BUSH: Thank you for that warm welcome. First, I want to thank my
friend Norm Coleman. What a great leader he is for St. Paul.

He’s a very good friend. I think it’s very important for you all to
know that when Norm calls over there to Washington, I’ll answer the
phone.

Traveling with me today are two of my Cabinet officers. First, from
the state of Michigan, the Energy Secretary Spence Abraham.

And the EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman.

I appreciate John’s invitation to be here and I want to thank the
Capital City Partnership for giving me the chance to come and deliver
a major policy address to the nation.

I’m also pleased to be in the home of the mighty Minnesota Twins.

Their cost per win is astounding.

It serves as a good example of what frugality can do for the nation.

But I’m not here to talk about baseball. The Twin Cities are a great
place to discuss America’s energy challenge. Minneapolis-St. Paul
grew up as a mighty milling and transportation center because of the
power of the Mississippi River. Your history was built on energy that
was abundant and affordable and reliable. So too will be this nation’s
energy future.

I invite you to think with me about that future. I had an early look at
the future this morning right here in St. Paul. I toured a plant that
harnesses the best of new technology to produce energy that is
cleaner and more efficient and more affordable.

The plant boils enough water to heat 146 major office buildings in
downtown St. Paul. Not a bit of energy is wasted, not even the
waste. The excess heat generated as the water boils is captured and
used to create steam, which generates still more electricity to power
pumps and to deliver heat.

The plant is a model of energy efficiency. It is also a model of energy
diversity. It uses conventional fuels like oil and natural gas and coal,
and renewable fuels like wood chips. And the plant is a model of
affordability. While other energy prices rise, District Energy has not
raised its heating and cooling rates in four years.

We’re beginning to see the power of the future, not only in office
buildings, but also in our homes and our cars.

This spring the Sustainable Buildings Industry Council showcased a
solar powered home so advanced that it actually produces more
energy than it uses. And some Americans are already driving hybrid
cars that can convert to battery power to reduce emissions and get
up to 70 miles a gallon of gas. These are our early glimpses of a
future in which Americans will meet our energy needs in ways that
are efficient, clean, convenient and affordable.

The future is achievable if we make the right choices now. But if we
fail to act, this great country could face a darker future, a future that
is unfortunately being previewed in rising prices at the gas pump and
rolling blackouts in the great state of California. These events are
challenging what had become a fact of life in America: The routine,
everyday expectation that when you flick on a light switch, the light
will come on. Californians are learning, regrettably, that sometimes
when you flick on the light switch, the light does not come on at any
price.

I’m deeply concerned about the impact of blackouts on the daily
lives of the good people of the state of California, and my
administration is committed to helping California.

We’re helping right now by expediting permits for new power
production and by working as good partners to reduce our electricity
at federal facilities, especially during the peak periods this summer.

My administration has developed a sound national plan to help meet
our energy needs this year and every year. If we fail to act on this
plan, energy prices will continue to rise.

For two decades, the share of the average family budget spent on
energy steadily declined. But since 1998, it has skyrocketed by 25
percent, and that’s a hardship for every American family.

If we fail to act, Americans will face more and more widespread
blackouts. If we fail to act, our country will become more reliant on
foreign crude oil, putting our national energy security into the hands of
foreign nations, some of whom who do not share our interests.

And if we fail to act, our environment will suffer, as government
officials struggle to prevent blackouts in the only way possible, by
calling on more polluting emergency backup generators and by
running less-efficient old power plants too long and too hard.
America cannot allow that to be our future, and we will not.

To protect the environment, to meet our growing energy needs, to
improve our quality of life, America needs an energy plan that faces
up to our energy challenges and meets them.

Vice President Cheney and many members of my Cabinet spent
months analyzing our problems and seeking solutions. The result is a
comprehensive series of more than 100 recommendations that light
the way to a brighter future through energy that is abundant and
reliable, cleaner and more affordable.

The plan addresses all three key aspects of the energy equation:
demand, supply and the means to match them.

First, it reduces demand by promoting innovation and technology to
make us the world leader in efficiency and conservation.

Second, it expands and diversifies America’s supply of all sources of
energy -- oil and gas, clean coal, solar, wind, biomass, hydropower
and other renewables, as well as safe and clean nuclear power.

Third and finally, the report outlines the ways to bring producers and
consumers together by modernizing the networks of pipes and wires
that link the power plant to the outlet on the wall.

