template for defending climate policies in a second Trump administration.
Washington’s program has raised more than $2 billion since 2023, financed by selling a declining number of allowances for the state’s biggest polluters to emit greenhouse gasses, with prices set at auction. The funding has paid for climate-related projects like free mass transit for children and electric school buses, as well as some utility assistance.
But as fuel prices jumped, opponents of cap and invest mocked Inslee’s prediction that it only would cost “a few pennies” — an example, they argued, of the governor’s ideological fixation on climate to the exclusion of everything else.
But after cap and invest survived, its opponents conceded the public had been persuaded to see its benefits as justifying the costs, at least for now.
Inslee “was a lucky man,” said Republican Rep. Jim Walsh, the chair of the state GOP and one of the organizers of the repeal effort.
“He came at a time when the Washington state economy was booming, and average people in the state could afford to value policies that are optional,” he said.
Inslee used that as an opportunity to latch onto other people’s ideas, Walsh said, dismissing Inslee’s book as “basically a magazine article.”
“In my opinion, rather than lead any sort of agenda, he sort of bobbed along like a cork on the tides,” he said. “Nothing he stood for was unique to him.”
For his part, Inslee hopes his approach becomes less of an outlier — he wants more states and elected officials to pick up the policies and the messages that have been battle-tested in Washington.
The effort to repeal cap and invest — known as Initiative 2117 — failed with 62 percent of the state voting to keep it, more support than any statewide candidate.
The policy had “immediate, visible, tangible benefits for Washingtonians that were so pronounced, so omnipresent across the state, that people didn’t just defeat [the attempt to repeal] it,” Inslee said. “They gave it a fanny-whooping.”
