On Clean Energy
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REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
12:52 P.M. CDT THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. Thank you, Rich, for the great introduction. Thank you very much. Please, everybody have a seat. It is good to be back in Newton, and it's a privilege to be here at Trinity Structural Towers. I've got a couple of special thank yous that I want to make, because I've got a lot of old friends -- not old in years, but been friends for a long time now. First of all, your outstanding Governor, Chet Culver, please give him a big round of applause. (Applause.) His wonderful wife, Mari, I see over here. She's not on the card, but -- (applause.) My outstanding Secretary of Agriculture, who I plucked from Iowa, Tom Vilsack and his wonderful wife Christie Vilsack. (Applause.) We've got the Attorney General of Iowa, one of my co-chairs when I ran in the Iowa caucus and nobody could pronounce my name -- Tom Miller. (Applause.) My other co-chair, Mike Fitzgerald, Treasurer of Iowa. (Applause.) We got the Iowa Secretary of State, Mike Mauro. There he is. (Applause.) We've got your outstanding member of Congress who's working hard for Newton all the time, Leonard Boswell. (Applause.) And your own pride of Newton, Mayor Chaz Allen. (Applause.) There he is, back there. It's good to see you again, Chaz. It is terrific to be here -- and by the way, I've got a whole bunch of folks here who were active in the campaign, and precinct captains. And I just want to thank all of them for showing up, and to all the great workers who are here at this plant -- thank you. (Applause.) I just had a terrific tour of the facility led by several of the workers and managers who operate this plant. It wasn't too long ago, as Rich said, that Maytag closed its operations in Newton. And hundreds of jobs were lost. These floors were dark and silent. The only signs of a once thriving enterprise were the cement markings where the equipment had been before they were boxed up and carted away. Look at what we see here today. This facility is alive again with new industry. This community is still going through some tough times. If you talk to your neighbors and friends, I know they -- the community still hasn't fully recovered from the loss of Maytag. Not everybody has been rehired. But more than 100 people will now be employed at this plant -- maybe more, if we keep on moving. Many of the same folks who had lost their jobs when Maytag shut its doors now are finding once again their ability to make great products. Now, obviously things aren't exactly the same as they were with Maytag, because now you're using the materials behind me to build towers to support some of the most advanced wind turbines in the world. When completed, these structures will hold up blades that can generate as much as 2.5 megawatts of electricity -- enough energy to power hundreds of homes. At Trinity, you are helping to lead the next energy revolution. But you're also heirs to the last energy revolution. Think about it: roughly a century and a half ago, in the late 1950s [sic], the Seneca Oil Company hired an unemployed train conductor named Edwin Drake to investigate the oil springs of Titusville, Pennsylvania. Around this time, oil was literally bubbling up from the ground -- but nobody knew what to do with it. It had limited economic value and often all it did was ruin crops or pollute drinking water. Now, people were starting to refine oil for use as a fuel. Collecting oil remained time consuming, though, and it was back-breaking, and it was costly; it wasn't efficient, as workers harvested what they could find in the shallow ground -- they'd literally scoop it up. But Edwin Drake had a plan. He purchased a steam engine, and he built a derrick, and he began to drill. And months passed. And progress was slow. The team managed to drill into the bedrock just a few feet each day. And crowds gathered and they mocked Mr. Drake. They thought him and the other diggers were foolish. The well that they were digging even earned the nickname, "Drake's Folly." But Drake wouldn't give up. And he had an advantage: total desperation. It had to work. And then one day, it finally did. One morning, the team returned to the creek to see crude oil rising up from beneath the surface. And soon, Drake's well was producing what was then an astonishing amount of oil -- perhaps 10, 20 barrels every day. And then speculators followed and they built similar rigs as far as the eye could see. In the next decade, the area would produce tens of millions of barrels of oil. And as the industry grew, so did the ingenuity of those who sought to profit from it, as competitors developed new techniques to drill and transport oil to drive down costs and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. |
