Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee jumped into the 2020 Democratic presidential primary Friday with a promise to put climate change front and center in both his campaign and his potential presidency.

Given the serious risks of rising global temperatures, Inslee told TIME in an interview ahead of his announcement that climate change cannot be one item “on a list of things to do.” He pledged to coordinate an unprecedented effort to tackle the issue.

“Beating climate change has to be the first priority of the United States,” he said. “It has to be the paramount duty. It has to be the organizing principle of the next administration throughout all its agencies.”

The two-term governor, who previously served seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, enters a crowded field of candidates, many of whom have better name recognition and more buzz, and he hasn’t featured prominently in Democratic primary polling to date.

But Inslee is betting that voters in early states will be drawn to his record and message on climate change. Inslee pointed to a poll from the Center for American Progress, a progressive group, showing that tackling climate change is a key concern for primary voters in five early voting states, an issue equalled only by universal health care.

To be sure, Democrat candidates all have noted the importance of tackling climate change, but so far none have put it as front and center as Inslee promises to do. Most candidates have endorsed a resolution from the progressive wing of the party calling for a Green New Deal that would seek to supply all of the country’s power by zero-emissions sources by 2030, although some do not necessarily endorse all elements of the plan.

And the topic comes up frequently in speeches and campaign messaging, often as a way of hitting President Donald Trump, who announced in 2017 that the U.S. will leave the Paris Agreement on climate change and previously called climate change a hoax.

Still, none of the other candidates in the field have signaled that climate change will be the centerpiece of their campaign the way that Inslee plans. Inslee will host a series of climate change-related events in Iowa next week before heading to Nevada and California.

Inslee referred to his record on a range of policies from the state’s clean energy standard to a program for electrifying the transportation sector and touted his leadership of an alliance for cities and states to commit to the Paris Agreement. And more than a decade before the Green New Deal entered the national lexicon, Inslee authored a 2007 book calling for a massive spike in government funding for research and development and investment in clean energy that would create so-called green jobs.

While endorsing a Green New Deal has emerged as a litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates hoping to win the support of the party’s progressive wing, some say ranking climate change as the top issue may prove more important down the road.

Scientists say meaningful action on global warming cannot wait — whatever solution a future president may choose to pursue, and an incoming president typically faces a narrow window to burn political capital and enact sweeping new legislation. Trump enacted a tax cut early in his administration, but has struggled to notch legislative victories since then. President Barack Obama chose to put his energy behind the Affordable Care Act early in his presidency rather than his party’s major climate change bill, which passed the House but never received a vote in the Senate.

“You have to be willing to spend your political capital on it,” says Inslee. “I would be willing to do that, and that is the only way this is going to get done.”

Inslee declined to lay out the specific planks of a policy platform, but he said he was looking at a combination of direct investment to stimulate clean technologies and regulations to mandate emissions reductions. Carbon pricing mechanisms should not be taken off the table but are not part of his current thinking, he said, adding that his current work in Washington state will accomplish the same emissions reduction goals as the carbon tax that failed to pass a statewide ballot initiative last year would have.

“Our environmental laws have been extremely successful when we’ve applied them,” he says. “We just haven’t applied them to the most dangerous pollutant at the moment, which is carbon dioxide and methane.”

Write to Justin Worland at justin.worland@time.com.</s>[Who’s in, who’s out and who’s still thinking about it. Check out our presidential candidate tracker.]

“This is the 11th hour, but it is Washington’s hour to shine. It’s a time of great peril, but also of great promise,” Governor Inslee said in his State of the State speech earlier this year. “I don’t know of any other issue that touches the heart of things so many of us care about: our jobs, our health, our safety and our children’s future,” he added, referring to climate change.

Mr. Inslee has said in recent speeches that he would push the nation to global leadership in research and development of lower-carbon energy policies, likening the effort to the mass mobilizations and deployment of resources during World War II. But his base of support in his home state is also narrow.

In his election to the governor’s office in 2012, he carried only eight of the state’s 39 counties, all of them along the heavily populated liberal western slope of the Cascade Range. He trailed his Republican challenger in more rural and conservative agricultural communities. In his second campaign four years later, he carried nine counties.

Many Washington residents, even those who admire Mr. Inslee and have voted for him, are prone to sometimes mock him for his sunny, boyish enthusiasm in talking about passions like ocean acidification and carbon.

