Meet the Jay Inslee staffers who wrote ‘the next president’s’ climate plan

That is especially satisfying for Sam Ricketts and Bracken Hendricks, a pair of low-profile former Inslee staffers who wrote his six-part, 218-page climate change agenda, which focused on eliminating fossil fuels and building a clean energy economy.

“Gov. Inslee ran for president for a reason,” said Ricketts, who was climate director for the Inslee campaign. “He felt the next president needed to be a climate president. We all felt, win or lose, we could still win. From the outset, this was about how to actually write the plan the next White House can meaningfully implement. That’s been borne out.”

Ricketts, 33, and Hendricks, 52, are a pair of career policy wonks with few hobbies. They united around crafting a “transformative but achievable” climate plan, which they agreed had to be almost comically detailed to match the complexity of the problem.

“It was a war of attrition; we were trying to grind people down by having them read our content,” said Hendricks, the Inslee campaign’s senior adviser for climate policy.

Inslee, upon dropping out in August and announcing a run for reelection as Washington’s governor, declared his climate agenda to be an “open-source” resource for the taking.

Warren, a top-tier candidate, quickly accepted Inslee’s offer, declaring in September that she was “adopting and building upon” his 10-year plan to achieve 100% clean energy by decarbonizing electricity, transportation, and buildings.

Warren also followed Inslee by setting a specific target for retiring all coal plants through regulations by 2030 and vowing to end fracking for natural gas to have fossil-fuel-free electricity by 2035.

“The ongoing and sometimes accelerating dependence on gas is a clear and present climate danger,” Ricketts said while acknowledging the “challenge” that phasing out natural gas would pose for the electric grid.

Ricketts and Hendricks say almost every remaining campaign has reached out to them, or Inslee himself, for advice on climate policy, including Joe Biden.

Biden was a target of Inslee’s during the campaign for his less aggressive treatment of fossil fuels and refusing to support ending the Senate filibuster, which Inslee and his staff consider the biggest hurdle to implementing their agenda.

The duo does not plan to join Inslee’s reelection campaign for governor, staying in the nation’s capital to focus on keeping climate change a top issue in the presidential campaign.

“We are encouraged candidates are continuing to put forward ambitious plans to show they are serious about the climate crisis, and we hope that continues,” Ricketts said.

Before linking up for the presidential run, Ricketts and Hendricks spent years working around Inslee, learning from his successes and failures as he obsessed over climate change during 15 years in the House and as a two-term governor.

Ricketts lists baseball and reading Shakespeare as hobbies, but the Seattle native and Syracuse University alum has been by Inslee’s side for 11 years over six jobs.

Ricketts rose in 2009 to become executive director of the Congressional Sustainable Energy & Environment Coalition, a group Inslee co-founded after he won reelection with Ricketts’ help the year before.

The coalition helped the House pass the 2009 “Waxman-Markey” cap and trade bill, which died in the Senate, along with the Obama administration’s American Reinvestment & Recovery Act that dedicated $90 billion to clean energy programs. Ricketts helped Inslee advance climate-related legislation at the state level last year when Inslee chaired the Democratic Governors Association.

Hendricks is a Harvard Kennedy School graduate born into a family of artists in New York, who counts his work leading a clean energy project development company, Urban Ingenuity, as a side interest.

He founded a labor and environmental group, Apollo Alliance, in 2002 before helping former Clinton aide John Podesta start the energy policy shop at the Center for American Progress in 2005. He also worked in the Clinton administration for vice president and climate crusader Al Gore.

Hendricks began consulting with Inslee in the early 2000s, helping him introduce a green infrastructure bill called the New Apollo Energy Act in 2004.

Around that time, Hendricks says he and Inslee realized they were both interested in writing “the same book” about clean energy, which they later released together in 2007 as Apollo’s Fire.

“It was sort of this amusing coincidence,” Hendricks said, noting he and Inslee and also share a Feb. 9 birthday.

Through their work for Inslee, Ricketts and Hendricks first met a decade ago. They started on the Inslee presidential campaign in February, receiving direction from Inslee to craft a comprehensive climate agenda.

“The history and the depth of all our work with the governor made it possible to have this kind of lean team do a substantial piece of policy work in a short time,” Hendricks said.

The duo would trade shifts writing the plan, with Ricketts taking nights so he could spend time with his two-year-old son, Liam, and Hendricks — an empty nester with a college-aged daughter — assuming mornings. About a half dozen campaign staff helped out as well, including Maggie Thomas, the deputy climate director, and Jared Leopold, the senior communications adviser.

Inslee eventually released the plan in several batches, informed by Ricketts’ and Hendricks’ consulting more than 100 outside experts, along with Inslee’s meetings with “front-line” groups exposed to climate change and environmental hazards, including visits to the most polluted zip code in Michigan, outside a refinery, and with residents of Miami’s Little Haiti being displaced by sea-level rise.

They based the plan on four principles: setting standards, or mandates, to reach net-zero emissions in various sectors; investing trillions in public and private funding on infrastructure and clean energy R&D to create an “Evergreen Economy;” eliminating fossil fuels; and confronting environmental and economic injustice.

The Inslee team’s decision to emphasize mandates over carbon pricing was notable, given Inslee’s failure to pass a carbon tax in Washington state. He later succeeded this year in passing a 100% clean electricity standard, following other states that implemented similar rules.

“This isn’t a decision based solely on the politics of a carbon price,” Ricketts said. “It was based on the most impactful policies to drive emissions reductions. For too long, it has probably dominated the climate policy discussion in a way that is not truly warranted.”

Ricketts and Hendricks have other parting advice for the remaining candidates.

They disagree with proposals to shut down existing nuclear power, as Bernie Sanders has said he would do.

“It becomes very difficult to decarbonize electricity if you begin to rule out or take off existing zero-carbon capacity,” Ricketts said.

The duo says candidates must commit to making climate change their first agenda item, saying that the Obama administration spent its political capital on healthcare legislation rather than on the climate change policies that are needed.

“If there is a critique of the current group of candidates, it’s making sure this needs to be the top-tier priority issue, or we are going to miss the moment and fall short at great cost,” Hendricks said.