Want a clean energy future? It matters who is president

Almost eight years ago, President Bush and I were sworn into our respective offices after exceedingly close elections. I became the 50th senator in an evenly divided Senate, and he became president of an evenly divided country.

I held out hope that a split Congress and the new president would be forced to work together to craft bipartisan solutions to America's long-term problems. Unfortunately, within a few months it became clear that the two former oil men now in charge at the White House had no intention of leading America into the new millennium.

Shortly after taking office, Vice President Dick Cheney held secret meetings with oil companies to map out their shared "drill here, drill everywhere" vision for America's energy future. While families and businesses dealt with the West Coast energy crisis that caused blackouts in California and huge electricity price spikes in the Pacific Northwest, our president claimed it was just a supply-and-demand problem, not blatant market manipulation by Enron and others.

For the past eight years, it has been more of the same. This administration has constantly fed and reinforced our nation's fossil-fuel addiction. For the past eight years, Big Oil's agenda trumped America's. For the past eight years, the White House and Republicans in Congress talked up clean energy but refused to support or fund it

The policies of old need to change. It matters who is president.

We need a president who gets that renewable energy and energy efficiency will create millions of high-wage jobs that can't be outsourced. We need a commander in chief who understands how dangerous the status quo is to our economic and national security. We need a leader who appreciates how essential affordable energy is to our nation's families and that our economy is better served if we keep consumers' hard-earned dollars in their pockets and out of the hands of Big Oil.

I believe that Barack Obama would be that president and that leader. If elected, he will invest $150 billion over the next decade to catalyze private efforts to build a 21st-century clean-energy system based on wind, solar and advanced biofuels, as well as more efficient buildings and vehicles and a smarter electricity grid.

Obama will transfer a portion of Big Oil's exorbitant profits — which have exceeded $650 billion since 2001 — to provide families $1,000 to pay higher energy costs. A President Obama will not allow federal regulators to ignore excessive speculation and, possibly, manipulation as Wall Street artificially inflates oil-market prices.

I know Obama will do this because he understands oil dependency is at the heart of many challenges facing our nation today. I know because Obama walked the walk long before he began running for president. He wrote bipartisan legislation with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., to boost biofuels production and infrastructure. He helped increase vehicle fuel-economy standards for the first time in more than two decades.

I had the pleasure of working with Sens. Obama and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, to craft landmark legislation that would provide consumers up to $7,500 to buy plug-in electric cars, trucks or SUVs — vehicles that could get more than 100 miles per gallon. Our bipartisan bill would have also provided American automakers the ability to retool to make the cars of the future. If every household had one of these advanced-technology vehicles in their driveway, we would no longer be spending more than $700 billion a year to buy foreign oil from places such as Venezuela, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Unfortunately, in each of the six times our bipartisan plug-in-electric vehicle incentives came before the Senate, Republican filibusters blocked the legislation. Every one of those six times, we needed Sen. John McCain's help to be one of the deciding votes. He didn't show up and those critical incentives didn't become law.

McCain's poor energy record does not stop there. He missed eight votes to extend expiring clean-energy tax incentives that would have ensured more than 100,000 green-collar jobs and installation of around $20 billion in new renewable-energy production capacity. McCain voted against making gasoline price gouging a federal crime and against home-heating assistance for low-income families.

It matters who is president. We've seen what happens when we have a president who believes oil companies are going to solve our nation's energy crisis, or thinks that with less than 2 percent of the world's oil reserves we can drill our way to energy independence or affect world oil prices.

I am supporting Barack Obama because I support real energy solutions, not gimmicks. I will vote for him because he understands our nation's future greatness and prosperity depend on alleviating our debilitating oil addiction and charting a clean-energy future. I will be campaigning for him because he will be willing to take on entrenched special interests and their lobbyists, not ask them to be his advisers. Barack Obama will bring the change that America so desperately wants and needs.