Hillary Clinton’s Vision for Renewable Power

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from Hillary Clinton.com

Hillary Clinton announced two bold national goals that she will set as president to combat climate change, create jobs, protect the health of American families and communities, and make the United States the world's clean energy superpower:

The United States will have more than half a billion solar panels installed across the country by the end of Hillary Clinton's first term.

The United States will generate enough clean renewable energy to power every home in America within ten years of Hillary Clinton taking office.

The next decade will be decisive for our transition to a clean energy economy and our ability to meet the global climate crisis. The two goals Clinton announced are part of a comprehensive energy and climate agenda that she will lay out over the coming months.

By achieving these goals we will:

Expand the amount of installed solar capacity to 140 gigawatts by the end of 2020, a 700% increase from current levels. That is the equivalent of having rooftop solar systems on over 25 million homes.

Add more power generation capacity to the grid than during any decade in American history, from a combination of wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and other forms of renewable electricity.

Prevent thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of asthma attacks each year, meet our national and international climate targets, and move our economy along a path towards deep decarbonization by 2050.

How will we achieve these goals? Through a clean energy challenge to unleash American innovation.

First, Hillary Clinton will make it a top priority to fight efforts to roll back the Clean Power Plan. The Clean Power Plan is a crucial tool in our national strategy to reduce carbon pollution, level the playing field for and increase the deployment of renewable energy, and build a clean energy future. In the face of attacks from climate change deniers, we will need a champion in the White House to defend it and implement it effectively.

But smart federal standards set the floor, not the ceiling. We can and must go further.

Hillary Clinton will launch a Clean Energy Challenge that forms a new partnership with states, cities, and rural communities that are ready to lead on clean energy. She will outline this Challenge in detail in the coming weeks, and it will include:

Climate Action Competition: Competitive grants and other market-based incentives to empower states to exceed federal carbon pollution standards and accelerate clean energy deployment.

Solar X-Prize: Awards for communities that successfully cut the red tape that slows rooftop solar installation times and increases costs for businesses and consumers.

Transforming the Grid: Work with states, cities and rural communities to strengthen grid reliability and resilience, increase consumer choice and improve customer value.

Rural Leadership: Expand the Rural Utilities Service and other successful USDA programs to help provide clean, reliable, and affordable energy, not just to rural Americans but to the rest of the country as well.

As part of the Clean Energy Challenge, Clinton will ensure that every part of the federal government is working in concert to help Americans build a clean energy future. This includes:

Transmission Investment: Ensure the federal government is a partner, not an obstacle, in getting low-cost wind and other renewable energy to market.

Solar Access: Overcome barriers that prevent low-income and other households from using solar energy to reduce their monthly energy bills.

Tax Incentives: Fight to extend federal clean energy incentives and make them more cost effective both for taxpayers and clean energy producers.

Public Lands and Infrastructure: Expand renewable energy on public lands, federal buildings, and federally-funded infrastructure, including an initiative to significantly increase hydropower generation from existing dams across the US.

Innovation: Increase public investment in clean energy R&D, including in storage technology, designed materials, advanced nuclear, and carbon capture and sequestration. Expand successful innovation initiatives, like ARPA-e, and cut those that fail to deliver results.

But this is only part of a comprehensive energy and climate agenda.

This is just the beginning of the energy and climate strategy that Hillary will present over the coming months, including ways in which the Clean Energy Challenge will improve the efficiency of our buildings and modernize our transportation system, as well as major initiatives in the following areas:

Energy and Climate Security: Reduce the amount of oil consumed in the United States and around the world, guard against energy supply disruptions, and make our communities, our infrastructure, and our financial markets more resilient to climate-related risks.

Modernizing North American Infrastructure: Improve the safety and security of existing energy infrastructure and align new infrastructure we build with the clean energy economy we are seeking to create.

Safe and Responsible Production: Ensure that fossil fuel production taking place today is safe and responsible, that taxpayers get a fair deal for development on public lands, and that areas that are too sensitive for energy production are taken off the table.

Coal Communities: Protect the health and retirement security of coalfield workers and their families and provide economic opportunities for those that kept the lights on and factories running for more than a century.

Collaborative Stewardship: Renew our shared commitment to the conservation of our disappearing lands, waters, and wildlife, to the preservation of our history and culture, and to expanding access to the outdoors for all Americans.

Hillary Clinton is a proven fighter against the threat of climate change.

As Secretary of State, Clinton built an unprecedented global effort to combat climate change, making it a key U.S. foreign policy priority. She appointed the first Special Envoy for Climate Change to make the issue a top priority in U.S. diplomacy. She led the creation of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition global initiative and with President Obama achieved the key diplomatic breakthrough that yielded the 2009 UN Copenhagen Accord, the first international climate agreement in which major developing countries like China, India, and Brazil committed to reduce their GHG pollution.

As Senator, Clinton advanced initiatives to protect the American people from the threat of climate change and unleash the full potential of America's clean energy economy. She introduced the Strategic Energy Fund Act and co-sponsored and supported legislation to extend the Wind, Solar and Ethanol Tax Credits. She championed the Clean Power Act to reduce harmful industrial pollutants and was part of a bipartisan coalition to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.


read the plan: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/p/briefing/factsheets/2015/07/26/renewable-power-vision/

The Briefing

...this detailed plan by released Hillary Clinton can be measured against the first comprehensive environmental plan in this campaign, addressing climate change, released and outlined in an op-ed by Martin O'Malley earlier this month (who I am supporting in this primary)

[riversedge]

1. Thanks. I had posted

a short article but yours gives lots more information.

