Jay Inslee caught in awkward oil refinery lie

Either Jay Inslee’s staff believes the state is better off when they leave their boss out of critical policy matters, or Inslee wouldn’t know the truth even if he received a formal introduction. Those are two plausible explanations for the latest scandal to come out of the governor’s office.

According to emails, the Inslee administration has been working for months to facilitate a new oil refinery along the Columbia River. The problem is, Inslee denied knowing anything about the project… before news of the emails broke. Presumably, Inslee’s denials were due to the fact that an oil refinery does not exactly mesh with the extreme “green” image he has established. The Seattle Times,

“Citing emails obtained through a public-records request, Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that Inslee’s advisers have been courting a project by Riverside Energy to build a combined crude oil and biofuel refinery in Longview, Washington.

“Plans for a 45,000 barrels-per-day refinery surfaced publicly in April. The project would process 30,000 barrels of crude oil and 15,000 barrels of seed oil and used cooking oil.

“Inslee told reporters on May 28 he hadn’t heard much about the project other than what had been reported in the media.”

But according to the facts, Inslee’s cabinet and staff have been discussing the oil refinery plans with the company’s CEO for nearly one year. Inslee offered the lame excuse that he “expects his staff to have such discussions” when confronted by the emails last week.

News of the oil refinery discussions did not sit well with the usual suspects among the extreme green activists. Eric de Place, policy director at the far-left Sightline Institute, said that it was “very worrisome that this kind of communication, this kind of lobbying would be happening with the governor’s office outside the view of the public, on an issue of this magnitude… We’re talking about a very environmentally risky project in a key part of the region.”

But, at least de Place can be comforted by the fact that Inslee’s staff might have left him out of the loop in these discussions to bring jobs to Washington State. That way de Place only has to criticize the “governor’s office” and not the “governor” himself, a governor that extreme environmentalists spent millions of dollars electing in 2012.