by Ben Adler
Hillary Clinton’s official campaign launch speech Saturday was largely
greeted with yawns from the political cognoscenti. Her theme of economic
fairness — highlighted by making her announcement speech in Franklin D.
Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in New York City — has
been telegraphed for months, and the speech itself reads like a State
of the Union address: a laundry list of center-left policy proposals.
Environmental organizations such as the League of Conservation Voters and NextGen Climate issued statements praising Clinton for highlighting climate change as a priority...
But then Clinton offered one line that promised better policy on a
major climate change issue: raising the U.S.’s scandalously cheap rates
of fossil fuel leasing.
Clinton said her administration will use “additional fees and
royalties from fossil fuel extraction to protect the environment.” The
Obama administration has been giving away leases to extract fossil fuels
from federal land for bargain-basement prices far below their
market-rate value, and even farther below a price that accounts for the
government’s own estimates of the social cost of carbon...
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced
in March that her department will study modernizing its fossil fuel
leasing programs to bring them in line with the administration’s goal of
reducing climate change. It’s unclear how much the current
administration will raise the rates. But it is clear now that if Clinton
succeeds Obama, she intends to finish the job.
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