George Rebane

[This is President Obama’s 2oct10 weekly radio address with my commentary annotated in blue italics.  All emphases are mine.]

Over the past twenty months, we’ve been fighting not just to create more jobs today, but to rebuild our economy on a stronger foundation.  Our future as a nation depends on making sure that the jobs and industries of the 21st century take root here in America.  And there is perhaps no industry with more potential to create jobs now – and growth in the coming years – than clean energy.

With alarm we have watched the kind of “stronger foundation” that you and yours have started fashioning for our country – it is not an American foundation, but one that today is uniquely yours.  Jobs and new industries have always taken root in America.  In fact they have sprung from the fertile soil of America’s creativity, liberty, and firm knowledge that the most generous of rewards are retained by those who successfully manage their entrepreneurial risk in free markets.  There are many other sectors than ‘clean energy’ for which generous investments and their attendant jobs are waiting.  These include water, sanitation, agriculture, bio-technology, robotics, machine intelligence, transportation, and healthcare.  All of these, and clean energy in its time, will bear more fruit and quicker when government lifts its heavy tax and regulatory burdens and promises a known, open, and stable playing field.

For decades, we’ve talked about the importance of ending our dependence on foreign oil and pursuing new kinds of energy, like wind and solar power.  But for just as long, progress had been prevented at every turn by the special interests and their allies in Washington.

The “special interests” have been those in behalf of the American citizens and the industry that has supplied them for decades with the world’s most abundant and cheapest energy to power our homes, farms, and industries.  Our growth, quality of life, and security have all been dependent on the success of such special interests.  Long may they wave.

So, year after year, our dependence on foreign oil grew.  Families have been held hostage to spikes in gas prices.  Good manufacturing jobs have gone overseas.  And we’ve seen companies produce new energy technologies and high-skilled jobs not in America, but in countries like China, India and Germany.

Jobs have not left America because of our dependence on foreign oil.  Jobs have gone and continue to go overseas because the American worker has been dumbed down by two generations of union dominated state education monopolies in which multi-culturalism and puerile self-esteem have replaced the curricula of science, math, and history.  In the workplace – public and private – every sector that has fallen under the grip of unions has suffered and seen its  productivity shrivel.  Overseas, formerly autocratic governments are loosening their grip and allowing hundreds of millions of workers to leave farms for new factories that out produce ours and are raising the quality of life for billions of people.  All the while our socialists demagogue workers’ rights to produce less, in greater comfort, for more pay.  We are reaping what we have sown, and the trade wars now in the planning stages will bring home to all the fantasyland future you are architecting for us Mr President.

It was essential – for our economy, our security, and our planet – that we finally tackle this challenge.  That is why, since we took office, my administration has made an historic commitment to promote clean energy technology.  This will mean hundreds of thousands of new American jobs by 2012.  Jobs for contractors to install energy-saving windows and insulation.  Jobs for factory workers to build high-tech vehicle batteries, electric cars, and hybrid trucks.  Jobs for engineers and construction crews to create wind farms and solar plants that are going to double the renewable energy we can generate in this country.  These are jobs building the future.

None of these jobs mandated by the bayonet will build the future that we Americans want for ourselves and our children.  As long as cheaper energy is available from existing sources, all such ‘clean energy’ jobs are subsidized make-work, and they will not be fiscally sustainable, nor will they sustain our quality of life.  We need to embark immediately on a totally new program of public and private education that begins with cleaning house of the deadwood ‘teachers’ who don’t teach, but survive only through their special interest unions that have ground down our ability to compete in the new technologies outlined above.

For example, I want share with you one new development, made possible by the clean energy incentives we have launched.  This month, in the Mojave Desert, a company called BrightSource plans to break ground on a revolutionary new type of solar power plant.  It’s going to put about a thousand people to work building a state-of-the-art facility.  And when it’s complete, it will turn sunlight into the energy that will power up to 140,000 homes – the largest such plant in the world.  Not in China.  Not in India.  But in California.

And not in California Mr President.  At full capacity BrightSource advertizes a 100MW output from its 50K heliostats during the day’s good sun angles in a desert under clear skies.  At that, this sprawling facility will not even be able to power a toaster in each of those 140K homes, let alone supply its normal household needs.  Confident that your constituency “flunks Econ 101”, you, sir, are patronizingly selling bullcrap to the country with reports like these.

With projects like this one, and others across this country, we are staking our claim to continued leadership in the new global economy.  And we’re putting Americans to work producing clean, home-grown American energy that will help lower our reliance on foreign oil and protect our planet for future generations.

With projects like this we are only driving a stake through the heart of our economy.  Projects such as BrightStone would not be feasible were it not for subsidies and the mandates to utilities to buy its power output at elevated prices.  There are a hundred ways to structure financing deals for such energy projects that let select early investors reap guaranteed profits for political display purposes.  Such projects are nothing but feel-good totems to the technically and financially inert.  They are only affordable to the extent that the government can continue to plunder the taxpayer.  Attempting to lower reliance on fossil fuels and ‘protect our planet’ with many square miles of earth’s surface mounted heliostats is a fools errand.  There are many more promising energy generation approaches to which a free market would allocate such investments.

Now there are some in Washington who want to shut them down.  In fact, in the Pledge they recently released, the Republican leadership is promising to scrap all the incentives for clean energy projects, including those currently underway – even with all the jobs and potential that they hold.

This doesn’t make sense for our economy.  It doesn’t make sense for Americans who are looking for jobs. And it doesn’t make sense for our future.  To go backwards and scrap these plans means handing the competitive edge to China and other nations.  It means that we’ll grow even more dependent on foreign oil.  And, at a time of economic hardship, it means forgoing jobs we desperately need. In fact, shutting down just this one project would cost about a thousand jobs.

Yes, and I would venture that half the country wishes godspeed to those wanting to shut down such boondoggles.  There is nothing that the BrightStones of America will do to keep us from “handing the competitive edge to China and other nations.”  In fact, they would rather that we keep slogging onward with such politicized power projects to insure the success of their own ends.

That’s what’s at stake in this debate.  We can go back to the failed energy policies that profited the oil companies but weakened our country.  We can go back to the days when promising industries got set up overseas.  Or we can go after new jobs in growing industries. And we can spur innovation and help make our economy more competitive.  We know the choice that’s right for America.  We need to do what we’ve always done – put our ingenuity and can do spirit to work to fight for a brighter future.

Mr President, with projects and propaganda like this, you and yours are forcing us into a failed energy policy that will do nothing but propel us to that final crisis which you are determined not to waste.

Thanks.