President Obama's State of the Union Speech had many promising elements, but ultimately failed when it desperately needed to succeed. It's primary failure was in obsessing on a future too vague. Its corollary failure was in presenting energy investment as a virtue rather than an existential necessity. He could have done better, because no doubt he knows better. And in the context of SOTU, Carol Browner's departure seems hardly a surprise.
What follows is the speech I wish he had given:
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Members of Congress,
My fellow Americans,
Tonight I would like to briefly review recent events, and discuss the next challenge and its related opportunities which we must seize.
When I assumed the presidency in 2009, the Country was in the midst of the greatest recession since the Great Depression; a recession that could have further deteriorated into depression if we had not continued the initiatives of President Bush, and reinforced them with essential stimulus. Most importantly, we preserved the basic functioning of the financial infrastructure, without which no recovery would be possible.We could yet fall back to those troubling days if we divert our attention from reforms that have been initiated and require full implementation. But our stimulus plans have, by the assessment of many economists, provided the catalyst for recovery, and are still working their way through the system. We urge the private sector to begin reinvesting in the economy and taking the prudent risks that will benefit their stakeholders and the society as a whole.
In 2010, our focus turned to health-care. Many critics contended that we should have concentrated on jobs and deferred health-care to when the economy returned to health. What the critics have failed to acknowledge is that the crisis of affordable and universally accessible health-care in this country is the major common factor in our loss of quality jobs, our declining competitiveness due to higher labor costs, and our ballooning federal and state deficits. The private sector has failed to control costs through the operation of competitive markets, and the health-care marketplace has become dysfunctional as its various components have pursued their respective profit goals to society's overall detriment. In 2010 we instituted a comprehensive restructuring of health-care, not to displace the private sector, but to better focus it to meet society's needs. We have begun a transitional process, the effects of which are just beginning to manifest, but will not be fully apparent for a few more years.
We do not claim perfection in addressing either of these initiatives. But we faced the risks that were presented, and took decisive steps first to stabilize, and now to build a foundation for a more effective and beneficial future. As we look to 2011 and the years beyond, we will continue to advance these initiatives to meet our Country's needs, modifying them as experience reveals opportunities for further improvement.
But tonight I would like to address another challenge as big as the financial crisis, and as universal in its potential impact on our citizens as health-care. That issue is our Energy Future.
As many of you know, there has been growing concern in recent years that we are approaching what some experts refer to as Peak Oil. Simply stated, Peak Oil is a situation in which the addition of new oil sources fails to add capacity at a rate that replaces declining production of existing wells. In a world economy that is projected to increase from the current 6.5 billion people to 9 billion by the end of the century, the arrival of Peak Oil means that initially, the price of oil in its various forms, from energy to synthetics, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals, will steadily grow, and will cause further increases in prices in various products and services that depend on oil and its derivatives. This poses a threat to our economic stability far greater than health-care, and every bit as real as the financial crisis if we fail to understand it and take prudent action.
This is a complex issue, and I will not attempt to deal with it at length and in depth tonight, but in the coming weeks I and other members of our administration will address our fellow Americans on various aspects of this challenge, and what we need to do. This evening, my purpose is to call the American people's attention to the gravity issue, and to propose some major initiatives that this Administration will take with the cooperation of the Congress.
First, it should be understood that, as with the financial crisis and health-care, this evolving crisis has been growing for several decades; specifically since 1970, when oil production in the US peaked as was predicted by industry professionals, and we began importing more oil, substantially from the Middle East. It is fashionable to blame OPEC for our current dependency, but the truth is that we have become accustomed to building our economy and society on cheap and plentiful oil, and have been wasteful in treating this unique and limited resource as if its supply was infinite. It takes millions of years for Earth's natural processes to produce a barrel of oil. Of the three trillion barrels of estimated reserves on the planet, it is believed that we have used 1 trillion since the beginning of the oil age in 1849; and half of that since 1950. The planet cannot continue to consume this resource at the rates that a burgeoning world population will demand without creating a crisis and a threat to the economic well-being of the world community; and yes, the certainty of war as we compete for dwindling resources of oil and any other commodity that might take its place.
The looming energy crisis may be seen as our equivalent of the launch of Sputnik, which crystallized our competition with Communist nations fifty years ago. Such a comparison would add drama and symbolism, but would fall short of the substance of this challenge. Sputnik symbolized our fear of being overtaken by a threatening ideology that seemed on the verge of surpassing us. In the case of energy, we are our own primary enemy. If China and India and all the other nations who will be competing for energy and other resources did not exist, we would still risk squandering the resources available at the rate we are currently using them. We would still find the need, sooner or later, to replace these resources or change our way of life. But China and India and a couple of hundred other nations do exist, and believe that they have as much right to the resources and the quality of life they make possible as we do. If we do not recognize where this will inevitably lead, we will ultimately find ourselves in conflicts we cannot afford and in which there will be no ultimate winners. I believe that our national experience has already had a glimpse of such a future.
