WIKIMEDIA, LEONARD G.The United States should establish a $2 billion energy security trust fund dedicated to fueling research into technologies that would result in a new generation of cars and trucks that run on clean energy, President Barack Obama announced at Argonne National Laboratory last week (March 15).
“The only way to break this cycle of spiking gas prices—the only way to break that cycle for good—is to shift our cars entirely, our cars and trucks, off oil,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported Obama saying to about 400 people in the lab’s Center for Nanoscale Materials. “It’s not just about saving money; it’s also about saving the environment. It’s also about national security. . . . Our reliance on oil makes us way too dependent on other parts of the world, many of which are very volatile.”
The money for the trust fund, which Obama mentioned in his last State of the Union address, would come from selling leases to drill oil and gas on public lands over the next 10 years.
