I Know Gretzky Was An Oiler But….

In a open meeting with reporters, President Obama, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the White House coordinator of energy and climate policy Carol M. Browner discussed the administrations energy policy. (Read full transcript here) Team Obama dropped the puck and then the hammer on Congressional Republicans.

Secretary Chu drops a hockey reference in the middle of the press conference saying:

….So this is an opportunity for the United States to say that’s where the puck is going to be — to quote Wayne Gretzky — 10 or 20 years from now this is where it’s going to be, so why don’t we meet in this new industrial revolution, meaning that we’re going to get energy, abundant energy, the clean energy. So we have the ability to lead….

President Obama: And I just want to point out my Secretary of Energy used a very cool Wayne Gretzky metaphor. (Laughter.)

MEDIA:  There still will be ice in the future is what you’re saying? (Laughter.)

Wayne Gretzky - In Oilers Jersey

Secretary Chu: You know, here’s this skinny kid who is arguably the greatest hockey player in the world. And they say how — and he says, I position myself on the ice. Well, how do you do it? I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been. And so for decades we’ve been trying to figure out how to — you know, this is where we wanted it — do we want it back to 1950? Well, it isn’t going to be back to 1950. And so this bill begins to say to America this is where it’s going to be and so why don’t we take the industrial lead on this.

How cool is must be to be a Nobel laureate and to be able to drop sports references. I know Gretzky played for the Oilers but I didn’t think I would hear his name dropped in a serious conversation about oil independence.

After the sports reference the President drops down the hammer on Republicans. This seems to be his administrations tact of the moment in dealing with Congressional Republicans. He is using this line of logic for both his health care and energy policy.

President Obama: Which I think is fascinating, because that tells me those guys are 16 years behind the times. I mean, here they are having an argument about the 1990s and we’re in 2009 — and they’re making the same argument on health care. They’re doing the same thing. They are fighting not even the last war, they’re fighting three wars ago.

The American people have moved forward. They are way ahead. And for all the fear-mongering I think that, as I said, there’s a recognition that the status quo is unsustainable. We have now an additional 15 to 20 years under our belts where we’ve seen energy prices continue with their volatility, the environmental consequences moved more rapidly than anybody had anticipated, our economy has not been strengthened — we’ve actually been — we’ve actually fallen behind other countries on this front. The same is true on health care, what we’ve seen is huge increases in health care costs, less satisfaction, decreases in quality.

And so we are not going to succeed by looking backwards. We’re going to succeed by moving forward. That’s what has always been true about America. Nobody ever looks back on American history and says — whether it was the transition from the agricultural era to the industrial era, whether it was the shift from the industrial era to the information era — nobody ever looks back on American history and says, boy, if folks had just kept things exactly the way they were, America would be wildly successful. Those arguments are always made. At every juncture in our history there has always been somebody who says: Be afraid of the future, this is a disaster, we can’t change. At every juncture.

But that’s not how we operate. What we do is we say, yes, the future is going to be tough, but we see opportunity there, along with challenge, and we’re going to meet it.

And it was interesting, just — because you’re talking about sort of I think a Republican congressional mind set that is looking backwards, because Republican governors and mayors have been largely supportive of all the steps we’ve taken on clean energy.

(Bolding in this quote taken from an article on the subject by Climate Progress)

Team Obama seem to have a nack for making thoughtful and logical arguments in a way everyone including sports fans can understand.