It was all about creating green and clean energy jobs in the United States. Although China is leading the way in green technology and we can learn from them, we have to build our infrastructure and be more innovative here in America. It was pretty much what he is saying now about convincing people that saving the planet and fighting climate change is an opportunity to boost our economy, build infrastructure, and create jobs.
Excerpts from his speech:
So let me share with you some thoughts. I have to confess that when it comes to this challenge of clean energy and when you look sometimes at what our neighbor on this planet, our competitor, China, is doing, it’s easy to become discouraged. It’s also – it’s also easy to look at the things that we are doing and kind of shake our heads and say, gosh, you know what? That’s just not enough.
Well, it’s not enough. And that’s why we’re here, to acknowledge that it’s not enough and to reflect a little bit on the things that we are learning and to reflect on the things that are actually possible.
I wanted to share with you a little bit about some of the things that we are learning in Maryland. Josh was very kind in reciting the success we’ve had over these last five really difficult years. I’ll tell you what, I didn’t run for office five years ago for governor of our state saying, vote for me, I will cut more out of your state budget than any other governor in history. But that’s what we’ve been called upon to do in order to balance, as we must, every year. But we’ve also done other things. We’ve asked people to contribute more as well.
I saw Tom Friedman speak recently out at the National Governors Association in Utah. And he said, as he always does so eloquently, which I guess is why he’s a lead columnist – opinion writer for The New York Times – he said, yes, we need to cut and we need to raise and we need to reinvest, because the country we need to discover is America. There’s a tremendous amount of potential in our nation. And especially now, we cannot squander it.
So in our state, in our one state, acknowledging that we only are one among fifty, we have something very important from our legacy and that is a legacy a leadership, a legacy of sacrifice, a legacy of determination, a legacy which, in the past, has allowed our people to move forward even when apparently, other states are falling back. That’s who we are at our gut. That’s who we’ve always been since the founding of this republic. And I’d like to think that in many ways, that’s what we’re doing right now on the clean energy front.
So I cannot call these reflections – I can’t say that these are the lessons that we have learned. These are lessons we are learning. This is a lot more Lewis and Clark than it is third-grade reading. This is a lot more the voyage of the Mayflower than it is multiplication tables. None of us really know exactly what this future holds or exactly how we’re going to get there, and that’s what makes it all so exciting. We are learning important lessons on renewable energy, but we’re also learning other lessons, or maybe I should say, re-learning them.
One of those lessons is the importance of acknowledging in – whether it’s our political opponents or whether it’s in our economic competitors, let’s acknowledge, let’s re-learn that American art of acknowledging the good intentions in others, even as we disagree on the way to get there because there is, and throughout the movement of human history, always a symmetry of the way we’ve always done things and a need to break that symmetry to create a new balance, a balance that allows us to lean forward, a balance that allows us to fulfill the responsibilities we have, not only to these times, but to a future that is watching.
So Josh talked about the fact that a few weeks ago, we returned from China. I traveled there with my highest-ranking foreign policy adviser, my 13-year-old son William – (laughter) – as well as about 70 other businesspeople.
And as we discuss China’s efforts on renewable energy, my mind’s eye can’t help but return to that trip. Everywhere we traveled, we could see the big investments that were being made. In some respects, I think communist China is outperforming us as capitalists. (Chuckles.) They are making investments in their infrastructure. They’re making the investments that a modern economy requires to create jobs.
And we saw cranes everywhere, wherever we traveled. On the high-speed rail when we traveled from – where were we – Shanghai to Nanjing, we would travel quickly through towns that had four, five, six, 10 times the population of my city of Baltimore that very few of us have ever heard of, and there were cranes all over the place. We saw lots and lots of construction cranes.
What we did not see much of, what we did not see any of, was blue sky. Seven days traveling the length of the eastern half of China and we never saw blue sky. When the sun would come up in the morning, it was more like someone turned on the lights high above a gray sheet that covered the landscape.
Thus is the paradox of China. On the one hand, you have a country that invests $54 billion annually in clean energy, and on the other hand, a country that opens two coal-fired power plants – new coal-fired power plants – every two weeks as the world’s largest producer, the world’s largest consumer of coal and the world’s largest emitter of sulfur dioxide and greenhouse gas.
