For instance, former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a Republican, backed a big wind-power transmission project in his state, even while saying climate science was unsettled. Georgia reduced carbon emissions from electricity production by 35 percent from 2005 to 2012, more than twice the national average, and its Republican-controlled legislature recently passed a bill expanding incentives for homeowners to install rooftop solar panels.

“There are just more concrete steps being taken,” said Keya Chatterjee, the executive director of the U.S. Climate Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy group. “We’re affected — what are we going to do about it,” she said of the new efforts.

Shooting for results, even if sometimes incremental, was a hallmark of Mr. Inslee’s 15 years in Congress. He favored greater wilderness protections on federal land, but when that was not politically feasible, he shifted to the middle ground, defending rules that discouraged development of roads in forests and on other lands. Those rules were ultimately left intact by the Supreme Court in a 2012 ruling.

In a debate over water quality as governor, he supported what he called a balanced plan — tightening some pollution rules while leaving others alone.

“Jay has always had a clear eye on the bull’s-eye, the goal he’s trying to achieve, and also an understanding of what he has to do to get there,” said Bill Arthur, who has watched Mr. Inslee for 30 years at the Sierra Club, where he is the deputy Western campaign director for the Beyond Coal campaign. “He’s smart and savvy enough to know, ‘I’ve also got to speak in a language and speak in terms that can resonate with a larger contingent of people.’ ”

Mr. Inslee, 64, a fifth-generation Washingtonian who grew up in the Seattle area, said he owed part of his appreciation of the natural world to his father, Frank. Frank Inslee, a high school science teacher, often led the family on volunteer expeditions to replant alpine meadows on the slopes of Mount Rainier, the glacier-clad volcano south of Seattle.

But money for education, a key to Mr. Inslee’s carbon plan, was also the starting place for his political career in the 1980s, when he was working as a lawyer in a small town in central Washington that needed to build a new high school. The fight over the school’s funding led him to run for his first public office, in the legislature. He jokes that now, in trying to link emissions to education, he is back where he started.