“He’s a true believer,” said Travis N. Ridout, a professor of government and public policy at Washington State University and longtime observer of Mr. Inslee. “He’s identified with climate change. Other than that, it’s hard to — at least in my mind — come up with signature policy focuses. The positive of that is that it’s hard to think of the big scandals he’s been involved in either. He’s fairly low drama. He’s not a firebrand.”</s>Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announces bid for Democratic nomination for president in 2020

SEATTLE (AP) — Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announces bid for Democratic nomination for president in 2020.</s>
• Inslee, 66, was first elected to public office in 1989. He’s served in the Washington State Legislature and the US House of Representatives, and he was first elected Washington’s governor in 2012.
• Inslee’s campaign message will heavily revolve around environmental issues and solving climate change, the governor has said.

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington on Friday announced he’s running for president in 2020.

While Inslee enters the race as a relative underdog with lower name recognition than other 2020 contenders, his combination of legislative and executive experience, as well as his progressive credentials, could help set him apart from the rest of the field.

Inslee, who has served as governor since 2012, has held some form of public office for most of the past 30 years. His path to the presidency relies on his billing himself as the “climate candidate,” having made reducing carbon emissions and promoting renewable energy a priority as governor.

“I’m Jay Inslee and I’m running for president because I am the only candidate who will make defeating climate change our nation’s number one priority,” Inslee said in a video released Friday.

In the video, Inslee says he has “a lot” to say about climate change, and old clips show Inslee raising the issue through his years as a politician.

The video shows Inslee in the aftermath of wildfires as he says in a voiceover: “We are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change. And we’re the last that can do something about it.”

“We went to the moon and created technologies that have changed the world. Our country’s next mission must be to rise up to the most urgent challenge of our time: defeating climate change,” Inslee says in the video alongside images of flooding and clean energy production. Inslee advocates “100% clean energy” as a way to “transform” the economy and create jobs.

The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported in early January that Inslee had begun building his support and fundraising base among climate activists across the US.

“For millions of Americans, climate change is no longer just a graph or a chart,” Inslee recently wrote on Twitter. “It’s floodwater invading their homes. It’s ash on their tongues from raging wildfires. From Washington State to Texas to Puerto Rico, we are living climate change right now.”

Inslee has also used his time as governor to champion causes such as criminal justice and immigration reform. His attorney general led a successful lawsuit challenging parts of the Trump administration’s travel ban on visitors from majority-Muslim nations, and he recently issued pardons to more than 3,500 Washingtonians with misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions.

Read more: Washington’s governor will pardon people convicted of misdemeanor marijuana possession – 6 years after the state legalized recreational pot

After growing up in the Seattle area, Inslee attended law school and briefly worked as a prosecutor. He was first elected to public office in 1989 to represent eastern Washington in the Washington House of Representatives.

He was later elected to represent Washington’s 4th District in the House in 1992 but served just one term before being unseated in the Republican wave year of 1994.

Inslee spent the rest of the 1990s serving as a regional coordinator for the federal Department of Health and Human Services under the Clinton administration before being elected to Congress again to represent Washington’s 1st Congressional District in 1998.

Inslee served six terms in the House before stepping down to successfully run for governor. He was elected to a second term in 2016. Inslee also served as chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, helping oversee seven gubernatorial seats across the country flip from Republican to Democrat in 2018.</s>SEATTLE (AP) — Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announces bid for Democratic nomination for president in 2020.</s>Washington state Governor Jay Inslee announced Friday that he is running for president of the United States, CNN reports.

“I’m Jay Inslee and I’m running for president because I am the only candidate who will make defeating climate change our nation’s number one priority,” the governor said in a video announcing his bid for the White House, indicating that policies meant to combat climate change will be the core of his platform.

“Our moment” appears to be Governor Inslee’s official slogan. Throughout the video, Inslee’s supporters can be heard repeating the phrase, and so can popular television host and science communicator Bill Nye, aka the “Science Guy.”

According to Inslee, he is set to hold a news conference in Seattle in which he will attempt to demonstrate how his policies have helped the state of Washington. The governor’s campaign will be headquartered in Seattle, which makes it the first campaign so far based on the West Coast.

A veteran legislator, Inslee was first elected to the Washington House of Representatives in 1989, and to the United States House of Representatives in 1992. He assumed the governor’s office in Washington in 2013, dedicating himself to enacting a slew of progressive policies, and raising the minimum wage in the state to $15.

Known as a vocal critic of President Donald Trump – who has been known for his denials of climate science – Inslee has criticized the president’s agenda and policy on numerous occasions, suing him in 2017 over the so-called Muslim ban.

