GEN-WE Blog

Can you believe that Neil Armstrong’s short walk on the surface of the moon happened just forty years ago?  We as a country fulfilled President Kennedy’s bold challenge to marshal the resources and technical ingenuity needed to win the space race. I recently read this quote and it captures the new challenges we face today, “as we celebrate the anniversary of this historic human achievement, it’s important to remember that Kennedy’s ambition launched more than just a rocket — it heralded a new era of job creation, modern businesses, and leading-edge industries that would propel decades of American economic progress.” Phil Angelides former California State Treasurer.

Many times in the past the world has changed when ordinary people-the off ended masses being oppressed by those in power-got fed up with their condition and did something about it. The thing that will change our world today is the vote of the youth. We need the political will to blunt the power of the special interests, to elect those who are fit to serve and will focus on the best long-term interests of our country, and to vote out those who are obstructionist, short-sighted, and self-interested.

I believe Generation We, together with their supporters from other generations, can and will band together to create the greatest political force in the history of our nation. The fi rst step in the restoration of their birthright and the revival of the American dream: Project FREE, to technologically innovate the next generation of energy.

Inventing the next source of energy is the single greatest thing we can do to change the world for the better. There is nothing more important to our society. It is the call and legacy of Generation We and will be the greatest achievement in the history of mankind.

In 1962, John F. Kennedy set the seemingly impossible goal of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to Earth within a decade.

Kennedy said: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not          because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Kennedy was taking a page from the playbook of World War II. Like the Apollo moon-landing project, the Manhattan Project was a seemingly audacious technological challenge that an earlier generation of Americans had met, keeping us free by developing atomic weapons just months ahead of our Nazi enemies.

Today, an equally bold vision is required. We must immediately implement an Apollo- or Manhattan-like project to invent new sources of nonfossil fuel energy free from carbon emissions, based on hydrogen, fusion, or other means. The ultimate goal of this eff ort will be to take Americans “off the grid”-to free us from dependence on one or a few centralized sources of energy and instead to generate most energy at the point of need, without having to be wired. The goal is to create a power source generated within the place of consumption-the car, home, business, or factory. This will liberate us from the limiting factors introduced by long-distance transmission, which is an impediment to large-scale implementation of clean energy, such as wind and solar, and getting it into large markets quickly.