The media has been full of analysis of President Obama's State of the Union address on Wednesday. His commitment to "stay the course" on health care reform while putting new emphasis on creating jobs has been well covered, as well as his continued attacks on lobbyists just before the White House offered special interests off-the-record conference call briefings on the speech's topics on Thursday and his renewed call for bipartisanship after a year of locking Republicans out of Congressional discussions on major legislation.
There is obviously much that pundits from both the left and right can praise or criticize about the President's speech depending the critics' political leanings, but I was struck that he actually advocated a course of action on new domestic sources of energy that both parties should be able to agree to pursue:
".... to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies."
All of these areas of increased domestic development of new energy sources would lead to reduced dependence on foreign sources of oil. This goal has been called for by candidates of both political parties during election campaigns for decades. Unfortunately, the Democrats have usually advocated achieving this goal for the most part through solar and wind technology without supporting (and even opposing) efforts to increase use of nuclear energy, offshore oil and gas exploration or clean coal technology.
With a Democratic President advocating these approaches to such a longstanding problem, the Republicans should stop attacking him and his party long enough to realize that we have a unique opportunity to make real progress on a problem that has long been out of the grasp of our political system.
Obama repeated these positions in his remarkable meeting with Republican House members in Baltimore yesterday. It is also reported that the Administration's annual budget for 2011 to be released on Monday will include a significant increase in government guaranteed loans for nuclear power plant construction.
Not only would these actions help the US increase the domestic production of energy without worsening emission of greenhouse gases (whether global warming is a real problem or not), but it would also be the source for more jobs in the US that cannot be exported since the whole point is to produce more energy in the US. The President should be supported for taking these positions in his address to Congress and for taking action in the proposed budget for next year that backs up his rhetoric.
Common ground is very difficult to find with all the partisan bickering that characterizes Washington politics in modern times. Our leaders should seize this opportunity and work together on expanding the pursuit of these new sources of energy in the US!
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