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2. glad to provide this here

[Cosmic Kitten]

3. BS: Hillary Clinton is NOT a proven fighter against the threat of climate change.

Has Hillary flip-flopped (evolved) AGAIN...

These platitudes about Renewable and Clean Energy are simply pandering.

Meet the Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Raising Money for Hillary Clinton
Many of Clinton's bundlers are linked to Big Oil, natural gas, and the Keystone pipeline.

Nearly all of the lobbyists bundling contributions for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign have at one time or another worked for the fossil fuel industry.

A list of 40 registered lobbyists that the Clinton camp disclosed to the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday revealed a number of Democratic Party lobbyists who have worked against regulations to curb climate change, advocated for offshore drilling, or sought government approval for natural gas exports.

The two Clinton bundlers also were part of a much-criticized campaign by Chevron to manipulate Congress into inserting language into the Andean Trade Preferences Act that would require Ecuador to dismiss a longstanding lawsuit against the company for polluting the Amazon jungle. Democratic lawmakers pushed back against the campaign and the lawsuit is continuing.

One prominent lobbying topic embraced by Clinton bundlers is the expansion of liquefied natural gas exports and federal approval of new LNG terminals.
Ankit Desai, vice president for government relations at top LNG exporter Cheniere Energy, bundled $82,000 to the Clinton camp, with much of it coming from Cheniere Energy executives. Cheniere executives, including Desai, have donated $38,800 to Clinton's campaign.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/07/hillary-clinton-bundlers-fossil-fuel-lobbyists

Rember KEYSTONE XL?

Hillary Clinton's Bought-And-Paid-For Favors for Keystone XL Deal
On May 31st, Paul Blumenthal and Ryan Grim at Huffington Post headlined, "Banks Behind Hillary Clinton's Canadian Speeches Really Want The Keystone Pipeline," and they reported that, "Two Canadian banks tightly connected to promoting the controversial Keystone XL pipeline in the United States either fully or partially paid for eight speeches made by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the period not long before she announced her campaign for president. Those speeches put more than $1.6 million in the Democratic candidate's pocket."

This is hardly virgin territory, however, for Clinton and the XL deal.

In a report that I posted at HuffPo and several other sites on 1 February 2014 summarizing the State Department's appalling corruption and perhaps equally appalling incompetence in its three (and especially in the two Hillary Clinton State Department) environmental impact statements on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline project, I headlined, "John Kerry vs. Hillary Clinton On The Keystone XL Report," and noted that:

Clinton's redo of her earlier faked report was itself fake, because: first, "The study does discuss 'Climate Change Impacts on the Proposed Project,' but not the proposed project's impacts on climate change"; and, second, because it was not written by the State Department but by an oil-industry contracting firm (ERM Inc.) that Clinton's State Department had non-competitively assigned to be performed by the company that was selected for this purpose by the corporation (TransCanada) that would own the pipeline; and, third, because that contractor had no climatologist. Both of Clinton's reports were simply fakes; they were barely disguised promo-pieces for TransCanada.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/hillary-clintons-boughtan_b_7489118.html

[JaneyVee]

4. KNR!

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5. I don't disagree that those are important factors in negating the benefits of efforts

...to reduce or reverse the adverse effects of climate change, but it is true that she's supported many important efforts to advance renewable energy sources in the past - it's also true that some of those initiatives went nowhere.

I would be interested in some Clinton supporters coming on here and addressing your criticisms. I'm not really prepared to make critical defenses of her energy policy, and posted this plan to compare, contrast, and debate.

[Cosmic Kitten]

7. Hillary is ignoring the elephant in the room!

Untill Hillary adresses this issue
head on she has ZERO credibility
on the renewable clean energy debate

Some of her supporters are sabotaging
the move to renewable energy.

For the last few months, the Kochs and other big polluters have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy, which have been adopted by most states. They particularly dislike state laws that allow homeowners with solar panels to sell power they don’t need back to electric utilities. So they’ve been pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive.

Oklahoma lawmakers recently approved such a surcharge at the behest of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative group that often dictates bills to Republican statehouses and receives financing from the utility industry and fossil-fuel producers, including the Kochs. As The Los Angeles Times reported recently, the Kochs and ALEC have made similar efforts in other states, though they were beaten back by solar advocates in Kansas and the surtax was reduced to $5 a month in Arizona.

But the Big Carbon advocates aren’t giving up. The same group is trying to repeal or freeze Ohio’s requirement that 12.5 percent of the state’s electric power come from renewable sources like solar and wind by 2025. Twenty-nine states have established similar standards that call for 10 percent or more in renewable power. These states can now anticipate well-financed campaigns to eliminate these targets or scale them back.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/opinion/sunday/the-koch-attack-on-solar-energy.html?_r=0

[Indepatriot]

6. Why is it I just don't believe her Clean Energy commitment?

Maybe her support of the Keystone Pipeline sham?...

[Cosmic Kitten]

8. AND promoting FRACKING around the globe!!!