Condoleezza Rice – Ensuring a Sound Energy Future

Secretary Rice: Ensuring a sound energy future is one of the most critical challenges facing the world today. One of the most unexpected, indeed, disconcerting developments of recent years has been the warping effect that energy issues have had on the geopolitical landscape. Energy is truly a global challenge – making a decisive impact on issues as diverse as security, diplomacy, development, and climate change. No one nation can address the global energy crisis alone. We need to work together to seize new opportunities to develop cleaner and more efficient sources of energy and to prevent the global and rapidly growing demand for energy resources from generating unnecessary confrontation in the years ahead.
This is one of President Bush’s highest priorities, and he has identified five key goals that will drive our policies at home and serve as the beginning of our consultations with allies abroad. We seek: to diversify world energy sources through free, open, competitive markets; to encourage a variety of energy sources, including renewable and alternate fuels; to use energy wisely through efficiency and conservation; to expand strategic energy reserves; and to protect the world’s critical energy infrastructure.

With the President’s guidance, I have taken several steps to reorganize here at the State Department and to integrate energy issues more fully and comprehensively into our foreign policy. I have appointed a new Special Advisor and International Energy Coordinator, and recast the responsibilities of one of our under secretaries and our assistant secretaries to focus on this issue with renewed intensity. We are looking for new opportunities, identifying new partners, and working in new ways to tackle the energy challenge more effectively.

We’re off to a pretty good start. President Bush recently visited Brazil and launched a new partnership with the Brazilian Government in the area of biofuels. This agreement will transform the way we work together to promote a critical alternative energy source, deepening research and investment, helping developing countries in our hemisphere and beyond to fuel their growth, and working to enable more countries to supply energy for themselves and for others. The goal is to promote the democratization of energy – increasing the number of energy suppliers, which expands the market, boosts competition, and reduces the chance of supply disruption.

This kind of creative work is what we want to do in other parts of the world especially with our allies in Europe. I think we are approaching an inflection point in history when science, technology, policy and free markets are all converging on new approaches to supply affordable, reliable and clean sources of energy. To seize this opportunity fully, we need to change the shape of the table, ensuring a seat not just for policymakers, but for leading scientists and most especially for the private sector. That is exactly what we are doing today, Americans and Europeans together, to spur new and innovative approaches.

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