Ken Salazar: Hillary Clinton’s Unpopular Choice
Hillary Clinton seems to be keeping it cozy with the choice of Ken Salazar to head her transition team, because he was also one of President Barack Obama’s first cabinet appointees as the Secretary of Interior to preside over energy and environmental issues in 2009.
Then, like now, the choice of a cattle rancher and former Colorado Attorney General was very unpopular with wildlife conservationists and green groups fighting climate change. But the real sign of how unfit Salazar was to protect the environment came with getting bipartisan, unanimous approval from a Congress that would soon commit to making Obama a “one-term president.”
Furthermore, Salazar, who was criticized for approving seventeen new offshore drilling permits even after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill finally resigned as Secretary of Interior in 2013. He also has a proven track record of supporting fracking, which has devastated his home state of Colorado. Further, he has gained the reputation of being a fossil fuel industry insider.
According to a report in Politico, Salazar has taken the position that fracking doesn’t cause environmental harm, while increasing evidence suggests that millions of gallons of toxic wastewater disposed underground after natural gas extraction, indicates the boom in fracking coincides with the rise in earthquakes; particularly, in the states of Oklahoma and Texas.
Clinton has come out in strong support of regulating greenhouse gases that are known to contribute to climate change and to increasing the renewable energy industry for economic benefit.
The following statement can be found on Clinton’s website:
Climate change is an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time. It threatens our economy, our national security, and our children’s health and futures. We can tackle it by making America the world’s clean energy superpower and creating millions of good-paying jobs, taking bold steps to slash carbon pollution at home and around the world, and ensuring no Americans are left out or left behind as we rapidly build a clean energy economy.
Nonetheless, Clinton’s choice of Salazar to head her transition team once she beats out Donald Trump to win the White House is more than a symbolically unwise choice.
Feature image courtesy of Politico
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