Now, none of us can deny the serious competition that exists in this flat world of ours and the tremendous competitive strength that China brings as it creates 100,000 clean-energy industry jobs every year. And none of us can underestimate what it means that China builds 50 percent, now, of all the world’s solar panels and wind turbines or that Chinese companies control now two-thirds of the global solar photovoltaic-cell production market, a market for which America’s share has decreased from 42 percent just five years ago, in 2005, now down to 10 percent in 2010....
In terms of the great innovation, the power to innovate in science, including in energy, the U.S. still has a dominant position. We rank number one in innovation while China ranks 26th – that’s according to rankings by the World Economy Forum. Our universities are the envy of the world, even if they are the most expensive in the world.
And we have coastlines conducive to solar. We have the climate and the blue sky that’s conducive to solar. We have agricultural resources and land for biomass. We’re home to the most innovative and creative people on the Earth. And if you ever walk with me through the halls of NIH or Medimmune, you will also see that we are a very, very diverse country where people from all over the globe, cultures from all over the globe want to live and want to work because of our balance of law with the protection of individual freedoms.
We are what Tom Friedman calls a, quote, “high imagination-enabling economy.” We have the wherewithal to create more clean-energy jobs, and we need to do it. And we have the wherewithal to control a greater market share. Will it be a larger market share than China? No, there’s probably nothing we do that will ever be as large as China. But we can do it well and we can do it in such a way that we have a strong enough share to create jobs and to expand opportunity for our own people.
But when countries like China are willing to invest 9 percent of their GDP in their infrastructure while we spend 2 percent, there’s really only one reasonable conclusion, and that is, it’s not what other countries, including China, are doing to us; it’s what we are not doing for ourselves.
And our greatest challenges, I’d submit to you, are therefore not financial, nor are they technological. Our greatest challenges are political. Our greatest challenges are political. To move forward, we have to ask ourselves whether we still have the ability as a nation to govern ourselves, to build that next chapter of this tremendous public-private partnership that built railroads and moon shot and everything else.
You want to talk about clean energy as a moral and historical and imperative? Combine the technology of the moon shot with the securing of this world for individual freedom and democracy of the Second World War along with the vision and the – and the investment of the transcontinental railroads and other great endeavors, and they’re all here in this one – in this one endeavor....
But to move forward, we have to renew our national focus on creating jobs and expanding opportunity. We have to find a way to balance and move forward at the same time. When you hear some people rattle the sabers and say, it’s all about cuts, caps and balance, let’s acknowledge the goodness in the call to balance. But a modern economy requires modern investments if it’s going to achieve the balance necessary to create jobs.
In this spirit, let me share with you some of the things that we are – we are doing in Maryland. The – in Baltimore County, thanks to President Obama’s help, we were able to create about 800 jobs building the next generation of green electric motors in that tremendous turnaround – the public-private partnership that has led to the turnaround of GM – advanced manufacturing happening here in our country building the next generation of electric-drive motors, not in Mexico, but here in Maryland. By the way, they’re housing them in a plant that is powered largely by solar.
In another example, through a tax-incentive initiative we call the Sustainable Communities Tax Credit, we’re using the tax code to help local governments team with businesses on green buildings and creating jobs in the process. We were the first state to adopt the International Green Construction Code. We’ve also passed reforms that require all new public buildings in our state to earn LEED silver certification – that is, our schools, our colleges, universities and the like.
We’ve worked with the Green Building Council on these priorities, recognizing that they’re good for jobs, good for business, yes, good for sustainable energy and the future climate of this – and oxygen of this planet.
We’re also working across sectors to advance solar energy in Maryland. We have a combination of new policy choices, including stacked state, local and federal credits, direct investment and a specific carve-out for solar energy as part of our renewable-energy portfolio.
We’ve also been able to create a significant number of new jobs in our state. Our people at our economic development say that there are about 1200 jobs now in solar in our state where just a few years ago, in 2006, you’d barely find that industry registering anywhere in our state.
Is it in manufacturing? Not as much in manufacturing, but a lot in sales and installation and marketing. I would dare say that if I were able to stand in front of a plant and cut a ribbon on 1200 new jobs, it would be a news-attracting event.
