Jay Inslee has spent most of his three years as governor trying to come up with ways to impose his extreme “green” agenda on the people of Washington State, though without much success in getting legislators of either party to actually pass the laws he proposes.
That has reduced Inslee to largely symbolic action, which he put on display in Paris this week while attending the UN’s global warming gabfest. It was there that Inslee announced that he will mandate that the state buy 20% electric cars for its government fleet by 2017.
Never mind that although Inslee brags about our state being a leader in electric car purchases, currently just 3 out of every 1,000 privately registered vehicles (for the math challenged, that under four-tenths of one percent) are electric, and that the state itself only has 1% electric cars in its 12,000 car fleet . Inslee assumes that by snapping his fingers the state can efficiently do go from its current 1% to 20% electric vehicles in less than two years, and that private businesses will follow suit.
This latest stunt is a precursor to Inslee’s planned “carbon cap” regulations, which his bureaucrats at the Department of Ecology are promising drafts of by the end of the month. That attack on Washington’s manufacturing sector promises to be heavily debated during Inslee’s re-election run next year. As pointed out by State Senator Doug Ericksen, Inslee’s scheme“hurts families and he’s overstepping I’d say, and a bit tone deaf to the working families of Washington who are dependent on these manufacturing jobs.”
With any luck, and for the sake of taxpayers, it will be a different governor who puts the brakes on Inslee’s electric car purchase plan come 2017.
