President Clinton: Why I Support Proposition 87 and Why the Oil Companies are Wrong--The Complete Speech Delivered at UCLA
[The entire speech of President Clinton, based on a court reporter's transcript can be read on the California Progress Report at President Clinton's speech on Prop 87. This is a very lengthy, but very powerful speech. Proposition 87 has been the subject of over $100 million in campaign expenses pro and con, a record for California.]
First-- thank you. Let me say, first of all,I would like to thank Madam President for that great introduction.
I want to thank you all for coming, thank my long time friend, Steve Bing, for his leadership role in this, and Chad Griffin for heading this campaign. I love this campus and I'm glad to be back here.
California is being given an opportunity and an obligation to do something remarkable to save the planet and improve our national security and create the next generation of good jobs for the American people. That's what Prop 87 represents to me. The Apollo program would never have gotten off the ground if it hadn't been for California. The personal computer was born here. I could give example after example after example after example where you have always led the way.
But California, because so many people want to live here, because it is a picture of 21st century America, it is also going to have always more challenges than other places. You're dangerously dependent on unstable sources of oil, your air is still too polluted, with all the risks that carries, and there is a lot of money here, and too much of it is being directed to trying to beat Prop 87.
The great French writer Victor Hugo once wrote a line that Martin Luther King, when I was your age, quoted over and over and over again: There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. It is also true, however, that there is nothing so dangerous as an idea whose time has come and gone but there is still a lot of money and power behind it and people don't want to let go. We have got to let go of the greenhouse gas emitting dependence on oil and coal and
(inaudible) economy.
Prop 87 will move California toward energy independence with cleaner fuels, with wind and solar power. There are people who don't believe you can do it. I do. Look at Brazil. Don't you think you can do it if they did it? They run their cars on ethanol.
Soon every single car there will have to be able to run 100 percent on ethanol or 50/50 or on gasoline. In that never-to-come day when it's cheap again, and the ethanol is one-third cheaper than gasoline, this will save the people of California money, not cost them money. I think it's a pretty good investment for just one vote.
Now, I know the oil companies have trotted out some economists in their ads. But let me ask you something: If they really thought you were going to pay for this, would they be spending all that money trying to convince you to vote against it? You need to know that California is the only state in America without any kind of extraction fee on its natural resources on oil.
I come from a state, Arkansas, where we had an oil and gas severance tax. It never makes any difference in the price. It's set in the market. There are plenty of states with very, very high severance taxes, much higher than Prop 87 would impose here, that have less expensive gasoline. Believe me, this -- all this campaign is a ruse. This is designed to slow down America's transformation to a clean, independent, energy economy.