Climate Activists, Youth and Indigenous Leaders Urge Inslee to be a Bold Climate Champion

With today's announcement that Governor Jay Inslee is running for president, local climate activists, youth, and Indigenous leaders are urging him to be the bold climate champion that the state and the country desperately need.

"No other candidate has Inslee's track record of attention to climate," says Lily Frenette of the Sunrise Movement Seattle Hub, "so we're happy he's going to make it a top issue in the race. But we have to think hard about what it means to be a climate champion in an era when literally every day without bold action dooms more people and ecosystems to tragedy. We applaud that Governor Inslee recently pledged not to take any fossil fuel money, but we are deeply disappointed that he hasn't come out against new and expanded fracked gas infrastructure in WA. We have to start moving away from fossil fuels now, and fracked gas is at least as bad as coal in its climate impacts--there's zero room for it in a sustainable future."

Washington State faces multiple proposals for fracked gas mega-projects, and climate activists say it's no longer acceptable for Inslee to be silent on them. Just one of these proposed projects, the Kalama methanol refinery, is poised to be Washington's largest source of climate pollution by 2025. It comes with staggering health, safety, and environmental risks to local communities -- as does the Tacoma Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) facility, currently being built without all its permits on Medicine Creek Treaty Territory, without the Puyallup Tribe's government to governmentconsent.

Indigenous leaders say Inslee also has to meet the climate justice principles in the Green New Deal, which he has praised. "The fracked gas industry has a long history of violating treaties, environmental racism, polluting our air and water, and causing devastatingly high rates of sexual assault and violence against Indigenous women in communities near extraction sites. Believing in climate justice means saying no to fracked gas," points out Roxanne White, Missing & Murdered Indigenous Relatives advocate and survivor.

Despite widespread community opposition to projects like Kalama methanol and Tacoma LNG, Inslee has been an active proponent of fracked gas expansion: his Maritime Blue 2050 strategy advocates for continued investment in gas infrastructure over renewables, and lags behind industry innovators like the Dutch company Port-Liner, which has created battery-powered barges with technology that can be retrofit into existing vessels.

Last week, activists delivered more than 140,000 comments to Governor Inslee from Washington State residents opposing fracked gas. This week, hundreds more will be calling his office -- and in the coming months, activists say that they'll be keeping the pressure on to make sure that he's a real climate champion -- and most especially that he publicly recognize that fracked gas is not a bridge fuel to our healthy climate future.

"These projects completely undermine our state's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lead on climate - we can't build our clean energy future if we're still investing in dirty, dangerous fracked gas infrastructure," says Stacy Oaks of 350 Seattle.