Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, left, discusses the state’s efforts to fight climate change with Amy Feldman, Forbes senior editor, and Andrew Steer, president and CEO of Bezos Earth Fund, at the 2024 Sustainability Leaders Summit in New York City. (Courtesy of Gov. Jay Inslee’s office)
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is cautioning that resistance to locating large-scale wind, solar and battery storage projects risks slowing the use of artificial intelligence.
“This is a double-edged sword,” Inslee said Tuesday at the Sustainability Leaders Summit hosted by Forbes magazine in New York City. AI “will help the clean energy revolution. It’s going to help us decide what’s the most effective silicon anode battery. It’s going to help develop fusion.”
While AI may be pivotal to accelerating research and development of new technologies, it demands huge amounts of energy to operate.
“I’m having trouble siting facilities for wind, storage and solar just to feed the AI centers,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to site them because we’re not going to stop this use of technology.”
Inslee, a Democrat who is not running for reelection this year, has made the global battle against climate change a central focus of his political career and his policy efforts in the last 12 years as Washington’s governor.
On Tuesday, he touted the suite of climate laws driving the state’s shift to clean energy even as one of his signature policies is threatened by a ballot measure voters will decide in November.
Last week, Forbes named him to its inaugural list of Sustainability Leaders, a roster of 50 entrepreneurs, scientists, funders, policymakers and activists the magazine lauded for “leading the charge to combat the climate crisis with real, tangible impact.”
On Tuesday, sitting alongside Andrew Steer, president and chief executive officer of Bezos Earth Fund, Inslee reflected on what’s transpired on his watch.
“Look, if you’re going to build a real clean energy economy, you can’t do just one thing. You have to do multiple things, which we’re doing,” Inslee said.
He teamed with the Democratic-led Legislature to adopt a clean fuel standard and a policy to phase fossil fuels out of new building construction. Washington enacted a law requiring the state’s electric utilities to generate 100% of their power from renewable or zero-carbon resources by 2045.
He said his “proudest accomplishment” is the Climate Commitment Act, which sets annual emission limits for major emitters, such as oil refiners and utilities, and requires them to buy allowances at state auctions for each metric ton of their pollution.
Portions of the roughly $2.3 billion raised from auctions is already getting spent on buying electric school buses, expanding air quality monitoring, and installing electric vehicle chargers. Nearly 700,000 Washington households received a $200 credit on their electricity bills through a $150 million investment of auction proceeds.
Inslee said his cap-and-invest program is “working big time.”
“It marries a ceiling on pollution, an absolute binding ceiling that the economy cannot go over and every year that cap comes down until we get to zero,” he said. “It’s economy wide with a mechanism of giving Washington families the ability to get the assets they need to go through this transition.”
But Initiative 2117 on the November ballot would repeal the law if passed. Its backers contend the policy won’t significantly move the needle on climate change but is driving fuel, food and energy prices higher as companies required to buy allowances pass the new expense onto consumers.
“We’re trying to defeat that,” he said. “And I hope that we will succeed, because my state is not a state that follows climate deniers and is not a state that believes wind turbines cause cancer.”
Before Inslee took the stage, John Kerry, a former U.S. senator who served as President Biden’s presidential envoy for climate, stressed the need for the nation to curb its appetite for fossil fuel and shift to clean energy faster to counter the harms of climate change
“This transition is going to happen. The marketplace is already moving,” he said. “What we have to do is convince people that this is a better set of choices. It will cost far more to respond late to this crisis.”
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