Weekly Address: Gas Prices & Energy Security

Weekly Address: Energy Security Can Only Come If We Invest in Cleaner Fuels and Greater Efficiency

WASHINGTON – In his weekly address, President Obama discussed his strategy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and secure our nation’s energy future.  When the President was elected, America imported eleven million barrels of oil a day.  This week he announced a bold, but achievable goal of cutting this number by one-third by 2025.
 
To achieve this goal we will increase responsible domestic oil and gas development in the short term, while also increasing efficiency and harnessing new technologies including biofuels, natural gas, and advanced batteries.  And through the Clean Fleets Partnership, large companies, such as UPS, FedEx, AT&T, Verizon, and PepsiCo, will help boost the market for clean fuels by switching their fleets over to electric and alternative vehicles.
 
The audio of the address is and video of the address will be available online at www.whitehouse.gov at 6:00 a.m. ET, Saturday, April 2, 2011.

Remarks of President Barack Obama
As Prepared for Delivery
Landover, Maryland
April 2, 2011

Hello, everybody.  I’m speaking to you today from a UPS customer center in Landover, Maryland, where I came to talk about an issue that’s affecting families and businesses just like this one – the rising price of gas, and what we can do as a country to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
 
This week, I released a Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future.  It’s a strategy to reduce the oil we import from around the world, and to make our economy stronger at home.  Part of this strategy involves increasing our oil exploration right here in America.  In fact, our oil production last year reached its highest level since 2003, and we want to encourage more safe, responsible drilling where we can.
 
But the truth is, drilling alone is not a real strategy to replace our dependence on foreign oil.  And that’s because even though America uses 25 percent of the world’s oil, we currently have only about 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.  Even if we used every last drop of all the oil we have, it wouldn’t be enough to meet our long-term energy needs.  So, real energy security can only come if we find ways to use less oil – if we invest in cleaner fuels and greater efficiency.
 
That’s what we’ve been doing since I took office.  For example, we secured an agreement from all the major auto companies to raise the fuel efficiency of their cars and trucks.  So if you buy a new car, the better gas mileage is going to save you about $3,000.  Altogether, this will save us about 1.8 billion barrels of oil as a country.
 
We need to build on this progress.  As we make our cars and trucks more efficient, we’ve got to harness new technologies to fuel our vehicles with everything from biofuels to natural gas to advanced batteries.  And the good news is, these technologies aren’t science fiction anymore.  They exist today.  Already, American car companies are producing electric vehicles that use little or no gas.  And innovators across America are testing new products that hold incredible promise not just for new vehicles, but for countless new jobs.
 
To help jumpstart this market, the federal government has doubled the number of clean energy vehicles that we have in our fleet.  In the next few years, we’re going to switch the entire fleet over.  And I’m here at UPS because it’s not just the government getting in on the action.  Companies like UPS, FedEx, AT&T, Verizon, and PepsiCo – firms with some of the largest fleets in the country – are switching to more efficient vehicles.  And through our Clean Fleets Partnership, driven not by government, but by business, more companies are going to be switching to electric and alternative vehicles, too – not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it’s good for their bottom lines.
 
The goal is simple.  When I was elected to this office, America imported 11 million barrels of oil a day.  Through these and other steps, by a little more than a decade from now, we will have cut that by one third.  And by doing so, we’re going to make our economy less vulnerable to wild swings in oil prices.  We’re going to use cleaner sources of energy that don’t imperil our climate.  And we’re going to spark new products and businesses all over the country by tapping America’s greatest renewable resource: our ingenuity.
 
We know how important that is. This week, we learned that the economy added 230,000 private sector jobs last month.  That makes 1.8 million private sector jobs created in the last thirteen months.  That’s a good sign.  But we have to keep up the momentum, and transitioning to a clean energy economy will help us do that.  It will ensure that the United States of America is home to the jobs and industries of tomorrow.  That’s how we’ll win the future.  And that’s how we’ll leave our children an America that is more secure and prosperous than before.
 
Thanks, and have a great weekend.

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