Clinton’s Drilling Chill
http://www.wsj.com/articles/clintons-drilling-chill-1440629242
Hillary gets to the left of Obama on Arctic oil exploration.With the media transfixed by Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s will-he-won’t-he candidacy, some revealing policy news in the presidential campaign is being overlooked. Take Hillary Clinton’s decision to get to the left of President Obama on oil drilling in the Arctic.
The Obama Administration late last week gave final approval to Shell’s project to drill in the Arctic Ocean’s Chukchi Sea—seven years and billions of investment dollars since it won the lease in 2008. Mrs. Clinton wasted no time using Twitter to express her opposition. “The Arctic is a unique treasure. Given what we know, it’s not worth the risk of drilling,” she explained in fewer than 140 characters, which sounds like the amount of thought she put into the decision.
The policy dissertation achieved its purpose, which was praise from the anti-drilling left. “We applaud Secretary Clinton for standing up for what science, the will of the American people and common sense demand,” cheered Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, adding that Mr. Obama’s decision to let Shell drill “is a recipe for disaster and toxic to any climate action legacy.”
Arctic drilling thus joins trade, student loans, capital-gains tax rates and entitlement spending, among others, as issues on which Mrs. Clinton has moved well to left of the most liberal President in decades.
In opposing the Shell project, Mrs. Clinton is bowing to the latest green policy goal, which is to keep fossil fuels from ever being developed. The strategy has been to use regulation and mandates to subsidize renewables and raise the price of oil and natural gas. But that is proving too slow for many activists who think the earth is rapidly warming, so now the green pressure is to use regulation to block all drilling whenever possible.
Voters should consider this Arctic statement a signal of how Mrs. Clinton will eventually come out on the Keystone XL pipeline. She’s been taking the Fifth on that project to move oil from Canada and North Dakota to the Gulf Coast, so as not to anger either side in the debate. But look for her to come out against it—after the election if she can wait that long, or earlier if she sees the nomination slipping away.
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