Our new energy plan begins with a 21st century focus on
conservation. The American entrepreneurial system constantly invents
ways to do more with less. We pack more and more computing
power on to a chip. We carry more and more messages over a cable
and we squeeze more and more power out of a barrel of oil or a
cubic foot of natural gas. A new refrigerator you buy today, for
example, uses 65 percent less electricity than one that was made 30
years ago. Overall, we use 40 percent less energy to produce new
goods and services than we did in 1973. But this steady
improvement slowed in the 1990s.

Our energy plan will speed up progress on conservation where it has
slowed and restart it where it has failed.

It will underwrite research and development into energy-saving
technology. It will require manufacturers to build more
energy-efficient appliances. We will review and remove the obstacles
that prevent business from investing in energy-efficient technologies
like the combined heat and power system I toured this morning.

Conservation does not mean doing without. Thanks to new
technology, it can mean doing better and smarter and cheaper.

Innovation helps us all make better choices. Smart electric meters
can tell homeowners how they’re using power and how they might
reduce their monthly electric bill. Sensors can turn off lights when
people leave a room. And innovation is bringing us transmission wires
that waste less of the electricity they carry from plant to home or to
office.

Conservation on a wide scale takes more than good ideas. It takes
capital investment. Outdated buildings and factories have to be
upgraded or replaced to consume less and pollute less.

And here, some well-intentioned regulations have created a
catch-22. Procedures intended to protect the environment have too
often blocked environmental progress by discouraging companies
from installing newer and cleaner equipment.

Wise regulation and American innovation will make this country the
world’s leader in energy efficiency and conservation in the 21st
century.

Our goal is to use less additional energy to fuel more economic
growth, and I know we can do so. I also know that conservation is
the result of millions of good choices made across our land on a daily
basis.

Yet even as we grow more efficient, even as this nation achieves the
objectives in conservation, we will always require some additional
energy to power our expanding economy. We learned that from the
California experience.

California has been an impressive conservation leader. It is the
second most energy efficient state in the union, but California has not
built a major new power plant in a decade. And not even the most
admirable conservation effort could keep up with the state’s demand
for electricity.

So the second part of our energy plan will be to expand and diversify
our nation’s energy supplies. Diversity is important, not only for
energy security, but also for national security.

Over-dependence on any one source of energy, especially a foreign
source, leaves us vulnerable to price shocks, supply interruptions
and, in the worst case, blackmail.

America, today, imports 52 percent of all our oil. If we don’t take
action, those imports will only grow. As long as cars and trucks run
on gasoline, we will need oil, and we should produce more of it at
home.

New technology makes drilling for oil far more productive, as well as
environmentally friendly than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

Here is the result of one study. And I quote, "Improvements over the
past 40 years have dramatically reduced industry’s footprint on the
fragile tundra, minimized waste produced and protected the land for
resident and migratory wildlife." Those aren’t my words. Those are
the words of the Department of Energy study conducted during my
predecessor’s administration.

Advanced new technologies allow entrepreneurs and risk-takers to
find oil and to extract it in ways that leave nature undisturbed. Where
oil is found underneath sensitive landscapes, rigs can stand miles
away from the oil field and tap a reservoir at an angle.

And Arctic sites like ANWR, we can build roads of ice that literally
melt away when summer comes and the drilling then stops to protect
wildlife. ANWR can produce 600,000 barrels of oil a day for the
next 40 years. What difference does 600,000 barrels a day make?
Well, that happens to be exactly the amount we import from Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq.

We’re not just short of oil, we’re short of the refineries that turn oil
into fuel. So while the rest of our economy is functioning at 82
percent of capacity, our refineries are gasping at 96 percent of
capacity.

A single accident, a single shutdown can send prices of gasoline and
heating oil spiraling all over the country. The major reason for
dramatic increases in gasoline prices today is the lack of refining
capacity, and my plan gives the needed flexibility and certainty so
refiners will make the investments necessary to expand supply by
increasing capacity.

And America needs to generate more electricity. The Department of
Energy estimates that America will need between 1,300 and 1,900
new power plants over the next two decades. A high-tech economy
is a high electricity consumption economy. Even the sleekest laptop
needs to plug into an electrical outlet from time-to-time.

More than half of the electricity generated in America today comes
from coal. If we weren’t blessed with this natural resource, we would
face even greater shortages and higher prices today. Yet coal
presents an environmental challenge.