Accordingly, tonight I am calling for a national resolve as great as that which sent us to the Moon. But, whereas reaching the Moon was a largely symbolic feat, our Energy Initiative is very much closer to home, and essential to not only our prosperity but our very survival.
I cannot emphasize enough that a failure to take prompt action will be devastating to our national well being. We saw a glimpse of the future in 2008 when oil hit $147 a barrel, and caused cascading failure throughout the economy. In our weakened economic situation at present, oil will not have to rise to that same level to precipitate the same or worse effect. Again, on this I believe I have the concurrence of many economists and business leaders. Our exposure to constrained energy will increase steadily with time, and it will take at least three decades for us to deploy the variety of technologies and strategies that will be required to address this challenge.
Furthermore, addressing the Peak Oil dilemma is not simply about finding alternative energy resources. Fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas have their own supply constraints, in addition to generating various environmenta pollutants and contributing to the accelerating climate change that we have witnessed over this past decade. It is also recognized that, while we must greatly accelerate the introduction of renewable energy resources such as solar, wind, wave and geothermal, no scenario realistically foresees these options fully replacing fossil fuels in the next thirty years.
We must proceed on a three pronged strategy to address our energy challenge.
1) We must continue to exploit in the near term the fossil fuel resources that we currently depend upon wherever and however it is environmentally prudent to do so, as we proceed to build alternative options.
2) We must accelerate our development and deployment of alternative energy resources. We are currently significantly behind other advanced nations that have recognized the energy risk well ahead of us and are rising to the challenge far faster.
3) Since neither our continued reliance on fossil fuels nor our adoption of renewable resources will fully meet our needs over the next thirty years, we must aggressively begin to restructure our economy and communities to conserve the energy that is available.
This third point will require a bottom-up and top-down assessment of how we live and work, of how we define quality of life and wealth, in order for us to squeeze out the waste and sustain our quality of life and our prosperity. But this effort is not merely a necessity; it is an opportunity. The challenge of rebuilding our society to meet the energy challenge will not involve only the energy industry; it will involve the entire array of industries and communities that rely on energy, which means all of us. This challenge will provide the opportunity for the private sector to redeploy its capital to purposeful objectives. It will open immense job opportunities for the under-employed and unemployed.
The Energy Challenge must ultimately be born by the private sector and communities. But, as in going to the Moon, the federal government has a pivotal role, in facilitating and coordinating the millions of participants toward a shared goal. Accordingly, my administration proposes to do the following:
1) We will initiate National Institute of Energy and Environmental Policy to serve as a platform for defining critical issues and strategies that can best be addressed at the national level, and that can serve as a resource to state and local governments in identifying strategies, technologies policy templates and best practices that can be deployed to their specific needs.
2) In one year, we will implement a national tax on fossil fuel extraction and importation which will go into a fund for research and development, and funding transitional investments to new energy and community infrastructure.
3) We will re-evaluate our investments in transportation infrastructure in light of Constrained Energy and will begin to direct more investment to public transit where demographic and economic characteristics make it effective.
4) We will seek to foster increased national investment in communications and data infrastructure and technologies that can reduce our dependence on transportation as an energy conservation strategy.
5) With regard to the prior two items the federal government's first goal will be to define policies that will encourage private sector investment, and augment that investment with government investment where necessary. Our goal is to work with private sector enterprises and state governments to define economic strategies that provide the best return from energy and other technology investments. Where the buying power of the federal and state governments can create opportunities to support the initial deployment of new technologies, we will endeavor to do so through prudent choices. I cite the creation and evolution of the Internet as an example of how the federal government can serve as a catalyst for investments that can ultimately generate broadbased and creative private investment.
6) Finally, the United States shall invite China and India and Russia and other developed and developing nations to join us in an Energy Research Consortium that will jointly develop and distribution new energy technologies that will benefit all. This initiative will seek to do with Energy what the International Space Station has done for the study of space.
The Energy Crisis that looms before us all is too important to be resolved by international competition. It can only be overcome through international cooperation. It is a challenge that all nations face, and none of us can overcome alone. If we can successfully join together in this crucial endeavor, it will teach us the way to overcome the many lesser challenges that have kept us distrustful and apart.
I will conclude with the affirmation that the state of our Union is strong, and the belief that we can summon the wisdom and resolve not merely to sustain, but to prevail and prosper.
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Onward
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