Obama, in a speech in my former state of North Carolina yesterday (at the Daimler manufacturing plant in Mount Holly), drilled home a few key oil and gas points that he’s been drilling in speeches across the U.S. lately. Here’s the video, followed by some of the highlights.
- The U.S. has 2% of the world’s oil reserves and accounts for 20% of the world’s oil consumption. With that ratio, no matter how much we drill, we can’t keep the price of oil (and, at the pump, gas) down. As my Texan, conservative grandfather, former chief excavation geologist for Exxon for the entire United States except California and Alaska, said to me in recent years: “We just got spoiled” (on cheap gas).
- Politicians who tell you there’s a quick fix to reducing the price of gas (drill more) are either not telling you the truth or don’t know what they’re talking about. Exactly.
- Conflict in the Middle East right now is contributing to rising gas prices, and that’s simply not something the U.S. has a lot of control over.
- China’s adding tens of millions of cars a year (10 million in 2010). China and other fast-developing countries are using a ton more oil year after year. And that’s going to drive up the price of gas for us year after year.
- We need to (and have been, with Obama in office) developing new types of cars, alternative transportation fuels, more efficient cars and trucks, and alternative forms of transportation.
- The Clean Fleets program (which Silvio just wrote about) is growing and is making a huge difference.
- The federal government is especially speeding up the shift from older transportation technologies to cleaner transportation options in its fleets.
- $4 billion in U.S. tax dollars are going to oil companies that make record profits, year after year. It doesn’t make sense, and Obama is calling on Congress to eliminate these subsidies. Basically, he said the same thing in Mount Holly’s Daimler manufacturing plant yesterday that he drilled heavily in Miami a couple weeks ago (full post and video on that here).
The full text of Obama’s speech and a fact sheet on Obama’s “all of the above” strategy are available from the White House.
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