Clinton outlines energy infrastructure plan

Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton detailed a plan Wednesday to upgrade the United States’ energy infrastructure, which she said would help the economy and encourage clean energy.

The vision came a day after Clinton announced her opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, a major infrastructure project that supporters say would have created thousands of construction jobs.

{mosads}The infrastructure plan, Clinton argued, is a better way to create lasting jobs, which avoiding the exclusive fossil fuel focus of Keystone.

“For too long, the Keystone XL pipeline has been a distraction from the real challenges facing our energy sector  —  and the job-creating investments that we should be making to meet them,” Clinton wrote in a post on the blogging platform Medium.

“Building a clean, secure, and affordable North American energy future is bigger than Keystone XL or any other single project,” she said.

Clinton’s plan focuses on a few key areas: improving the safety of oil, natural gas and propane pipelines, making oil transport by rail safer, upgrading the electric grid to better accommodate renewable energy and working with Canada and Mexico toward greenhouse gas emissions cuts.

Many of the proposals either have been generally considered by the Obama administration or are direct improvements on Obama policies, like the administration’s efforts to crack down on major disasters involving oil train explosions.

The administration called for billions of dollars of energy infrastructure improvements earlier this year in the Quadrennial Energy Review, which identified major problems with the current pipeline network and electric grid.

“American energy policy is about more than a single pipeline to transport Canada’s dirtiest fuel across our country,” Clinton wrote. “It’s about building our future  —  a future where the United States will once again lead the world by constructing state-of-the-art infrastructure, creating new jobs and new markets, accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy, and improving the health, safety, and security of all Americans.”