Hillary Clinton’s newly unveiled climate vision sounds ambitious on its face: 500 million new solar panels from coast to coast, eco-minded energy tax breaks and enough green power to keep the lights on in every U.S. home.

But just as glaring are the details she left out.


Does Clinton support or oppose the Keystone XL oil pipeline? Or Arctic offshore drilling? Or tougher restrictions on fracking? Or the oil industry’s push to lift the 1970s ban on exporting U.S. crude oil? Clinton avoided all those questions in the solar-heavy climate plan she outlined Sunday night and in her speech promoting it Monday in Iowa — and she declined yet again Monday to say where she stands on Keystone.

That means that liberals longing for Clinton to erase what they see as the dirtiest spot on President Barack Obama’s environmental record — his support for an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that includes domestic oil and gas drilling — have to keep waiting. Greens want to cheer for Clinton, but Democratic rivals Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley are already trying to outflank her with even more ambitious climate plans, while the GOP attacks her from the right.

“Clinton’s climate plan is remarkable for what it doesn’t say, yet,” California-based environmental activist R.L. Miller, who founded the Climate Hawks Vote PAC, said in a statement. Specifically, she added, Clinton offered “no effort to keep fossil fuels in the ground, no price on carbon; no word on Keystone XL, Arctic oil or other carbon bombs; no word on fracking.”

Climate activists are also looking for the Democratic front-runner to put some distance between herself and her record at the State Department, which issued a series of studies finding no significant environmental obstacles to approving Keystone.

“We’re expecting a reset” of the former secretary’s platform, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in an interview, “and a completely different climate and energy policy than the last time she ran for president.”

While Clinton’s pitch to boost renewables to a 33 percent share of the nation’s power supply is “a positive first step,” Brune added, “we’re looking for her to reconcile her climate and energy policies, which is something Obama has not yet been able to do effectively.”

Even a largely glowing response from billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer made a point of noting that “in the coming months we look forward to hearing more details about her proposals.”

Clinton’s campaign said that by design, the steps she outlined Sunday and Monday are not “the sum of her plan,” but are just the first piece of a broad environmental platform. “We made clear these goals were just the first pillars of her larger climate and energy agenda,” a campaign spokesman said, writing to POLITICO that “even many of the activists you quote seem to understand that.”

In the coming months, Clinton’s campaign said in a fact sheet, she plans to outline steps that will include reducing oil consumption, modernizing the electric grid and aiding “coal communities.”

At the core of the tension is climate activists’ insistence that the next president go beyond defending Obama’s main approach to global warming — a series of EPA regulations that will throttle carbon emissions from major pollution sources such as power plants. Instead, they want Obama’s successor to commit to reining in an oil and gas industry that has turned the U.S. into one of the world’s top fuel exporters.

Anti-fossil fuel campaign group Oil Change International’s campaigns director, David Turnbull, warned that greens are looking for a candidate with a plan to keep oil and gas locked up, not just expand wind and solar projects.

“Any coherent climate policy needs to address not just our urgent need to continue scaling up renewable energy but also the reality that fossil fuel production needs to be swiftly curtailed as well,” he said.

Clinton’s campaign described Monday’s speech as “just the beginning” of a broader energy plan, promising future proposals to cut U.S. oil use — without mention of natural gas consumption — and ensure “safe and responsible” drilling by putting some lands off-limits. But the former first lady has already declined to endorse a ban on fossil-fuel development on public lands, which O’Malley has backed, and she hewed to a years-long pattern in declining to take a position on Keystone.

O’Malley’s deputy campaign manager, Lis Smith, slammed Clinton again Monday for avoiding Keystone, and for failing to publicly oppose drilling off the Alaska coast.

“Real leadership is about forging public opinion on issues like Keystone — not following it,” Smith said in a statement that touted O’Malley’s goal of 100-percent clean power by 2050. ”Every Democrat should follow his lead and take a stand to commit to ending our reliance on fossil fuels.”

Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Short also hit Clinton over her Keystone silence, but the GOP took the criticism a step further by trashing her renewable-power plan as lacking detail yet loaded with inevitable tax hikes. “Hillary Clinton’s energy ‘plan’ is to raise more taxes and double down on President Obama’s EPA overreach,” Short said in a statement.

The Clinton camp estimates that its proposal, which calls for installing 500 million solar panels across the U.S. by the end of her term, would cost about $60 billion over 10 years — money that would come from rolling back tax benefits for the oil and gas industry. But it’s unclear where at least $20 billion of that money would come from.

Democrats have unsuccessfully targeted an array of oil and gas breaks for repeal over the past four years, with estimates of the money raised in the process going as high as $4 billion per year, or $40 billion over 10 years, leaving Clinton short by one-third at best. A failed 2012 Democratic bill ending oil and gas subsidies would have raised $24 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The Clinton campaign said recent scores from the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation “show that it will be possible to offset most of the cost of Hillary Clinton’s clean energy challenge. The remainder will be covered by additional revenue raisers and loophole closures related to the oil and gas industry.”

Environmentalists mainly welcomed Clinton’s announcement as a promising start.

Heather Taylor-Miesle, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, said her group is “excited about” the opening bid from Clinton, while acknowledging that “we have to deal with oil and gas” and that environmentalists won’t know how to judge the candidate’s plan in that department until she reveals it.

Even 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, who aimed a torrent of anti-Keystone activism at Clinton’s State Department and warned her in June that “many serious environmentalists currently distrust you,” said her first crack at a climate plan got “half the way there.”

“Now, we need Clinton to show she understands the other half of the climate change equation — and prove she has the courage to stand up against fossil fuel projects like offshore and Arctic drilling, coal leasing in [Wyoming’s] Powder River basin and the Keystone XL pipeline,” he added in a statement.

After Clinton said Monday that she couldn’t speak on Keystone “because I had a leading role in” the pipeline’s administration review, McKibben said by email that her rationale was “silly” because “she’s rightly full of insights about Iran, about Benghazi, about Korea, about a thousand other ongoing issues the State [Department] processes daily.”

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