President Clinton: Why I Support Proposition 87 and Why the Oil Companies are Wrong--The Complete Speech Delivered at UCLA

And I want you to think about it, all of you students, not just from the point of view of climate change, but also our national security. Aren't you tired of financing both ends of the war on terror? And think about -- think about it from the point of view of our economic security. We are now in a period for the first time ever when we've had five years of economic growth, a 40-year high in corporate profits, five years of increasing worker productivity. So the people who are working for us are doing a better job every year, and yet wages are stagnant, poverty is going up among the working poor, and the people without health insurance that are working and their children are increasing.

Now, why is that? That is because we have not found this generation's new jobs. In my second term, for the first time in 20 years, wages were rising for a simple reason: Information technology exploded from the province of video games and dot-com companies into every aspect of the American economy and it created a huge number of new jobs everywhere. They were good-paying jobs and they lifted the wage levels of all Americans.

If you want to have an open economy, if you want us to continue to go to all parts of the world, if you want us to help lift up poor countries so they are working and still have good jobs when you finish at UCLA, when your counterparts are going into the work force all across this country, then every five to eight years we have to have a source of new jobs. This is a lay down. This will help to create the kind of jobs that will keep America strong and able to lead the word to peace and prosperity and security.

When I was here at UCLA just a couple of weeks ago to announce a partnership between my foundation and now 32 of the 40 biggest cities in the world including Los Angeles -- soon to be 36 of them -- to drastically lower greenhouse gas emissions in cities. And the commitment that I made when I went to work for this all over the world, on every continent, embracing all cultures, all religions, all racial and ethnic groups is that we would do this. In a way, that would improve the security, the sustainability, and the economic well-being of every single one of these cities on every continent on earth. That is what California can lead the way in doing.

And I cannot tell you how strongly I feel about this. The argument that this is going to raise your gas prices is just bogus. It's not so. All my public career before I become president -- and I'll say it again -- was spent in a state that used to have a lot of oil, still has a lot of natural gas. Nobody in the whole wide world ever thought that measly little extraction tax we had had anything to do with the price people paid for their natural gas or their gasoline. No one. The only way they can even put these ads up and make this argument is that you never had it, so you don't know. Take it from me. I've been there. I lived in a place that had it. It will not make a difference to the price, but it will make all the difference in your future. All the difference in your future.

With one vote you can make California America's leader in alternative fuels. I was just in upstate New York with Hillary the other day and we went into -- we went -- we went to a project supported by the New York State Environmental and Forestry University, the branch in northern New York. They are growing a fast-growing brand of willow tree that can be turned into biofuels that has a conversion ratio of 4 gallons of biofuels to one gallon of gasoline. These things are not expensive. We have this kind of biomass to make cellulosic ethanol all over America. It would increase income in rural America. It would increase income in rural California. It would stabilize the environment and improve our national security. I could give you example after example after example.

You see that windmill there? I was just in Denmark. Now listen to this: 20 percent of their electricity is generated from wind. In the last several years they have increased their economic output by 50 percent in Denmark. The economy had grown 50 percent in the last few years. Do you know how much the energy use has grown? Zero, nada, not a bit. Conservation, clean fuels, wind and solar -- we can change the world and give you the future you deserve. And anybody who doesn't understand the calamitous potential of climate change didn't see Al Gore's movie and hasn't looked at the facts.

Last year at the Annual Global Initiative I have at the beginning of the UN where we ask people to come and make contributions to fight climate change, to empower people to work their way out of poverty, to bridge the religious divides around the world, and deal with health crisis -- the last year the biggestcommitment that was made as made by Swiss Re, big European re-insurance company. They actually -- they insure insurance companies. So if insurance companies are tanking, they have their own insurance policies in case their losses exceed a certain amount, and they don't have enough money, to avoid bankruptcy.

Swiss Re made the biggest commitment,$400 million, to clean energy. Why? Because natural disasters caused by the disturbance of the weather in the last decade were triple what they had ever been for insurance losses. And that's only in the wealthy countries. In the poorer countries, most people aren't insured at all.

