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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Inslee Says His Climate Plan Will Create Millions of Jobs

Presidential candidate and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee added an economic plan Thursday to the clean energy policy he announced earlier this month, saying his agenda to get to net-zero climate pollution by 2045 will create 8 million jobs.

(CN) – Presidential candidate and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee added an economic plan Thursday to the clean energy policy he announced earlier this month, saying his agenda to get to net-zero climate pollution by 2045 will create 8 million jobs.

Inslee made the announcement at the Bailey Bioenergy Facility, a thermal hydrolysis plant in Washington, D.C., that processes 384 million gallons of wastewater each day, converting waste to energy – or “poop to power,” as David Gaddis, D.C. Water general manager and CEO, put it.

“So we’re treating sewage and creating new bioproduct suitable for planting and growing and also generating revenue,” Gaddis said.

FILE - In this March 15, 2019 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, second from right, speak during a Columbia Climate Strike rally at Columbia University in New York. Inslee, as part of his pledge to make combating climate change the top national priority, is calling for the nation’s entire electrical grid and all new vehicles and buildings to be carbon pollution free by 2030. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Inslee said the plant is a model for the clean energy economy he wants to create.

“We need high-paying, family wage jobs to rebuild the middle class with people who understand the power of unions, just like these workers here do,” Inslee said. “A major reason that half the people in America haven’t had a raise in 20 years is because of the decline of union membership. The people who brought us the weekend are going to bring us the evergreen economy and start wage growth again in the United States. So we are embedding the union movement, we are embedding higher minimum wages and we are moving forward building a better economy.”

Inslee said his Evergreen Economy Plan would “defeat income inequality at the same time as we defeat carbon pollution,” by making the largest infrastructure investment since the building of the interstate highway system, revitalizing America’s manufacturing sector by creating high-paying, family wage jobs and increasing investment in research and development to five times today’s rate.

It’s a big job, Inslee said, but it’s the type the country has achieved in the past.

“In 1940, the U.S. economy produced exactly 77 jeeps – 77,” Inslee said. “Four years later, the U.S. economy had produced 640,000 jeeps to defeat fascism. If we can do that, we can build new, high-tech measures across our manufacturing sector, just like we’re doing at the Blue Plains Clean Water Treatment Plant in Washington D.C. Americans always invent the future. Because it is in our nature to invent, to create, to build.”

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Categories / Economy, Energy, Environment, Politics

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