Whenever you read something associated with Trump, you have to ask whether it’s out of the Onion or not. And so when you see things like this — “wind turbines cause cancer,” “Trump runs on his environmental record,” you have to think, Is this just out of the Onion?
Point taken. What do you make of the prospect of him actually doing it, though?
My belief is there is no whopper too obvious and large for him not to tell, there’s no expectation of truthfulness — ever — from him. Therefore there’s no norm of honesty that he would not violate in a heartbeat, for whatever reason, and a guy who’ll tell you his father was born in Germany — when we know he was born in Kenya, by the way — will tell you anything. So no, nothing would shock us, but would that be successful? No. It won’t be successful, because — and Republicans know this too, the Republicans now are moving on climate change issues, the national number now is 75 percent, it’s gone up 10 percent in the last year, year and a half, because of increasing disasters, more people are recognizing this with visual evidence, personal evidence, it’s no longer a graph on a chart — the things he is doing are so palpably violative of any sense of health. He’s trying to strip our state’s ability to protect our clean water, he’s trying to take away a state’s ability to protect its own citizens. That doesn’t even wash with quite a number of Republicans in my state. I’m trying to think of an important protection of clean air or water that he has not threatened, from coal plants to CAFE, to now this latest assault on the clean water standards. So nothing would shock me, but I don’t think it would succeed.
You talk a lot about teaching D.C. about the way things work in “the other Washington,” but on the environmental front specifically, efforts to pass a carbon fee or tax have fallen short repeatedly. What lessons have you drawn from this experience when you face up to national policy?
Number one, when you’re up against the most well-funded industry in world history, which is the fossil fuel industry, and they’re willing to spend $32 million to obfuscate and create misimpressions, that makes it tough. And they’re willing to spend untold numbers of dollars. And that is frustrating because those dollars come from the taxpayers, because there’s $27 billion of subsidies they get, they turn around and tell deceptions to the public. That’s very frustrating. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been so forceful in saying we need to end those $27 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. So I’ve learned that is something you’ve got to work to overcome.
Number two, I’ve learned the most powerful renewable fuel is perseverance — that’s the most important renewable energy source — and that it can succeed. You know, we’ve had successes in Washington, untrammeled and unstopped by temporary setbacks. So we have built a $6 billion wind-turbine industry because we narrowly passed a renewable portfolio standard. We have rapidly electrified our transportation system, we’re on track to meet our goal of 50,000 electric cars next year, and that will probably be second in the country, I think, as far as per capita electric cars. We’ve had success with our clean energy research and development fund, which has spun off some companies. We’ve had success with our charging infrastructure. We are, I think, likely to pass a 100 percent requirement for clean electrical grid this year in our legislature. I think we are likely to pass a ban on superfluids, hydrofluorocarbons. It looks good that we’ll move forward with a better building code to reduce waste and energy. So we’re having successes, and what I’ve also learned is the good news is there’s not just one avenue here, one tool. There’s multiple tools in the toolbox and you gotta use them all.