Kissing Cousins?
October 25th, 2007 by Carbon CoalitionJust days after formally filing for the NH Primary, Barack Obama spoke to a packed gymnasium in Dover. TPC was in Portsmouth just three weeks ago to hear Obama announce the second installment of his Climate and Energy policy. Obama claimed to have the most aggressive emissions reduction plan that would create billions of dollars for the development of alternative energy.
Obama criticized our current energy policy by telling some timely jokes: “Now obviously it doesn’t help when you put my cousin, Dick Cheney in charge of energy,” joked Obama, reffering to the recent news that in fact Cheney and Obama are distant cousins.
After the crowd’s laughter and applause subsided, Obama criticized Cheney for meeting with the oil and gas companies 40 times and the environmental groups only once when developing a national energy policy. I guess blood is not thicker than water in the primary season.
Responding to a question about poverty, Obama put a positive spin on the economic opportunities provided by a transition to alternative energy. He brought the issue home to New Hampshire when he stated:
“There are people up in the North Country where there are all these former mills. We could harness the energy of wood chips to create alternative fuels. They are already developing that. If you could suddenly put all of those mills back on line, you would be producing energy right here in the United States that is clean and ends up freeing our dependence on foreign oil.”
Obama stressed that “the next president can’t just tell you what you want to hear, he has got to tell you what you need to hear,” but there was actually little within Obama’s energy talk that would have upset the majority of the American public outside of Detroit. His only references to any kind of American ”sacrifice” concerned a call for conservation, a push for a renewable energy standard and the need to reduce oil consumption to keep the price of gas down.
Listen to Obama’s energy quotes in Dover: 1) Cheney Joke 2) Policy Description 3) Economic Opportunity
