Clinton on the Issues

Update: Clinton suspended her campaign for the presidency on June 7, 2008.

During her years representing New York state in the U.S. Senate (2001 to the present), Hillary Clinton has earned an 87 percent lifetime voting score from the League of Conservation Voters (lower than it might have been because she's missed some votes while campaigning for president). She has tended to run with the Democratic pack on environmental policy, but in November 2007 she unveiled a comprehensive and ambitious climate and energy plan.

Read an interview with Hillary Clinton by Grist and Outside.

Key Points

• Proposes a Strategic Energy Fund that would raise $50 billion over 10 years by taxing the "excess profits" of oil companies and cutting their tax breaks. The money would be invested in "clean energy technologies," including renewable energy, energy efficiency, "clean coal," plug-in hybrids, cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels, and more. Clinton describes it as "an Apollo Project-like program dedicated to achieving energy independence."
  
  
• Calls for cutting U.S. carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Would accomplish this through a cap-and-trade system that would auction off 100 percent of emissions permits, making polluters pay for the CO2 they emit.
  
  
• Emphasizes the creation of "green-collar jobs" in the fields of clean energy and energy efficiency. Aims to create up to 5 million clean-energy jobs over the next decade.
  
  
• Made her campaign carbon-neutral in April 2007, one month after John Edwards did.
  
  
• Calls for the U.S. to cut its consumption of foreign oil by two-thirds of projected levels by 2030.
  
  
• Supports a goal to get 25 percent of the U.S. electricity supply from renewable sources by 2030.
  
  
• Supports raising fleet-wide fuel-economy standards to 40 miles per gallon by 2020 and 55 mpg by 2030.
  
  
• Has advocated for a summer "gas-tax holiday" to ease consumer prices at the pump. The proposal would suspend the 18-cent federal gasoline tax and 24-cent diesel tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day, to be paid for by a tax on oil-company profits.
  
  
• Supports coal-to-liquid fuels if they emit 20 percent less carbon over their lifecycle than conventional fuels. On June 19, 2007, voted in favor of an amendment that would provide loans for coal projects, including liquefied coal; the amendment did not pass.
  
  

Video & Audio

Watch Clinton explain her positions on climate change and energy issues at a Nov. 17, 2007, Grist-sponsored forum:




Watch a "Hillcast" from March 1, 2007, in which Clinton explains her energy vision:




Watch Clinton discuss her energy plans on May 30, 2007, at a rally in Las Vegas:




Listen to a clip of Clinton's interview with Grist and Outside:

Quotable Quotes

• "I know that we have got an important debate going on right now about how we are going to help families deal with these gas prices. They have gone up so fast, so out of sight in the minds of the people that I talk with and I think it’s time that we really had a concerted strategy. You’ve heard me say this and I’ll say it again. I think its time to give Americans a break this summer and to make the oil companies pay the gas tax out of their record profits."
  -- May 6, 2008, in a victory speech in Indiana
  
  
• "We're going to create at least 5 million additional jobs in green energy. Jobs making public buildings more energy efficient. Jobs weatherizing homes to make sure that people get more value for their dollar, to save on home heating and cooling bills. Jobs that will re-open shuttered factories to build the clean energy technologies."
  -- April 1, 2008, in a speech to the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO
  
  
• "I am concerned about [mountaintop-removal mining] for all the reasons people state, but I think it's a difficult question because of the conflict between the economic and environmental trade-off that you have here. I'm not an expert. I don't know enough to have an independent opinion, but I sure would like people ... to come up with some approach that would enable us to retrieve the coal but would enable us to do it in a way that wouldn't damage the living standards and the other important qualities associated with people living both under the mountaintop and people who are along the streams. You know, maybe there is a way to recover those mountaintops once they have been stripped of the coal."
  -- March 19, 2008, in an interview with West Virginia Public Radio
  
  
• "The risks of inaction [on climate change], for those who still cling to the outmoded and disgraced view that there is no need for action, are abundantly clear. The consequences are so dire that this election has to focus on this issue. We cannot afford to fiddle while the world warms because we've already seen and we know conclusively what that will do to us."
  -- Nov. 17, 2007, speaking in Los Angeles at the Global Warming and America's Energy Future forum sponsored by Grist
  
  
• "[O]ur values demand that we be good stewards of the planet for our children and our children's children. We are failing that simple moral test if we continue to stand by as the Earth warms faster than at any time in the past 200,000 years. ... We can fix these problems together by changing to a clean energy future fueled by innovation and efficiency."
  
