John Kerry

We must make the hard choices -- about alternative energy and clean coal, conservation and fuel efficiency -- that will free our future from the dominance of big oil and yesterday's fossil fuels, a dominance that in the era of global warming threatens the future itself. So I come here again to Faneuil Hall, which is also the cradle of American inde... pendence, to set out a strategy for energy independence. To propose specific steps for an energy revolution as far-reaching as the industrial revolution. And to oppose the procrastination, the Washington evasion and the Cheney-run secret task forces by and for big oil. How insulting and ridiculous it is to be told that the solution to our problems is to drill in and destroy the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that would yield a few months of oil when we are already importing 60 percent of our oil and climbing? God only gave us 3% of the world's oil reserves. There is simply no way to drill our way out of our problem. We have to invent our way out. To do that, we also have to invent our way out of the politics of greed and empty posturing that has worsened our dependence and denied the undeniable and potentially disastrous effects of global warming. Not long ago, in the face of record gas prices, a volatile Middle East, and hostile rhetoric from a fundamentalist regime in Iran, a President of the United States asked "Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?" His name was Jimmy Carter -- and that steamy summer of 1979 seems as familiar today as the question he raised then. Almost twenty seven years later we face another summer of record gas prices, raging violence across a volatile Middle East, renewed rhetoric of hate from a fundamentalist regime in Tehran. Our national neglect has made the quarter of a century since then what Winston Churchill called "years the locust has eaten." Today we endure another summer of record gas prices; we witness the violence raging across a volatile Middle East; and we hear the ...Read More