American-Made Energy Offers Chance for Economic Boom

by: Bob Olson for Congress

Sun Jan 27, 2008 at 17:26:26 PM CST

By Bob Olson

Short-term economic stimulus plans in Washington are almost as plentiful as lobbyists. Everyone seems to have at least one: the president, those who want to become president, representatives, senators and probably even a few interns in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

But all of these plans share a critical flaw: they're short-term. Extending unemployment benefits and providing tax rebates/other breaks to middle-income families is fine (and very necessary), but if we want to create the kind of sustainable, long-term recovery America needs we have to look further down the field.

Every great economic boom of the last century has followed some kind of major societal shift or technological advance-like the invention of the automobile at the turn of the 1900s, the migration to the suburbs in the middle of the 20th century or the commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s.

We have to capture that kind of magic again and we can. The answer is right here in Minnesota: renewable energy.

Our business community, farmers, universities, state Legislature and Gov. Tim Pawlenty have been leaders in this critically important area. Now it's time for Congress and the president to follow.

By partnering with entrepreneurs and investing in American-made energy we can dramatically change the way we live for the better, strengthen our national security, clean up our environment and create well-paying American jobs.

Think about it this way: each day we send about $1.3 billion out of our country ($125 million of that to Saudi Arabia alone) for the oil we need to power our cars. At $3 a gallon, it costs more than $30 to gas up a small car and about $100 to fill up a pick-up truck.

Rather than exporting money from our economy and empowering dictators in the Middle East, we can work with farmers in Minnesota and the rest of the Midwest to produce more ethanol, cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel. This way, the money we pay at the pump will help create American jobs and the money we save will re-circulate in other sectors of our economy.

Today Minnesota is one of the leading producers of wind energy. But the turbines we're using to harness the power that blows across our state weren't made here. They're usually imported from Europe and India. For decades we've been watching our manufacturing base erode, but sustainable energy offers us a great chance to put steelworkers and other tradesmen back to work in Minnesota and across America.

Congress had a chance to take a step toward American-made energy when it passed the energy bill last year, but ultimately the provisions that moved us forward were stripped from the legislation after an intense lobbying effort by the oil industry (which stood to lose its huge tax breaks) and a veto threat from President Bush.

Now we have a second chance to get things right.

By implementing the renewable energy technologies available right here in Minnesota, we can dramatically reform our economy, stop poisoning our planet and end our reliance on the dictators in the Middle East who turn a blind-eye to terrorism. But we're not going to make these transformational changes with more of the same stale political leadership that has us still dependent on foreign oil almost 20 years after our first war in the Middle East.

It's time for leaders in Washington to accept that getting America off the oil standard is a challenge we cannot afford to shirk. America is better than that and we deserve a Congress that is, too.

Bob Olson, a St. Cloud resident, is a DFL candidate in the 6th Congressional District.