Although focused on climate change, Inslee has not yet come out in support of the Green New Deal, according to CNN, but he has praised the progressive initiative, arguing that it is “raising people’s ambitions” and “making what might seem impossible within the realm of the possible.”

While combating climate change is evidently Inslee’s primary focus, it remains to be seen whether the Washington governor will manage to stand out in the already crowded Democratic field, given that the vast majority of candidates has made environmental advocacy a part of their platform.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, prominent Democrats Corey Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Kamala Harris, and independent candidate Bernie Sanders have all officially launched their presidential campaigns. Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke and former Vice President Joe Biden are expected to announce soon.

Vermont Senator Sanders is considered to be the Democratic front-runner, according to The Atlantic. Sanders is the most popular U.S. senator, according to a Morning Consult poll, and 53 percent of Americans view him favorably, according to Gallup research.</s>Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced in a video Friday morning that he is running for president.

Inslee, a Democrat, is hinging his candidacy on the message of fighting climate change. In the one-and-a-half-minute video he posted to Twitter on Friday morning, he said fighting climate change is "the most urgent challenge of our time."

"We're the first generation to feel the sting of climate change and we're the last that can do something about it," he said.

Inslee, 68, a former congressman from 1998 to 2012, was elected Washington's governor in 2012 and re-elected in 2016. While governor, he's pushed for clean energy, information technology and life sciences industries and recently backed Washington lawmakers' efforts pass a carbon fee to limit pollution.

Inslee joins a growing field of Democratic candidates eager to challenge Republican President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Other Democratic candidates who have entered the race include U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren, as well as Julian Castro, former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration.

Who is running for president?: A list of the candidates who have declared so far

Beto O'Rourke: Texan will make announcement 'soon' on presidential run</s>Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is joining the growing Democratic primary field, making climate change a top issue as he vies to challenge President Trump next year.

“We’re the first generation to feel the sting of climate change. And we’re the last who can do something about it,” Inslee says in his announcement video. “We went to the moon and created technologies that have changed the world. Our country’s next mission must be to rise up to the most urgent challenge of our time — defeating climate change.”

Amid clips of him repeating warnings about global warming for years, Inslee argues that the crisis can’t be ignored any longer, saying that it “isn’t just a chart or graph anymore. The impacts are being felt everywhere.” He closes by saying he’s “the only candidate who will make defeating climate change our nation’s number one priority.”

While governors are frequently dominant figures in presidential primaries, Inslee is the first sitting or former governor to join the race for the Democratic nomination. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe are considering 2020 bids.

Inslee isn’t a well-known politician like other top candidates that have already entered the race, such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, California Sen. Kamala Harris, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and others. But Inslee is the first to make climate change the central facet of his campaign, which could help him carve out a unique niche. The issue is a rising concern among progressives and millennials especially, evident in the recent push for the Green New Deal in Congress.

“I’ve been pleased by what I’ve been hearing across the country,” the 68-year-old Democrat said last Sunday on CBS’s Face The Nation. “That people do want a president that will act on a real emergency, which is climate change.”

Inslee has long tried to raise alarm over the issue, dating back to his tenure in Congress. In his 2009 book “Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy,” Inslee compared fighting climate change to the space race. In 2017, he co-founded the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 21 governors pledging to take action after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement.

“I do think that it is absolutely imperative that the Democratic Party put forth a candidate who will make climate change a principal, front-burner issue, rather than some peripheral back burner,” Inslee told Rolling Stone last year.

As governor, he created the Washington State Clean Energy Fund, investing over $120 million into clean energy research and use, along with expanding transit and light rail service and increasing electric vehicle and alternative fuel tax credits.

However, some of his plans hit a roadblock even in his liberal home state. A ballot initiative that would have placed a statewide fee on carbon pollution failed in November, but Inslee said he was not dissuaded.

“I learned one of the key talents is persistence,” Inslee told NBC News. “Climate change is not going away, and neither are we.”

Inslee has made visits to early primary states, but he may not get the warmest reception in them all. Politico reported that when he was chairman of the Democratic Governors Association he decided not to invest in the 2018 gubernatorial race in New Hampshire, upsetting many state Democrats. Under his DGA chairmanship, the party flipped seven states from GOP control.</s>Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee announced Friday that he is running for President, launching a bid in which he intends to make combating climate change the central rationale for his campaign.

Inslee announced the bid in a video made public on Friday. He is slated to hold a news conference in Seattle at a solar panel installer to expand upon his presidential announcement. He will be surrounded by friends, family and business owners who the campaign says have benefited from his climate policies in the state.

