Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa addressing the Asia Society on Sustaining Economic Growth While Combating Social Challenges in Asia
As a result of that experience, that awakening, if you will, I came back to my state and suggested that our high school curriculum in particular needed to be far more rigorous and far more relevant than it had been. We needed to focus on foreign language. We needed to focus on science. We needed to focus on math. That trip profoundly impacted the education of literally tens of thousands of children in the state of Iowa....
If China is, as expected, going to increase its energy usage by a 150 per cent in ten years and India is going to project a 200 per cent increase -- and only a third of the homes in India have electricity -- and China and India are going to add seven hundred million cars to the world's car fleet in the next couple of decades, it is pretty clear that we are on a collision course as it relates to energy....
There are many Americans who are concerned about the competition, the global economic competition. I hear it a lot from workers. They're worried, they're concerned, they're anxious. And I fear that worry and anxiety and concern may translate itself into policies that shut us off from the rest of the world, that don't allow us to develop friendships and relationships with China and India and to continue to extend those relationships. So it is important for America to create an economy that doesn't necessarily compete. Energy security is a way to do that....
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