Jay Inslee believes in the power of local action—even in overcoming national pushback.
“Right now, we know these are hard days. We’ve got a person in the White House who must have been scared by wind turbines as a young man,” the three-term Democratic governor of Washington State said at the 2025 TIME Earth Awards on April 23. “But despite the bad news coming out of Washington, D.C., we have a magic vehicle for progress that is the states.”
Despite the President withdrawing the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and dismantling climate initiatives across the country, “Donald Trump cannot stop a state from defeating climate change,” Inslee said.
In 2021, Inslee signed into law Washington’s Climate Commitment Act, which requires the state’s largest polluters to cap emissions and purchase allowances for the amount they pollute, which the state reinvests into clean energy. He has passed laws requiring a 100% clean—meaning generated from renewable or zero-carbon resources—electrical grid by 2045, invested billions of dollars into solar power and electric vehicles, and launched state programs to help businesses and residents transition to clean energy.
President and CEO of American Forests, the oldest forest conservation non-governmental organization in the U.S., Jad Daley, who presented the award to Inslee, said Inslee’s leadership is “needed now more than ever.”
“The Governor’s leadership in Washington State alone would merit this award,” Daley said. But Inslee “went a pivotal step further” in 2017—when Trump first tried to withdraw from the Paris Agreement—by co-founding the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 states that pledged to maintain pace with the goals set forth in the accord. Member states include Michigan, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law an extensive climate package in 2023 that would push the state towards 100% clean energy by 2040, and Maine, where Gov. Janet Mills has signed multiple clean energy and solar power bills.
“The cheapest electricity today is clean energy,” Inslee said. “We are the answer to inflation, to give people cheap, inexpensive, clean energy.”
Inslee ended on a call to action.
“This is the United States, and every one of those states has the capability of advancing clean energy and fighting climate change,” Inslee said. “I’m tired of playing defense. We need to play offense right now.”
TIME Earth Awards was presented by Official Timepiece Rolex and Galvanize Climate Solutions.