“I’m Jay Inslee and I’m running for president because I am the only candidate who will make defeating climate change our nation’s number one priority,” the governor says in a more-than-a-minute-long video that highlights his decades-long focus on climate change and compares tackling the issue to President John F. Kennedy’s focus on going to the moon.

“We’re the first generation to feel the sting of climate change. And we’re the last that can do something about it,” Inslee adds. “We can do this. Join our movement. This is our moment.”

The video ends with a string of straight-to-camera videos from voters and supporters saying, “Our moment.” Among those featured is Bill Nye, the popular television star known as “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” who often talks about climate change.

Inslee has been upfront about the fact that he has been exploring a presidential run for months. He now enters a crowded presidential field that boasts 12 other Democrats, including six senators, and could grow to more than 15 Democratic candidates in the coming months.

He will headquarter his campaign in Seattle, making his campaign the only 2020 operation to date to be based on the West Coast. He will follow up Friday’s announcement with a trip to Iowa and Nevada in the coming days, an adviser added.

Inslee, who served as head of the Democratic Governors Association in 2018, traveled the country stumping for Democrats running for governor that year, but also used the trips to talk to Democrats about his platform focused on climate change. Inslee has told reporters and people close to him that he has been emboldened by what he has heard from those Democrats and believes there is a hunger in the country for someone with a singular focus on climate change.

“We know we have to have a candidate who will make climate change and building a clean energy economy a central focus, an organizing principle for the American people and we need a president who will do the same,” Inslee told CNN in February.

“I am excited about this because, as I have traveled the country, I hear people waiting for the bugle call from the White House,” Inslee continued. “We heard it from Kennedy when he said we are going to go to the moon. We need a similar bugle call to the American people on this.”

Inslee has been in elected office for much of the last three decades. He was first elected to the Washington House of Representatives in 1989 and was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 1992. Inslee, though, lost his re-election bid in 1994, an election cycle called the “Republican Revolution” after the party picked up 54 seats in the House.

After a failed 1996 gubernatorial election, he successfully ran for Congress again in 1998, a job he held until he successfully ran for governor in 2012.

Inslee, by raising the minimum wage in Washington state, helping to pass a statewide paid family leave law and enacting a moratorium on the death penalty, has been an outspoken progressive executive since he became governor in 2013. But his profile truly rose after the election of President Donald Trump. After the President’s inauguration in 2017, Inslee became a vocal opponent of the Republican leader, including by suing him after Trump tried to ban immigration from several Muslim majority countries.

Although Inslee has looked to make Washington state more carbon neutral during his time in office — including by investing in a statewide fund that looks to help business go green in Washington — the governor failed to enact a statewide carbon tax in 2018, delivering a stinging defeat for environmentalists after years of attempts to curb climate change through economic incentives. The proposal, which voters rejected by 13 percentage points, would have levied a tax of $15 per metric ton of carbon emissions, making Washington the first state in the nation to raise the cost of fossil-fuel-intensive activities.

Inslee’s time as chair of the Democratic Governors Association during the 2018 cycle helped raise his profile, too. The year saw Democrats pick up seven governorships across the country, a fact that the governor has touted in the wake of the midterm elections.

He faces a significant level of skepticism from Republicans on climate change. Trump, as President, has left the Paris Climate Accord and has said he does not believe government reports that cast grave warnings about the impact of climate change. Republicans now hope to make Democrats’ focus on the issue, namely through the newly proposed Green New Deal, central in their attacks against the party in 2020.

Inslee largely dismisses Trump’s comments on climate change, arguing that the President doesn’t understand where the American people are on the issue, especially young people.

“Donald Trump, fundamentally, is just fearful and pessimistic,” he told CNN. “He doesn’t think we are smart enough to do this. He is just wrong about the American people.”

Inslee has praised the Green New Deal, saying it is “raising people’s ambitions” and “making what might seem impossible within the realm of the possible,” but the governor has not outright said he would support the entire package.</s>In his 2020 presidential announcement video, two-term Washington Governor Jay Inslee declares that climate change is the “most urgent challenge of our time.”

Inslee intends to make climate change his signature issue. “I have heard from around the country that people believe that this issue demands priority, and it demands a candidate from the Democratic Party that will make it front and center,” he told FiveThirtyEight before his campaign announcement. He’s convinced that when voters see his work on climate change along with a laundry list of progressive achievements, it’ll be enough to become the nominee.

