Volts podcast: Washington Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon on the Evergreen State's excellent new climate laws

Greetings! Last week, I wrote about the ambitious slate of climate and energy policies that the state of Washington has put in place over the last two years — culminating, a few weeks ago, with the passage of the Climate Commitment Act, which would cap the state’s emissions and reduce them 95 percent by 2050.

It’s a dizzying amount of progress in a short period of time.

As I talked to those involved about how it happened, one name came up again and again: Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon (D) of the 34th District, which encompasses West Seattle and areas southwest of the city.

Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, had this to say: “Representative Joe Fitzgibbon is now a living legend for his miraculous legislative diplomacy and pure, selfless heart; he deserves to win every legislator of the year award in existence.”

This is not the kind of thing one typically hears about legislators after years of difficult negotiations, but in this case, it was a fairly typical sentiment. So I knew I needed to talk to Fitzgibbon — about his entry into politics, his approach, and what enabled this burst of progress.

Please enjoy our conversation. And please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber, so that I can continue to do this work.

David Roberts:

Hello, welcome to Volts. I am your host, David Roberts.

As longtime listeners know, Volts is headquartered in Seattle, in the great state of Washington, on the superior of America's two coasts. As it turns out, this is the place to be for climate policy. Over the last few years, the Democratic legislature in Washington has been engaged in a veritable frenzy of activity, cranking out climate and energy bills, a 100 percent clean electricity bill, bills on hydrofluorocarbons, bills to decarbonize buildings and boost electric vehicles – bills, bills, bills.

Most recently, the legislature passed what are arguably the two key remaining pieces of the carbon policy puzzle. The first is a clean fuel standard, or CFS, like the one in place in California, Oregon, and BC, which will slowly ratchet down the carbon content of liquid fuels in the state. The second, the big kahuna, is the Climate Commitment Act, or CCA, which puts in place a cap and invest system that will ratchet down economy-wide greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels 45 percent by 2030, 70 percent by 2040, and 95 percent by 2050. With the passage of the CCA, Washington now has, in my opinion, the most comprehensive and ambitious climate policy plan in the country – and yes, I have heard of California.

I just got done writing a big story on this, and according to everyone I talked to, one legislator was particularly important in shepherding the CCA and some of the other bills in question through the House, while ensuring that they remained ambitious: Representative Joe Fitzgibbon of the 34th Legislative District containing West Seattle and Vashon Island.

Fitzgibbon was elected to the legislature in 2010, when he was just 24 years old. Yes, he's a bona fide millennial. But instead of moping around his parents’ basement and eating avocados, which is what I'm told millennials do, he has been immersing himself in the wonky details of climate policy, and pushing his state into the future. So I'm happy to have him with me today to discuss climate policy and state progress. Representative Fitzgibbon, welcome to Volts.

Joe Fitzgibbon:

Thanks for having me, David.

David Roberts:

Let's start with a little bit of your history. I was thinking back on what I was doing when I was 24. I was in grad school, snowboarding a lot, smoking a bunch of pot, definitely not fit for running anything. What drew you to politics at such a young age? Is it the people aspects or the policy aspects?

Joe Fitzgibbon:

To your credit, you went to grad school. I'm a grad school dropout.

David Roberts:

Oh, I dropped out eventually. But I just stayed longer.

Joe Fitzgibbon:

I've always been really motivated by environmental issues, and that included a general concern for the direction things were going. I don't know how much of that can be attributed to Captain Planet and media when I was a kid. But as the climate crisis came into focus for me, probably in college, I realized, whatever I'm going to do with myself, whether that's nonprofit work or government work or something else, I want it to be about doing the most I can to make progress on the climate crisis.

When I got out of college and looked around to figure out where I could do the most, state or local government seemed much more appealing to me than going to DC and being a really, really small fish in an enormous ocean. I had enough friends who had gone and done that and become disillusioned that I thought state seemed more exciting to me, so I'm happy that's where I landed.

I started out as a staffer; I worked in the legislature for my predecessor in the House. She went on to serve in the Senate as Senate Majority Leader, and when she ran for the Senate, I ran for her seat in the House in 2010. It definitely was not part of some ambitious long-term plan that I was going to run for office when I was 24, but it turned out that was when the seat opened up, and I had just enough experience by that point that I thought I could make a case that I was a credible candidate. It was clear to me at that point that we weren't going to be making climate progress or other environmental progress at the state level unless we had more people in office for whom that was their motivating thing.

The good news for me was there were few enough other legislators at that time for whom that was their main issue that I got to carve out a space for myself as one of the experts – not that I was or am an expert, but in the legislative context, the bar is grading on a curve. The downside was nobody else cared about those issues, so we didn't make a lot of progress for those first couple years. For five of the 11 years I've been in office, we had a Republican Senate, and we had absolutely no climate progress during that time. But it did mean I had the time to become a committee chair and become what counts in the legislature as an expert, so that when the time was right for us to strike with some climate legislation, I was ready to go.

David Roberts:

You were around from 2010 to 2018, which were pretty bleak years in Washington climate-wise; there are long-standing complaints about the Washington legislature and climate during those years. Then you were here from 2018 to 2021, which has been a veritable renaissance of activity and motion. What explains this? What happened in the legislature that uncorked this burst of activity?

Joe Fitzgibbon:

The most important thing happened in November of 2018, when we gained a substantial number of seats for the Democrats in both chambers of the legislature. Washington has 98 House members and 49 senators, so a majority in the House is 50, and a majority in the Senate is 25. We have a comfortable working majority, more in the House than in the Senate, but increasingly in the Senate as well. We don't quite have a supermajority, so we can't pass a constitutional amendment, for example, with Democratic votes alone.

But we went into the 2018 election with a one-seat majority in each chamber; we had 50 in the House, 25 in the Senate exactly. So we couldn't get a lot done then, but we weren't negotiating bad budgets with Republican senators anymore. In 2018, we picked up seven seats in the