Majority Democrats in the Senate chose their committee chairs this week and one of the caucus’s youngest and brashest members came away with a big prize.

Sen. Joe Nguyễn, who will begin his second term in January representing the 34th District, which includes Vashon, was named chair of Environment, Energy, and Technology, a post currently occupied by Sen Reuven Carlyle, who didn’t seek reelection.

Nguyễn’s ascension to the post is noteworthy for a variety of reasons. First, it’s a significant generational shift; he’s some 18 years Carlyle’s junior.

Second, he leapfrogged the committee’s current vice chair, Sen. Liz Lovelett, D-Anacortes.

Lovelett was a dissenting voice two years ago during the passage of the Climate Commitment Act, which established a cap-and-trade system for major emitters of carbon that will bring in a giant pile of money for various climate-related spending. She backed a competing carbon tax proposal and ultimately voted against cap-and-trade, which didn’t go over well in mainstream environmentalist circles.

Third, it appears Nguyễn won’t pay any real political price for his confrontational challenge to King County Executive Dow Constantine last year. There were dark mutterings of vengeance about a politician so early in his career coming at Constantine from the left. Nguyễn had come out of left field in 2018 to win his Senate seat against a better-known candidate with Constantine’s backing.

Ultimately, the Seattle-area political establishment — including many of Nguyễn’s colleagues in the Legislature — rallied behind Constantine. The incumbent money-whipped the challenger hard in the campaign and won by more than 10 percentage points. But Nguyễn drew no Democratic opponent this year and got 86 percent of the vote in November against a token Republican. And now he’s got a plum committee chair.

Nguyễn’s fingerprints are on some of the more aggressive environmental measures of the past few years. In 2020, he sponsored the bill that ties Washington to California’s vehicle emission rules, which Gov. Jay Inslee used earlier this year to call for an end to sales of gas-powered passenger vehicles by 2035. Earlier this year, Nguyễn was the prime sponsor of a bill aimed at reducing the use of natural gas in existing buildings.

That puts him firmly in the let’s-electrify-everything camp, which faces strong pushback from various fossil fuel interests and some labor unions who represent folks who get paid to install and maintain gas infrastructure.

He inherits the implementation stages of much of the landmark environmental legislation passed in the last few years, including the Climate Commitment Act, the Clean Energy Transformation Act, which mandates a cleaner electrical grid, and the low-carbon fuel standard.

Nguyễn tells us he’s going to focus on building out new clean electricity generation and new transmission infrastructure to move all those electrons around.

This article was originally published in The Washington Observer, a newsletter written by Vashon resident and veteran political journalist, Paul Queary, covering politics and government in Washington State. Find out more and subscribe at washingtonobserver.substack.com/about.