But to do that, he first has to beat the Democratic field. As a whole, Inslee has a solidly liberal record, one that could conceivably attract voters on the left of the party. But that could be a crowded part of the field, with well-known names such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders already running. Sanders, for example, has increasingly sought to make climate change one of his core issues, which could steal some of Inslee’s thunder. Still, Inslee probably will be one of the few Democratic governors running, and his ability to point to tangible accomplishments rather than just rhetoric could allow him to differentiate himself from many other Democratic contenders.

As governor of Washington, Inslee has built a record of economic growth for which he credits his progressive policies. Among those policies are a minimum wage that is more than 50 percent higher than the federal one, a family leave policy that allows some workers to take up to three months of paid leave for a medical condition or to care for a new child or ailing family member, and a law that requires workers to receive equal pay and career advancement opportunities regardless of gender. Inslee has overseen an expansion of college financial aid for undocumented students and a large-scale transportation infrastructure program. He’s confident his record would help him beat President Trump.

But Inslee’s candidacy also relies on an unproven gambit: that climate change can be a winning issue in the 2020 Democratic primary.

At first glance, climate change may not have sufficient salience to carry a presidential campaign. It received little attention during the 2016 presidential race. In three presidential debates and one vice presidential face-off, the topic was never raised specifically.

But Inslee said the time is right to make climate change a central issue because it’s no longer a hypothetical but something that “touches everyone in every part of the country” and “every aspect of life.”

Just before the 2018 midterm elections, Gallup released findings that placed climate change as the fifth-most-important issue to Democratic voters, behind topics like health care and wealth inequality. Still, 75 percent of Democrats said it was an extremely or very important topic, compared with just 27 percent of Republicans. We can see how much the parties have diverged on the issue using a Gallup question that looks at concern about climate change. In 1990, the share of Americans who worried a great deal or a fair amount about global warming did not really differ by party identification. Today, Democrats and Republicans are a world apart.

Given the level of concern among Democrats, perhaps a campaign that homes in on climate change can help Inslee make inroads on the left during the primaries. It’s a topic receiving a lot of attention at the moment because of the proposed “Green New Deal” being pushed by some progressive Democratic House members. Moreover, Democrats can easily use the issue to attack the president’s record. The Trump administration has hindered efforts to address global warming by withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement and working to roll back auto fuel efficiency standards.

But putting climate change ahead of all other issues could be risky, Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick said. He has helped lead national surveys of public opinions on climate change since 1995 that have found that most voters don’t make their ballot box decisions based on climate change alone. Krosnick’s surveys show that about 18 percent of voters are passionate about climate change, which means that “taking a stand on this issue is electorally very wise, but making this a signature issue is probably unwise.”

Inslee plans to try anyway. He’s framing climate change as a threat to national security that warrants a huge government response on a scale akin to the Manhattan Project or NASA’s program to put humans on the moon. “This is the eleventh hour, but it should be our hour to shine and for we, as Americans, to do what we do best, which is to create, innovate and build,” Inslee said. His goal is to make the economy less reliant on fossil fuels over the next several decades, a task he called “a massive undertaking requiring a huge concentration of our intellectual talents, our entrepreneurial zeal, and to some degree, our investment.”

To achieve this goal, he advocates for clean fuel standards to reduce emissions from vehicles. He wants to revamp the U.S. electrical grid with a 100 percent clean power plan like the one he’s pushing for in his state of Washington, make buildings “net zero” emissions with stringent building codes, and promote alternative energy with subsidies.

It will be interesting to see whether he proposes a carbon tax to help him accomplish some of those goals. It’s an approach that has broad support from economists across the political spectrum, yet Inslee has been unable to get one passed by voters or the legislature in his own state. He doesn’t think that makes it kryptonite. “A carbon tax is just one of the tools in the toolbox,” he said, adding that it may not be the most important one. The carbon tax that failed in Washington didn’t derive most of its carbon savings from the signal to consumers sent by higher carbon prices, Inslee said, but, rather, from “putting people to work on building and installing solar arrays and building homes and businesses that are net zero. That’s where you’ve actually got the carbon savings.”

Is the failure of that carbon-tax measure in his own state an omen or just a bump in the road for Inslee? Whichever it is, it hasn’t nudged him off his strategy. “I believe that contrast is good in elections,” Inslee said, and the contrast between Democrats and Republicans on climate issues is stark. “We should embrace that contrast, magnify it, and run with it.”
Washington Governor Jay Inslee announces he will join the Democratic Party primaries in 2020 and cites fighting climate change as a reason.