A Better Definition of Patriotism
Op-Ed, Bangor Daily News
November 29, 2001
SENATOR JOHN F. KERRY |
In the days following the attacks of September 11 consumers reported cases of price gouging when they drove in to fill up their car. Some consumers even reported the price of gasoline soaring to five dollars a gallon. Even as millions of Americans pulled together, a few cynics hoped to profit from a shocked and apprehensive public. Today there's a different kind of opportunism at work in our nation's capitol. Under the guise of national security and economic stimulus, some want to scare Americans into drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Destroying a wildlife refuge won't make America any safer. There must be a better definition of patriotism than tapping public anxiety to pass bad public policy. Now is a time to summon our nation's hopes and strengths; not a time to play on it fears.
What's needed in a debate too often characterized by an instinct for the symbolic, is truth. America does face serious energy challenges. Our dependence on oil makes us susceptible to price spikes, entangles us in distant disputes and puts our military in harm's way. And oil money surely funds terrorism. But drilling in the Arctic Refuge won't change any of this.
Those who insist on portraying drilling in the Arctic Refuge as an urgent matter of national security do a disservice to the American public. Arguing that the wildlife refuge may produce as much oil as we import from Saudi Arabia- home to patrons of terrorism and a potentially unreliable exporter - is simply false. Under even the most optimistic scenarios in which the Refuge produces 1 million barrels per day starting in 2020, we and the world will continue to buy billions of dollars of oil from Saudi Arabia.
Drilling in the Refuge is also incorrectly characterized as a matter of economic security. Proponents cite a 10-year old report funded by the American Petroleum Institute predict that drilling will create more than 700,000 jobs. This claim is based largely on that has been contradicted by independent assessments, including from the Congressional Research Service. More likely, drilling will create a tiny fraction of the jobs predicted by the oil industry. And most importantly, it won't help lift the economy outof recession.
Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge won't make Americans safer, and it won't make our economy stronger. We can't drill our way to national or economic security. But neither can we stand by and merely condemn short-sighted policy proposals. Americans deserve - and our national security and economic needs demand - an energy policy for the future.
Our only long term answer, however, is to promote true energy independence - and to do so requires innovation. In World War II America printed a poster with the banner "INVENT FOR VICTORY." The nation must once again be challenged to make innovation a weapon in our national defense -- investing in a Manhattan Project that accelerates the development of breakthrough technologies like hydrogen fuel cells which hold the greatest promise to revolutionize our energy system. Fuel cell technology to power cars, trucks, buses, ships and trains exists today. The challenge is making them affordable and deploying them throughout the economy.
Making this mission a success will make America safer -- it will also make us more prosperous. America can create more jobs investing in efficient and renewable energy technologies than investing in oil. The Tellus Institute estimates that 900,000 jobs can be created from investments in efficient transportation. The Energy and Resources Group at the University of California estimates that generating 10 percent of our electricity from renewable energy sources will create more than 2 million jobs - good jobs designing, machining, manufacturing, distributing, building and maintaining a domestic energy system.
Honesty must drive a comprehensive energy plan for the nation: neither drilling nor conservation, efficiency and renewable energy will bring immediate national or economic security. There are no easy answers. The country needs to increase domestic oil production, but given its limited benefits we should expand production in an environmentally sound manner - protecting the Wildlife Refuge but exploring the more than 25 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico open for drilling today but not developed. We can also reduce our dependence on oil and susceptibility to price spikes through efficiency: making our transportation system more efficient by investing in fuel efficient cars, rail and public transit and diversifying our fuel base, particularly in the transportation sector by relying more on natural gas, especially in commercial and government vehicles; pressing ahead aggressively with domestic renewable fuels like biomass ethanol. But just as the war on terrorism tests American resolve, so too must we be prepared for a long and sustained effort in changing our energy policy.
It's time to call on America's strength, ingenuity, creativity and invention, to open a new front in the war on terrorism - and to support it with a national effort that rivals President Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the moon. Rather than put false hopes in largely symbolic acts like drilling in the Arctic Refuge, a real marketplace for renewable energy must be created to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and prepare us for a different - and far less predictable - geopolitical landscape.
But more important---http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/kerrey-keydel.html
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-http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=K000148
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bioguide.congress.gov
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J.F.K erry picking up the pieces of dead people living off dead people with dead people coincidence. |
