Issue Position: Energy and Environment

Issue Position

Issue Position: Energy and Environment

SUMMARY OF WHAT TO DO:
End Our Dependence on Foreign Oil
Invest in Clean Energy

Our dependence on foreign oil threatens our national security. Our foreign policy decisions are determined too often by our need for imported oil. Additionally, the cost and availability of energy affect every sector of our economy. When the cost of energy increases, the cost of everything else rises, leaving families and businesses in dire straits.

America should invest in a vast array of alternative energies that are not only friendly to our planet but that also decrease our reliance on foreign oil. I support initiatives that will make our automobile industry more competitive in hybrid technology and production. I also support building rapid transit and high-speed rail systems. In the long-term, we should invest in training the million of workers who will fill the jobs of building, managing, and maintaining the evolving alternative energy industry. We should invest in energy efficiency to reduce the use of fossil fuels.

We should provide tax credits for communities, factories, and farms that generate solar, wind, biomass, or geothermal power on site. I support making permanent the tax credit for the production of renewable energy set to expire at the end of 2008.

Our government cannot continue to ignore the effects that greenhouse gases are having on the world. Significant increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have been attributed to climate change, and to the rapid deterioration of our ice caps. We cannot predict all the consequences, but we are seeing more frequent extreme weather events and negative influences on agriculture as a result of climate change.

None of the needs are exclusive of each other. We must commit to turning the energy challenges --- national security, economic, environmental --- into an opportunity for growth. We are not capitalizing on our core competency, American ingenuity. For instance, even though we developed the technology for solar power, we have lost the manufacturing of that technology to other countries. We should have learned our lesson with our dependence on foreign oil to not outsource our evolving alternative energy needs. It is time that we begin the movement to address the three-pronged environmental, energy, and employment problems we face.

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