MANSFIELD — At a town hall event on Saturday,March 12, Republican presidential candidate John Kasich answered a question by Ohio Citizen Action member Jennifer Roddis.
Question:
Ohio saw benefits from energy standards adopted in 2008 that led to more jobs, less pollution and lower utility bills. Then the legislature instituted a clean energy freeze in 2014 and now we’ve got utility companies asking for rate hikes to prop up old coal and nuclear plants. Governor Kasich, what are you planning on doing to move our state and our country forward toward a clean energy future?
Answer:
Well, you know I’m the one Republican that said that we do have a problem with climate change…. and it’s made a lot people happy when I’ve said that. Um, but the fact is that I don’t know what impact humans are having, but I know we’re having some. Now this has been a battle and Dave Hall will tell you I have had a dust up and a skirmish with the legislature and young lady, let me explain to you what happened. The politicians set a goal that is unachievable. This man will pay higher utility costs and could face the fact that he has to lay people off because the goal cannot be achieved. How’d they come up with the goal? Just took it out of a hat. Sounds good. So what I told the business community and the legislature is let’s reset the goal to fit our economy because if you can’t achieve the goal you have to go out of state and buy power that costs more which drives up the cost for people that are involved in manufacturing. So I told – and this was the skirmish – because the legislature just kind of wanted to walk away from these standards. And I said no, we’re not going to do that, we’ll reset the standards. And they’re now working to come back with a standard that will fit Ohio’s economy because what I don’t think we have to do is to choose between a clean environment and put a bunch of people out of work. We can have a clean environment and keep people working if we do it the right way/we’re smart. So where are we headed in Ohio? Where should we head as a country? We need to develop these renewables. Solar power is really important to us. Wind power is very important. I have a plan to place a wind turbine in front of every legislative capitol in America to generate a heck of a lot more power from wind. (laughter and applause)
I believe in efficiency standards. That’s a tough one. Gorman is always worried about energy efficiency because the more efficient he is, the more money he saves, but we can’t pound him over the head and have him try to achieve something he can’t possibly do. The real exciting future is in battery technology. Cuz battery technology allows us to store power when sun doesn’t shine – when the solar and when the wind doesn’t blow with wind. We need geothermal.
You know we reduced emissions in Ohio by 30% in the last ten years. We’re making a lot of progress and we will reset it at a level that will be reasonable. Now I told the legislature – here’s what I told the. Ohio’s gonna be part of the national effort. That we’re gonna do our part to make sure we have a clean environment in a reasonable direction and a reasonable way. And that’s what we’re gonna get. Because you wanna know something? If they come back and they come up with some goofy plan, we’ll just go back to the 25% that’s not achievable. Cuz I’ve got leverage now. And I love these folks.
And we’ve got to make sure we come up with something reasonable and I think we will come up with something reasonable cuz the environment is important to us. So is the lake. You know this is another battle we had. I did not want the farmers to put the manure on frozen ground. I said we have to stop it because what it does is the runoff gets into the lake and creates algae blooms. And then we have problems with the lake. We spent a billion dollars cleaning up Lake Erie. We got a long way to go, but part of our problem is sins of the past. I tell ya, if you smoke cigarettes and you quit, your lings will clear… in 25 years. And the fact is that we’re paying for some of the sins of that lake. But I want you to understand that I believe that we ought to recognize all sources. Nuclear power. Natural gas, which we have some in Ohio. If we’re going to dig coal, we’re gonna have to clean it before we burn it. And we are. And I think these are the approaches we aught to take.
Let me say one more final thing. We all worry about manufacturing. Since I’ve been Governor, we are up over 60,000 manufacturing jobs in the state of Ohio. Over 60,000 which is unbelievable, OK? (applause) Now we want low priced energy, because if you want to have people bringing businesses back to our country, manufacturing back to our country, we have access to the North American market, and we have low energy prices and Jeff – What does low energy prices mean to you? … We have to think about all these things and we have to think of them in terms of our kids but at the same time we don’t want to leave these kids an environment we weren’t sensitive about. Cuz you can’t grow it back. We’re here to manage it, not worship it, and to make sure -and we’re making progress in this state – making it cleaner. And as President, of course I am committed to all this. And I can’t wait until we get battery technology.
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