Hillary Clinton to commit to important climate agenda

US presidential candidate will campaign against climate change in an unprecedented move thanks to draft platform adopted by Democratic Party leaders.

The draft platform commits the candidate to stronger goals than previously, with a carbon tax, a climate test for future pipelines, tighter rules on fracking and it gives priority to renewables over natural gas power plants.

The draft is to be approved at the Democratic national convention in July, in Philadelphia.

The platform indicates Clinton’s want of appealing to voters from swing states like Colorado, Florida and Virginia, in which climate change is a central issue, and it could differentiate her more clearly from the candidate Donald Trump, who denies climate change.

The initial goal was to ban fracking, but there was not enough support for it, but campaign groups still believe that the platform is a win for the environmental movement.

According to the maker of the 2010 documentary Gasland, Josh Fox, a member of the platform committee, campaigners have won a “monumental victory” in the new policies.

The draft platform follows Obama’s policy on climate change since 2014, with his “all of the above” energy policy, restricting oil drilling off the Atlantic coast and mining for coal on public lands, as well as a proposition for a carbon fee in the form of a $10-a-barrel tax on oil.

Since the beginning of her campaign, Clinton had said that she would fight for Obama’s climate agenda.

Bill McKibben, an author and climate activist, said: “We’ve gone in four years from all of the above, and natural gas as a bridge to the future, to a platform that explicitly recognizes that wind and sun should take priority over gas. It also says that all federal action should be weighed to see if it ‘significantly exacerbates’ global warming – the so-called Keystone test... The entire landscape of America’s energy policy will be changed if (Hillary Clinton) follows her word here.”

The move has some detractors, including Paul Bledsoe, an advisor on climate change in the Bill Clinton White House, who noted the consistent shifts of Clinton during her campaign, notably to appeal to Bernie Sanders’ voters.