Jay Inslee Wants to Be the First Climate President. Is America Ready?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

On a recent Sunday morning, Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington state, paid a visit to the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency. He was part of a group of governors who had come to meet with EPA chief Andrew Wheeler, the face and leader of President Trump’s all-out assault on Barack Obama’s environmental legacy.

In a blue plastic folder tucked under Inslee’s arm was a summary of the latest National Climate Assessment, the fourth in a series of reports by the government’s best scientists that distilled what we know about the causes and outcomes of climate change. When he got a chance to speak, Inslee confronted Wheeler about some of the report’s most dire predictions — a trillion dollars’ worth of coastal property and infrastructure threatened by rising seas and storms, extreme heat leading to $160 billion in lost wages, as many as tens of thousands of new deaths each year due to air pollution.

“These are very dire consequences,” Inslee says he told Wheeler, “but as far as I can tell, this amount of damage is not enough to motivate you to do anything about it. How many dead people will it take before you decide to do something about climate change?”

Wheeler responded by blaming Democrats, Inslee says, and the conversation went downhill from there. (An EPA spokesman confirmed the exchange.) But Washington, D.C.’s intransigence on the existential issue of our time is something Inslee’s long accustomed to. Before he was elected governor in 2012, he served 15 years in the House of Representatives and earned a reputation as one of the fiercest climate warriors on Capitol Hill. He was for the Green New Deal before the Green New Deal existed, introducing a sweeping bill in 2005 to cap greenhouse-gas emissions, wean America off fossil fuels and scale up funding for clean-energy technologies. He was one of the earliest and loudest voices condemning the denialism of the Republican Party. But shaming only gets you so far. “Having expended considerable energy trying to persuade them and cajole them and inspire them, that has fallen on deaf ears, like talking to a rock,” he told me recently over drinks in downtown D.C. “The only solution is to remove them.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jay-inslee-presidential-candidate-2020-801415/

Wheeler is such a piece of work.

[LakeArenal]

1. Everyone takes credit for good ideas..

PS Shaming Republicans? Not bloody likely...

[KPN]

2. "The only solution is to remove them."

Truth!