Jay Inslee’s promoting himself as a climate guy on his record of switching Washington State to renewable energy but that’s really not as great a record as it sounds.

Washington, uniquely, already was dominated by cheap hydropower before he was elected; the biggest step away from fossil fuels was an agreement to shut down a coal plant built next to a mine that already ran dry, and even that deal was before he came into office.

It’s true Washington has a more closely divided partisan politics than people think (the eastern drylands are basically a classic rural red state stapled to an urban coastal blue state), but industry/labor weren’t worried about energy costs (and labor likes building new infrastructure) and there wasn’t a strong constituency of stakeholders behind fossil fuel generation to begin with.

Now the real fossil fuel conflict in Cascadia is over transport through the coastal states - coal trains, natural gas pipelines - to marine terminals for Pacific export, which are drawing a lot of friction from local environmentalists who merge global and NIMBY scopes of concern. In turn infuriating the producers at the proposed eastern termini in the Rocky Mountain states. That’s exactly the kind of thing you can brush off when acting within your state but will absolutely thump you trying to scale up to national level.