Hillary
Clinton would probably stick with his counterproductive energy policies.
By
President Barack Obama’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, recently
boasted that his boss will “go down in history as the greenest president we’ve ever had.”
Yes, cars, trucks, and buses will increasingly burn less fuel because of this White House. If the
courts don’t spike the Clean Power Plan, our national electric grid
will get cleaner. Solar panels are back on the White House roof, symbolizing the Obama
administration’s faith in renewable energy.
But Earnest must be kidding. Just as cutting back from two packs
of cigarettes a day to one pack won’t do away with your personally inflicted
cancer risks, all Obama’s great steps toward a lower-carbon future won’t
paint his legacy green.
Not when he’s also championed the construction of new nuclear
reactors, supported heavy spending on failed so-called “clean” coal
experiments, and embraced fracking for natural gas and oil. Along with wind and
solar power, those dirty-energy mainstays form the core of Obama’s “all-of-the-above” policy.
Maybe you missed it with all the news about presidential
campaign launches, but the Obama administration just formally began a 30-day
review expected to greenlight Shell’s exploratory Arctic drilling north of Alaska. The government
allotted merely 10 days for
public comments, infuriating the Sierra Club and other environmentalists.
What’s the fuss? For one thing, this drilling would invite more accidents like the devastating 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska. Besides, scientists say the best way to avert an irreversible climate disaster is to forgo burning at least 30 percent of the world’s oil. Denying Shell the opportunity to drill in the Chukchi Sea would mark a great step in that direction.
This contradictory move looks pretty clumsy, coming
right after Earnest crowed about Obama being the Greenest. President.
Ever.
Which brings me to Democratic frontrunner Hillary “Inevitable.
Next. President.” Clinton.
The former first lady, senator, and secretary of state talks a
good green game. “The science of climate change is unforgiving, no matter what
the deniers may say,” she told the League of Conservation Voters in December.
That would sound greener if she had bold plans for ending
America’s addiction to fossil fuels.
They’re climate change’s main culprits,
after all. Does Clinton support the Keystone XL pipeline, which her State
Department endorsed? She won’t say.
And a lot of what Clinton does say about oil and gas dilutes
her climate cred.
She’s also openly supportive of fracking both in the United
States and abroad. And the fact that her family’s charitable foundation has
accepted millions of dollars in donationsfrom ExxonMobil, the Saudi government, and other oil interests
bodes badly for anyone who wants her to clamp down on the practice.
Environmentalists are sick of Obama’s “all-of-the-above” stance.
All that dirty-energy support can wipe out gains from his more planet-friendly
policies. Yet don’t count on a wave of none-of-the-above votes in 2016 if
Clinton gets nominated.
Republicans trend soot-black on energy issues.
Coal? GOP leaders love it. Oil? Drill, baby, drill.
Fracking for natural gas? They’re rocking it. Nuclear reactors? The GOP covets them more
uniformly than Democrats do.
The growing popularity and market share of wind and solar power
in red and purple states is making some GOP hopefuls more open-minded about renewable energy than their
peers.
But there’s no reason to expect whoever clinches the 2016
Republican nomination to go greener than Obama or Clinton. The crowd vying
for that gig is openly courting Big Oil.
As the Rolling
Stones song goes, they
see the White House and they “want it painted black, black as night, black as
coal.”
Columnist
Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords,
a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy
Studies. OtherWords.org.