Interior Nominee Would Likely Continue Bad Policies

Considering the anti-fossil fuel track record of President Obama and his first-term cabinet members Lisa Jackson (EPA), Steven Chu (Energy Dept.) and Ken Salazar (Interior Dept.), there is no reason to expect that Department of Interior nominee Sally Jewell would impose a different agenda – especially since the president no longer has to worry about re-election. In 2007 she told Forbes she was “intrigued” by the “success” of cap-and-trade as it was applied to sulfur dioxide, and seemed to welcome the idea to regulate carbon dioxide. As Charlie Spiering of the Washington Examiner noted, “Jewell called for ‘real change’ in the country’s approach to climate change.” which tells you where her head is at regarding fossil fuels.

Then in a 2009 interview Jewell embraced the other major policy means to approach carbon dioxide reduction. “We are not paying for the cost to the environment,” she told Web site Ethix.org, “of the carbon that we use, and we should be paying for that. I know tax is a dirty word, but if we were paying a carbon tax that accounted for our impact on greenhouse gases, that would in fact change our consumption…. Regulation plays an important role in driving behavior.” And as the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel recounted on Friday, the former oil company engineer (liberals love how that makes Jewell look more temperate) has served in leadership roles for years on boards for groups such as the National Parks Conservation Association and the Conservation Alliance, through which REI has pushed anti-development initiatives on public lands and financed environmental activist litigators to prevent economic activities such as logging and mining. “The president knows he can rely on Ms. Jewell to do for the federal government exactly what she’s done at an activist level,” Strassel wrote, “Lock up land, target industries, kill traditional jobs.”...more