No offense intended, but he's been on this since December 2003:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/122203A.shtmlUpon arrival at the school, Senator Kerry inspected the hybrid car the students were constructing, and then sat down with them in their classroom. A portion of the comments he made are below:
JK: After you get out of school here, after you finish college, most of you are going to be looking around asking, 'How am I going to find a job that is going to excite me and do some good?' I believe that one of the great possibilities for your generation is to make America safer ? safer in terms of our dependency on oil from the Middle East, from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, etcetera, but also safer in terms of our health and our long-term future on this planet.
Give me a show of hands: How many of you have studied global warming? Almost all of you. How many of you believe, after studying it, that global warming is a serious issue? All of you. How many of you think we're doing anything about it? None of you. There you go. And you're right, we?re not doing anything about it. We're going backwards.
One of the biggest contributors to global warming is carbon dioxide, in addition to sulfur dioxide, mercury and so forth. All the ice core studies and all of the analysis - there are 1,500 scientists at the United Nations, all of whom have agreed that this is a serious issue. 160 nations worked for ten years to come up with a solution, and the United States under George Bush was the first country in the world to say, 'To hell with all of you, we're walking away from the solution, we're declaring it dead.' In the last weeks, some of President Bush?s friends were working hard in Washington to get $50 billion of subsidies for oil and gas drilling instead of helping you get better batteries for that car out there, so you can do more research into electric cars, so we can begin to do some of the things we need to do to clean up our air, water, you name it.
This is your future. This is real stuff. It really wasn't so long ago that I was sitting where you are sitting, and I was probably daydreaming half the day away, trying to figure out what to do with my life like a lot of you are. And then, after college, along came a war, and I wound up fighting in it, and a lot of young students got active in politics. The first speech I ever gave in politics, I was exactly the age some of you are here today. This is when it begins. So you all can help us make a difference.
God only gave the United States of America three percent of the world's oil reserves. That's all we have. We import almost 60% of our oil. Saudi Arabia has 46% of the world's oil reserve, and we have three. All of the Middle East has 65% of the world's oil reserves. So we are very dependent on an unstable area, and on relationships we don?t particularly like, and I don't care how smart you are, there is no way you can figure out a way for the United States of America to drill it's way out of this predicament. We have to invent our way out of it. I think it's time we got about the business of really trying to do that.
So I'm going to create a $20 billion energy conservation trust fund. I'm going to create a hydrogen institute, where one of you may wind up working after you graduate. Which one of you said you wanted to be an electrical engineer? There you are. You could go to work at that hydrogen institute, and help us discover - it may not be hydrogen, but there is something out there that is going to be the clean energy source for the future and for your generation. We?ve got to start finding it.
That's why I'm here. That's why I'm running for President. That's why I want to talk to all of you today. Can we open this up? Can I get some questions?
STUDENT: Global warming is pretty much, like, the most important issue for me. We've denied it's a problem for so long that it?s now this huge problem. You said this is one of the reasons you want to be President. What is your record as far as environmental stuff?
JK: I'm happy to share that with you. I have the strongest environmental record of anyone who is running for President. I began my involvement with the environment, it was pretty much against my will, when my mom got me up at four in the morning and dragged me out for a so-called nature walk. She told me to stop and listen, and I did, and I heard things I hadn't heard and saw things that I hadn't seen. She began to explain all of that to me, and I've never forgotten it, because that connection is what started it.
When I came back from Vietnam, I became involved in Earth Day. This was 1970, and then I was chairman of Earth Day in New England in 1990. We actually painted Storrow Drive biodegradable green, and we had hundreds of booths up and down the Charles River showing people what the technologies of the future could do.
I've been chairman of the Oceans Committee in the Senate. I've written our fisheries laws, I've written our plastics pollution laws, our marine mammal protection laws, our flood insurance laws, our coastal zone management laws. I was in Rio for the Earth Summit in 1990. I was at Buenos Aires, Kyoto, The Hague for the global warming conferences. I've helped negotiate with the less developed countries on those issues. I led the fight to stop Newt Gingrich from literally killing the Clean Air Act. I led the fight as a Lieutenant Governor to make acid rain a national issue, and it's now in the Clean Air Act. I led the fight to stop the drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I come to this race with a long and passionate record of caring about the environment.
Sometimes in America, the environment becomes a really bad discussion. People like George Bush and his friends will say, 'You have a choice. You can have a job, or you can have a clean environment.' Have you ever heard that argument? Jobs or environment, right? It's a false choice. Cleaning up the environment can be jobs. In Massachusetts, the fastest-growing part of our economy is environmental companies that do clean-up of toxic waste and chemicals, and to consult with companies so they don?t spit out dirty water and the like.
I'm convinced that a good President can help bring the country together in a way that doesn't lose us jobs, and in a way that helps create a better future, and that?s why I?m running. That's why I'm here.
...more...
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
