John McCain and Barack Obama seem busier trying to one-up each other with daily sound bites than discussing realistic, long-term solutions for our nation’s toughest problems.
Take energy. Oil prices have forced painful choices in family budgets, choices that will only get worse when the winter heating season arrives. Thousands of jobs already have been lost in the airline, auto and other sectors, with more displacement likely. Suddenly, Americans are realizing they’re the victims of a decades-long leadership void — for which both major parties are responsible — that failed to invest in the cleaner, plentiful energy future our economy requires.
McCain and Obama are both campaigning on the promise of a new kind of bipartisan leadership, something that’s overdue and badly needed in energy policy. It is not an exaggeration to say that without a new, forward-thinking, comprehensive national strategy on energy, America’s future prosperity and way of life will be in peril.
A bipartisan group of 27 “elder statesmen,” including notable former Cabinet members (like Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and William Perry), former White House chiefs of staff (including Howard Baker and Thomas “Mack” McLarty) and former senators (like Sam Nunn and Charles Robb) sees it that way. On Wednesday, they sent an open letter to McCain, Obama, members of the next Congress and all 50 state governors calling for urgent action to solve our nation’s “long-term energy crisis.”
Partisan disagreements and political gamesmanship have for too long blocked a sound energy policy from being developed. The hurdles we face — finding economical and cleaner alternatives to oil, figuring out how to effectively deal with the waste from nuclear energy, developing the technology to sequester CO2 emissions from coal plants underground to reduce the impact on global warming, to name just three — are formidable but not insurmountable. “We remain optimistic,” the elder statesmen write, “that America when challenged, properly informed and led will successfully meet these challenges.”
They detail 13 strategies the next president and Congress must focus on, including aggressively promoting energy efficiency and increasing investments in clean alternatives. “We spend less than four billion dollars a year on clean energy R&D, which is less than we spend in three days on imported oil today,” they note.
The letter also calls for an expansion of domestic oil and gas exploration, a sore point for Democrats, and demonstrating global leadership on energy security and climate change, something the Bush administration has essentially refused to do. Bipartisanship requires compromise, a key element in the group’s call.
But mostly, they’re calling for leadership. The two men who seek to lead this nation for the next four years need to hear them.
To read the letter, go to www.energyxxi.org.
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