Mandate Renewable Energy First, mandate the increasing use of renewable energy. Only through mandation will we develop sufficient renewable energy resources to make a real dent in our environmental problems. Our greatest success in reducing pollution has come when we have legally required engineers to use their ingenuity to produce more efficient products. As a result, today's homes use half the energy per square foot as their predecessors. Refrigerators use 75 percent less energy.
Vehicles are twice as efficient.
When California enacted regulations that required an increasing number of zero emission vehicles it spurred more corporate investment in clean vehicles in the next five years than had occurred in the previous 75 years. We need to do for the supply side what we did on the demand side. We need a renewable energy standard. Interestingly, four years ago President Clinton proposed one, a 30 percent renewable oxygenate standard for transportation fuels. At that time, many in the environmental community refused to support that initiative because it was perceived as an ethanol mandate.