  -- May 23, 2006, in a speech on energy policy delivered at the National Press Club
  
  
  

Platform & Record In-Depth

• Supports reducing electricity consumption 20 percent from projected levels by 2020 through phaseout of incandescent light bulbs and other efficiency standards.
  
  
• Advocates for 60 billion gallons of homegrown biofuels to be available for use in vehicles by 2030.
  
  
• Says she is "agnostic" on nuclear power, having "real concerns" about the power source in general and the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York state in particular. She has pointed out that nuclear plants could be a target for terrorist attacks.
  
  
• Opposes the storage of nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain repository being built in southern Nevada.
  
  
• Opposes oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
  
  
• Supports requiring publicly traded companies to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission the risks climate change poses to their business.
  
  
• A cosponsor of the Boxer-Sanders Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act, the most stringent climate bill in the Senate.
  
  
• Wants to create an energy-research agency modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
  
  
• Has suggested that the federal government could help cover health-care costs for retired U.S. autoworkers in exchange for automakers producing more fuel-efficient cars, an idea Barack Obama has been pushing.
  
  
• Took a tour of Alaska in 2005 to see the on-the-ground impacts of climate change.
  
  
• Has been an active member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee during her whole tenure in the Senate.
  
  
• Calls for a Green Building Fund through which the federal government would allocate $1 billion annually to states to make grants or low-interest loans to improve energy efficiency in public buildings, such as schools, police stations, firehouses, and offices.
  
  
• Sponsor of the Zero-Emissions Building Act, which would require new federal buildings and major renovations to be carbon-neutral by 2030, and to have gradually reduced emissions in the years before then.
  
  
• Voted against the final version of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, a sweeping, oil-friendly energy bill opposed by enviros, because she said it "ignores our biggest energy challenges, subsidizes mature energy industries like oil and nuclear, and rolls back our environmental laws." The act passed and Bush signed it into law in August 2005.
  
  
• Introduced the Coordinated Environmental Health Network Act in 2004 and again in 2005, which would have helped orchestrate federal health-agency cooperation and provide public access to an electronic database of chronic diseases and relevant environmental factors. The bill went nowhere both times, but Clinton said she has plans to reintroduce it.
  
  
• In 2005, cosponsored the Child, Worker, and Consumer-Safe Chemicals Act, which would have mandated greater scrutiny of new and existing chemicals, offered market incentives for developing safer alternatives to toxics, and created a publicly accessible database with info on the toxicity of chemicals on the market.
  
  
• Successfully lobbied [PDF] the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to let International Paper conduct a two-week test burn of tires at a mill in upstate New York in 2005. The burn was so polluting that the company had to suspend it after a few days.
  
  
• When asked what she would do as president to address water and land issues in the U.S. West, Clinton said she would emphasize renewable energy, protect national parks and wilderness areas, reform the Mining Law of 1872, and employ a more balanced approach than the Bush administration to traditional energy development on public lands.
  
  
• Cosponsored the Clean Power Act in 2001, which proposed requiring power plants to significantly reduce harmful emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury, and carbon dioxide. The bill did not move forward nor pass.
  
  
• In 2003, voted in favor of an amendment to the 2003 energy bill to increase fuel-economy standards for passenger cars to 40 mpg by 2014.
  
  

Still Haven't Gotten Enough?

• Read Clinton's energy and climate platform and fact sheet on her campaign website.
  
  
• Read Clinton's official bio.
  
  
• Read David Roberts' comparison of Clinton's and Obama's environmental records.
  
  
• Read Grist's 2005 analysis of Clinton's record on energy issues.
  
  

What did we miss? Tell us below in comments. We'll update this page as the presidential campaign continues.


Kate Sheppard and Todd Hymas Samkara contributed to this fact sheet.