Obama's New Ad Promises 10 Years to Energy Independence----MAYBE

Gotta love Obama's new TV Spot. He promises a "fast track" to energy independence. That "fast track" is a $150 billion dollar investment over ten years to search to for energy alternatives. Gee where have I heard that "ten years" thing before? Oh I know ! One of the reasons for not wanting to drill for Oil is that it would be ten years before we would see any Oil (which is not true).

Lets compare the two. Senator Obama want to spend $150 billion and in the end of ten years you may have new energy, but since we are talking about research we may NOT. Even using the Senator's timetable, if we drill for Oil in ten years we can tell King Abdullah to stick his funny beard up a Camel's arse. Mmmmmmm Let me think about that one.

While I am thinking about that one, read what Factcheck.org says about Obama's slow track to a fast track and see the commercial, below:

Straining a Point

Announcer: 40 years ago it was missile silos and the Cold War.
Today, it’s cyber attacks…loose nukes…oil money funding terrorism.
Barack Obama understands our changing world.

On the Foreign Relations Committee, he co-sponsored a law to lock down loose nuclear weapons.

As president, he’ll rebuild our alliances to take out terrorist networks... And fast-track alternatives so we stop spending billions on oil from hostile nations.

New leadership for a changing world.

Obama: I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message.

As an example of Obama's supposed grasp of 21st-century security threats, the ad says he has "fast-track alternatives so we stop spending billions on oil from hostile nations." Pictured on screen are images of whirling windmills generating electricity, a solar array against a blue sky, and a couple of white-coated lab workers, one of them peering into a microscope.

The campaign says the ad is referring to Obama's long-standing proposal to spend $150 billion over 10 years for research into alternative energy – "to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial-scale renewable energy, invest in low-emissions coal plants, and begin the transition to a new digital electricity grid."

Spending that money may well be a good idea, but it's not our place to judge. We do object to describing a decade-long program, which in all probability could not even begin until sometime in late 2009, as a "fast track" to anything.

We also point out that even over the long term there can be no guarantee that just spending more for research will produce the sort of new fuels, vehicles or other breakthroughs that would actually reverse the growth of oil imports. Keep in mind that the U.S. imported the equivalent of 13.4 million barrels of oil per day last year, up nearly 17 percent from just five years earlier and 32 percent higher than in 1997. This is a huge problem that has been getting worse for a long time. Reversing it will not be "fast" or painless.

We repeat: We're not knocking Obama's 10-year plan. We cited it in our July 9 article as the reason that a Republican National Committee ad was wrong to say that Obama has "no new solutions" to the energy problem. We're not endorsing Obama's plan either. We are saying Obama is stretching the truth to call this decade-long program a "fast-track" alternative or to say that "we [will] stop spending billions on oil from hostile nations" as a result.

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Sources

Obama08 "OBAMA FOR AMERICA, “CHANGING WORLD,” :30 FOR TV" campaign fact sheet 17 July 2008.

U.S. Energy Information Administration, "U.S. Crude Oil and Petroleum Products Imports from All Countries (Thousand Barrels per Day)" Web site accessed 17 July 2008.