Gov. Richardson uses his first post-run speech on climate and energy policy

New Mexico Gov. Richardson, fresh off the campaign trail after dropping out of the Dem race in January, gave a speech at the Pew Center yesterday (video). Where upon dropping out of the race John Edwards had used his position as a prominent candidate to push the remaining Dems to press on poverty as a major campaign issue, Gov. Richardson’s speech yesterday is doing the same for energy and climate policy.

Gov. Richardson started right off the bat by relating his conversation with EPA Administrator Johnson over the Clean Air Act waiver denial (see this post), then called the 35 mpg CAFE standard in the latest energy bill “totally inadequate,” saying that it should go to 50 mpg. He went on to call the failure of a national RPS to pass “shameful.” Later in the speech he said that the state of the climate cannot just be a top-10 priority for the next President, but must be a “State of the Union priority.”

Our take: these are not just strong words from a former presidential candidate, they are shot-across-the-bow words, and an indication that Gov. Richardson will be spending no small amount of his political capital to force the prominence of energy and climate policy in the upcoming election.