MR. HARWOOD: Governor Huckabee, the federal government has spent years and billions of dollars promoting ethanol, but the result has been a glut of ethanol and gas prices that are still at record level. Wouldn’t it be better to just let the free market determine whether ethanol makes economic sense or not?
MR. HUCKABEE: I think ethanol and all biofuels are going to be an important part of the future energy needs of the country, but the accelerated pace at which we get there is critical for national security as well as for our own economic interest. The fact is, we keep talking about 15-, 20-, 30-year plans—that’s nonsense. If we don’t start saying we’ll do this within a decade, we’re never going to—ever going to get there, and we need to approach it the same way that a car does at the NASCAR pit stop: You rush in, you get it done because you have to. We’re in a race; we’re in a race for our lives against people who want to kill us. And a lot of the reasons that we are entangled in the Middle East is because our money buys their oil, that money ends up coming back to us in the way of Islamofascism terrorists.
We’ve got to come to the place where everything is on the table—nuclear, biofuels, ethanol, wind, solar—any and every thing this country can produce. We once had a president who said, “Let’s go to the moon in 10 years, ” and we were there in eight. And we did that when we started with a technology of bottle rockets when we got the thing launched. And we all saw that we can do it.
But we can’t do it when we create this sense of we’ll wait until another generation. We can’t wait till another generation. Instead of running it like NASCAR, we’ve been running it like taking the family station wagon in for letting Goobar and Gomer take a look at it when they get time under the shade tree. (Laughter. ) So it’s critical that for our own interest economically and from a point of national security, that we become energy independent and commit to doing it within a decade.
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