This is coming and we need to be ahead of the curve. So I know maybe I'm preaching to the saved here today, as we say at home, but you need to go out and talk to people about this. You have an election soon, you need a high turn out. You can't let people be afraid. Tell them there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, and nothing more damaging than an idea whose time has come and gone and people won't let go of it. Let go of the old energy economy.

Let go of the idea that you can't be rich without polluting the atmosphere. Let go.

I just want to make one other point that I think is really important, especially in California. There is another reason you should do this.There is a reason the American Lung Association and the Nurses Association and all the asthma and lung cancer experts are for Prop 87. You got an air quality problem here. It is the inevitable byproduct of your success as a place where people want to live combined with the way we all use energy. But it's given you the worst air quality in the country. At the age of two months babies in Los Angeles have already breathed enough toxins to reach the EPA's lifetime limit for cancer risk from dirty air. 95 percent of the people in California live in areas that don't meet federal and state standards.

What does that mean in the real lives of people? It means more asthma, more bronchitis, more lung cancer. It means heart disease, lung disease, and premature death. It means 21 and a half billion dollars in extra health care costs. It means too many young Californian's will be unable to live out the full lives that they deserve to have.

There are a lot of children that I met with their families earlier today who have asthma, like thousands of other children in California. They are paying the price for our addiction to oil, paying the price for America's lack of an energy policy, paying the price for record profits and under-investment by the oil companies in clean, independent energy. We owe it to them to take the first.

I've spent a lot of time -- now that I've reached a certain age and I have a grown child and have been in public life a long time, I spent a lot of time over the years with children with asthma. I'm tired of seeing kids gasp for breath, wondering if they will able to run outside on the play yard, wondering if they will be able to fulfill dreams of playing a sport, or riding a horse, or running a race, or just having a normal life. I don't believe the people who are against this proposition want those kids to suffer, it's just they give some other excuse so they can keep on doing what they have been doing. Just think what would have happened if the companies that have spent $100 million to beat this proposition had instead spent $100 million to become comprehensive energy companies instead of oil companies. What if there is a way for them to increase, not decrease, their profits? None of us are against them. I'd love to be an oil company executive today. I'd build it into the best energy company in the world. We would be investing in solar, we would be investing in wind, we would be investing in conservation, we would be investing in clean fuels. That's the answer to the oil companies: Make more money by helping to pave the way to the future, not hold on to an untenable, unsustainable, and dangerous past.

You need to go out and share this with other people who didn't come here. I hear some of you stayed up all night to get a place here today. Well, since you exerted that effort, surely you can exert a little more between now and election day to talk to the people who weren't here, who don't understand it's important enough to stay up all night for, who don't understand that the one night you stayed up all night could save you months or even years on your lives and the lives of the people you love and care for and want to build a future with, if you take the first step.

California has always led the way. It was the first state in America that had no racial group in the majority, where we were all in it together and knew it. It's a place where people reach across all their religious and cultural lines, it's a place full of positive interdependence. This crowd is a model for how I sorely wish the world would work. If you -- a place where the people believe that you can be proud of what is special about you and still respect what is different about someone else, a place where people believe that you really can find a way to respect your differences and still build a harmonious community.

You can't do any of that -- any of that -- unless we change the most basic thing about how we live and work together, where we get our energy, and how we use it. There is nothing more important.

Think of the children with asthma. Think of the instability and the impotence you feel knowing that every day we have to have a lifeline from places half a world away that could cut us off in a minute, or where the money we send might be diverted to destructive purposes. Think of how awful it is to turn out generation after generation of young people going into an economy that has high growth and flat wages and increasing poverty among working people. Think of how you could change it all, how you could make the air clean for the children, the economy secure and strong, the nation more safe from assault, and -- most important of all -- the planet is still here in a usable, sustainable, harmonious way for your own children and grandchildren.

All of that is at stake. America has to change. But you can lead the way. The charges against Prop 87 are not true, but the potential of it is staggering. Do what you have always done, claim the future.

Thank you and God bless you.