Last week, Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington, was in Washington, D.C., for a meeting of the National Governors Association, but he had additional business to conduct. Inslee, who is sixty-eight, was widely understood to be on the verge of announcing a campaign for the Democratic nomination for President. Earlier in the day, he told me, once we’d settled into a conference room at the downtown Embassy Suites, he had met with Barack Obama. The timing created a slightly ridiculous situation, in which Inslee would not formally acknowledge his candidacy but kept hinting at it heavily—mentioning, for example, that he might be in Iowa soon and raising his eyebrows meaningfully. A week later, on Friday morning, he announced that he was running. View more Inslee, who is tall and athletic, has an eager and direct manner: his thoughts emerge in lists (“No. 4 is . . .”) and his mind moves toward details. And though he has not been a single-issue governor, the case for his Presidential candidacy rests on his decades-long interest in political solutions to climate change. The thought of Iowa made Inslee turn not to county dinners but to wind turbines. Had I heard there was a new generation of turbines coming? “They’re humongous,” he said, with appreciation. “Three hundred feet long.” He mentioned an alternative-energy entrepreneur he had recently met, a man named Wayne Rogers, who had made a fortune by turning decommissioned dams into hydropower stations. Now, Inslee said, he was working on a high-speed-train venture. For all the obvious majesty of the subject, environmental politics has always had a slightly airless quality. Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which, for years, was the central document of climate-change activism, is essentially a PowerPoint presentation. For a while, the public discussion of climate change seemed defined, in part, by Gore’s personality—his tendency toward abstraction but also his assurance with his own expertise. Such emphasis was placed on the distinction between Democrats, who were said to be on the side of the scientists, and Republicans, who were said to be opposed, that it came as a surprise when, last October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report indicating that the scientists had somewhat underestimated just how bad the consequences of global warming would be. The discussion, Inslee said, focussed so much on the consequences of two degrees Celsius of warming that “it shut off discussion of ‘What if we get to four or five?’ ” Now scientists believe that we are on track, without further action, for four degrees of warming by century’s end. Inslee has been in politics for a quarter century but has never become a national figure. As one of his aides, reached on the West Coast, put it, “he’s not a show horse,” and it took a moment to conceive of the unpretentious governor as a Presidential candidate. On the other hand, there are credible public-opinion polls in which Democratic voters in the early-primary states of New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, and South Carolina say that they care more about climate change and health care than any other issues. Inslee’s approach to climate policy, he told me, is “can-do, optimistic—it’s in my nature.” But in Washington, D.C., that approach, reminiscent of Gore, has, for the moment at least, been displaced by the millennial left’s, which is bleaker in tone and more transformative in program. For many years environmentalism has been shaped by technocratic liberalism’s trust in scientific expertise, and faith in the possibility of a global consensus. Now there is an unexpected situation. The climate is in crisis and liberalism is under pressure, at the same time.

Inslee grew up in the Seattle area, where his mother was a Sears-Roebuck clerk and his father was a high-school basketball coach who became the athletic director of the city’s public schools. After Inslee graduated from the Willamette University College of Law, he and his wife, Trudi, moved to the small town of Selah, near Yakima, where he practiced law and worked as a prosecutor, and they raised, as he often says, “three feral boys.” Inslee won a seat in the state legislature, in 1988, and Congress, in 1992—just in time to vote for the assault-weapons ban and lose his seat in the Gingrich revolution of 1994. Inslee and his family moved to the more progressive suburbs of Seattle, and soon he returned to Congress, where he served from 1999 to 2012, co-writing a book, “Apollo’s Fire,” about the potential of green energy. Inslee, who became governor in 2013, tends toward the pragmatic, the longtime aide told me: “His instinct is to take the win when it is there.” He oversaw an increase in the minimum wage, extensions of family- and sick-leave policy, and the strengthening of environmental regulation and green investment, making Washington State more progressive by increments. Twice in the past three years, he has tried to persuade the state to adopt a relatively modest tax on carbon, once through the legislature and once by referendum; both efforts failed. In 2017, Inslee joined Andrew Cuomo, of New York, and Jerry Brown, of California, to create the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of states that have pledged to adhere to the provisions of the Paris climate accord, even if the Trump Administration did not. Inslee argued that this was important, pointing out that the twenty-one states now in the Climate Alliance would form the third-largest economy in the world, were they to secede from the United States. “Which I am not advocating,” he said, grinning. “Yet.” Inslee’s view is that the new urgency about climate policy was created by the “visual drama” of real events in people’s lives and on local news. “The reason is Paradise, California, burned down,” he said. “And Houston flooded with unprecedented rain and Miami is underwater and Iowa farmers can’t get their crops in because of precipitation events and Oprah’s house has been swamped by mudslides.” This past November, Inslee drove through Paradise, where the Camp Fire had killed at least eighty-five people. It was dark and silent. “We drove for an hour through a town that wasn’t there anymore, that had burned right to the foundations,” he said. You could look at the town and see the elements of a chemical equation: power lines were kindling; trees were incinerated; houses were reduced to ash. It had been a year of historic fires across the West, in hot and dry conditions intensified by the changing climate, and the Camp Fire was the worst in California’s history. “This is basically a race,” Inslee said. “That’s all it is. Who’s going to win, us or climate change?” I asked Inslee whether Democrats might have adopted a more urgent tone earlier. After all, humans have done more to warm the planet since his first election to Congress than in all the years before. Inslee said that they had. He and Trudi, his wife, had recently discovered a brochure from his first congressional campaign, in a conservative part of Washington State, in 1992, that emphasized reducing carbon pollution. The crisis had turned out to be deeper than scientists realized even a decade ago, he said, but that’s “hardly our fault.” He thought a bit more. “I think we could have taken Ralph Nader out on a ship before he could file for President. And set the ship adrift. And allowed him to be fed and healthy before the filing deadline. That would have been the most significant thing where we missed our opportunity. I mean, really! You think about how different the world could have been for three hundred and fifty votes that Ralph Nader took out of Al Gore’s pocket. Every time I think about that it just drives me nuts.”