Capital accumulation in the middle. One of the important steps that your administration signed into law was just making it easier and more automatic to save in your 401k plan. Now the majority of Companies Default people into savings and default into auto escalation in saving policies. Next step is take nearly half the population that doesnt have savings accounts at work and give them access to automatic ira. Thats an idea that came out of the Heritage Foundation working together with brooking. Theres a lot we can do to focus on a positive story to create well. For most families, homes are principle source of wealth. We have a bipartisan efforts to put people in houses from the tax codes and regulatory. How do we go back look at housing policy in a more reasonable way . We want people in homes. Its an important asset for most americans. How do we rejuvenate the Housing Market without creating the same we had before . First of all we should be reforming Housing Finance system, should be
[inaudible conversations] are we ready to go . Great. Welcome to todays launch of the council on Foreign Relations and the pendant Task Force Report north america time for a new focus to rid the cochairs hear Robert Zoellick of course, somebody who i think last time i interviewed you we were both in sudan. So thank you very much. Shannon oneil, director and cochair, David Petraeus i think last summer i into the jew we were in iraq. So its good to be in a slightly more tame environment. I want to get right to the question of why now, why this . Reading newspapers, the attention, the focus of this administration clearly on Foreign Policy, current prices the in the middle of these, please to the idea of a pivot to asia and effectively what youre talking about in the Task Force Report is a pivot to north america. So why . Its time for a new focus. The reason is when you come back to it, our number one and two trading partners are our two neighbors, not other countries or regions of the wor
Seriously affected today by Climate Changes caused in part by escalating Carbon Pollution. So whats the answer to this problem and how does it relate to the Keystone Pipeline . We have to continue to move toward a cleaner Energy Economy. We cant throw the brake on the use of fossil fuels. That would be unrealistic and would hurt our economy. As governor of virginia, i supported building a stateoftheart coal plant in exchange for converting a plant that predated the Clean Air Act to natural gas. I support development of offshore energy. We can use a phased approach to produce energy cleaner tomorrow than today, reducing pollution caused by Energy Sources through innovation and creating jobs. And guess what, mr. President . As you know, thats exactly what were doing. Wind power involves no Carbon Pollution and its the Fastest Growing Energy Source in america, cleaner tomorrow than today. Utility scales solar electricity output has increased 23fold in the last decade. Cleaner tomorrow tha
Going in a helicopter over this with the epa administrator right after it happened. Stunning. Now. The company has come in and, you know cleaned up most of what was there. We still cant fish. People along the river cant use their property their back yards. This is going to take tens of years to clean up. You can go to the other side of the state where we have in detroit mounds of whats called Petroleum Coke from tar sands that was sitting on the detroit river, now not only blowing into the river, blowing into the school neighborhoods, churches of the southwest side of detroit. Now, thanks to my colleague senator peters whos now with us and i was proud to join with him, that pet cokes not sitting there anymore, but it was pet coke from tar sands that blew into huge airreas of detroit. And now we have madam chair, a real concern in the straits of mackinaw going across our beautiful state from the upper to lower peninsula where we have a very old pipeline. And, again concerns about the fa
Us is the authorization of construction of pipeline infrastructure, the keystone xl, a project that in my view and i think the view of certainly all on this side and several others on the other side is important to our energys infrastructure system and how we work to build that out. I dont think its any breaking news here today, but i do believe that our climate is changing. I have said that. I dont agree that all the changes are necessarily due solely to human activity. Ive come from a state where we can see the change. Id welcome all of my colleagues one day to join me in alaska on a walking tour of what we call the permafrost tunnel, basically a tunnel bored straight back into the bank of a hill in fairbanks, pretty much in the interior part of the state where it is truly a walk back in time 30,000 years, where through the ice lenses that you see that you can touch, that you can smell in this tunnel, in this cave, you can see what has happened over the course of thousands tens of th