One of my favorite examples of new policy choices that have allowed us to advance us are the power purchase agreements, which we’ve been able to put together the political will to achieve and execute and do. We’ve agreed to purchase 20 years’ worth of power from companies who agree, in turn, to build new renewable-energy facilities. The agreements we’ve entered into so far are projected to bring enough clean power onto our grid to support 20,000 homes or 16 percent of our state government’s power load – energy needs.
Through a power purchase initiative we call Project Sunburst, again, enabled only by the leadership and the courage of the Obama administration through the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, we’ve been able to attract private solar investment into our state, entering into power purchase agreements for public buildings and using the federal dollars to help kind of pay down, buy down the initial start-up costs of that solar energy.
We’ve been able through this initiative to increase the amount of solar energy on our grid from 100 kilowatts to 20 megawatts. For those of you that are performance-measuring along with me, that’s a 20,000 percent increase.
By choosing to advance solar energy in our state, we’ve also found that you actually can create a bit of a “Field of Dreams” effect – if you build it, they will come. By demonstrating through smart, targeted investments that we’re committed to solar, we continue to attract several new solar businesses in Maryland. One of these new-arrival companies is teaming with Home Depot so that Marylanders can now walk into a Home Depot store and lease solar panels for their homes.
In addition to solar, we’ve put a major priority on wind in Maryland. We attempted and failed to get the legislature to authorize long-term power purchase agreements for offshore wind off the cost of Ocean City. We will be back. It has the potential to create 20,000 manufacturing, construction and assembly jobs each year on top of the 400 permanent jobs created upon completion over five years. That helps contribute an estimated 1.9 billion (dollars) in economic impact if we can get that done. And perhaps we do so in partnership with our neighbors in Delaware.
One last example is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which Maryland was a pioneering and leading member of. Unfortunately, we’ve seen New Jersey drop out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. But we believe this has been very, very positive. And we intend to stick with it. And this may be, again, another way that we’re able to forge the political will to move forward.
We – it’s been estimated that for every RGGI dollar that we invest, we spur $8.50 worth of private investment. In Maryland, we’ve been able to use RGGI investments to lower energy bills for 50,000 households, invest in energy retrofits for 3,000 low-income apartments and 350 farms, and have been able to train 900 Marylanders for green-energy jobs and reduce 3500 cars’ worth of carbon emissions.
One more point as I – as I close here, and maybe I’ll close as I began. We have tremendous assets in this country. I rattled off some of those things. I don’t for a second pretend that I can stand here before you and tell you that these things alone are the prescription to the challenges that we face.
But I do believe that each of them is important. The most important asset we have are the talents, the skills, the creativity, the imagination and the education of our people. Right now, and I don’t have to recap with you that the trends are not encouraging when it comes to some of the trends in terms of education.
When I graduated from high school, we were number one in high-school graduation. Today, we’re 11th. Thirty years ago, we were number one in college completion; today, we’re 12th, and on and on and on. These trends aren’t going to turn themselves around. This is something that we have to do ourselves. And fortunately, we have what it takes to be able to do that.
But what we need right now is that political will that has always brought us through difficult times in our country. And I would submit that we also need something else, and that is a – we need to create a third way, if you will, a higher-minded politics that allows for the goodness of our political opponents to emerge and to resonate and to come together in this space where we figure these things out....
And I think we also need, in our international (sphere ?), that same sort of enlightened engagement, not to feel like this is some sort of – some sort of Olympic game where we’re trailing the dragon but where we are working with the goodness that exists in the individuals and the humanity of individual people of China to find the solutions to the things that ail us....
There is more that unites us than divides us, and perhaps nothing is more important right now than the unity that comes from this tremendous imperative we have to discover new ways to feed, fuel and heal this world of ours. We are the first generation of our species ever to see our planet’s population double in our own lifetime, and yet we have also been granted the blessing, because of American innovation, American technology, American leadership to view for the first time this planet from outer space.
There is so much potential in our nation. What is needed is a higher politics, a politics that calls out the good in one another, a politics that finds a third way to that better future that we prefer for our children. Thanks very, very much.
If you listen to what he says to the group, even his use of the phrase "third way" has to do with learning from China, but focusing on creating jobs and green energy opportunities here in America.
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