So our plan funds research into new clean coal technologies. It calls
on Congress to enact strict new multi-pollutant legislation to reduce
emissions from electric power plants. My administration’s energy
plan anticipates that most new electric plants will be fueled by the
cleanest of all fossil fuels, natural gas. Our nation and our hemisphere
are rich in natural gas resources, but our ability to develop gas
resources has been hampered by restrictions on natural gas
exploration. Our ability to deliver gas to consumers has been
hindered by opposition to construction of new pipelines that today
are more safe and more efficient.

I will call on Congress to pass legislation to bring more gas to market
while improving pipeline safety and safeguarding the environment.

America should also expand a clean and unlimited source of energy,
nuclear power. Many Americans may not realize that nuclear power
already provides one-fifth of this nation’s electricity, safely and
without air pollution. But the last American nuclear power plant to
enter operation was ordered in 1973.

In contrast, France, our friend and ally, gets 80 percent of its
electricity from nuclear power. By renewing and expanding existing
nuclear facilities, we can generate tens of thousands of megawatts of
electricity at a reasonable cost without pumping a gram of
greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

New reactor designs are even safer and more economical than the
reactors we possess today. And my energy plan directs the
Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency to
use the best science to move expeditiously to find a safe and
permanent repository for nuclear waste.

Our energy plan also supports the development of new and
renewable sources of energy.

It recommends tax credits to homeowners who invest in solar homes
and to utilities that build wind turbines or harness biomass and other
environmentally friendly forms of power.

It removes impediments to the development of hydroelectricity. It
proposes incentives to buy new cars that run on alternative fuels like
ethanol that consume less oil and, therefore, pollute less.

It supports research into fuel cells, a technology of tomorrow that can
power a car with hydrogen, the most common element in the
universe, and emit only steam as a waste product.

In all of these ways, we will expand the diversity or our energy
supply. But as with conservation, new energy supply alone is not the
whole answer. There is a third element we must address: modernizing
the network that delivers the supply to the point of demand.

In 1919, a young U.S. Army officer was ordered to lead a truck
convoy westward across our country. He was astonished to discover
that the journey took 62 days. His name was Dwight David
Eisenhower. And the memory of this bumpy, transcontinental ride led
to the creation of a modern transportation system.

Today, our electrical system is almost as bumpy as our highways
were 80 years ago. We have chopped our country into dozens of
local electricity markets, which are haphazardly connected to one
another.

For example, a weak link in California’s electrical grid makes it
difficult to transfer power from the southern part of the state to the
north, where the blackouts have been worse.

Highways connect Miami with Seattle, phone lines link Los Angeles
and New York, it is time to manage our interstate highway and
phone systems with an interstate electrical grid.

And here, too, technology will make a big difference. Electricity
markets used to be localized because wires could not carry electrical
current over long distances. More and better wires can efficiently
ship power across the country, reducing the threat of local blackouts
or outages. And it’s just not our electricity delivery system that has
fallen behind.

The energy report projects that natural gas consumption will rise
rapidly as electric utilities make greater and greater use of this
environmentally friendly fuel. We will need newer, cleaner and safer
pipes to move these larger quantities of natural gas -- up to 38,000
new miles of pipe and 263,000 miles of distribution lines.

We’ll also need to recognize the energy potential of our neighbors,
Canada and Mexico, and make it easier for buyers and sellers of
energy to do business across our national borders.

And finally, we must work to build a new harmony between our
energy needs and our environmental concerns.

Too often Americans are asked to take sides between energy
production and environmental protection, as if people who revere the
Alaska wilderness do not also care about America’s energy future;
as if the people who produce America’s energy do not care about
the planet their children will inherit. The truth is, energy production
and environmental protection are not competing priorities.

They’re dual aspects of a single purpose: to live well and wisely upon
the earth. Just as we need a new tone in Washington, we also need a
new tone in discussing energy and the environment; one that is less
suspicious, less punitive, less rancorous. We’ve yelled at each other
enough. Now it’s time to listen to each other and to act.

And it’s time to act.

The energy plan I lay out for the nation harnesses the power of
modern markets and the potential of new technology.

It looks at today’s energy problem and sees tomorrow’s energy
opportunity.

It addresses today’s energy shortages and shows the way to
tomorrow’s energy abundance.

I have great faith in our country’s ability to solve the energy problem,
and our energy plan shows the way. But most of all, I have great faith
in the American people, our land’s ingenuity, our innovation. Our
entrepreneurial spirits is this country’s greatest of all resources. And
thank God, they are never in short supply.

God bless.