President Barack Obama visited the campus of Georgetown University to speak on the nation’s energy security today, telling the crowd that “we meet here in tumultuous times.” The audience included U.S. DOE Secretary Steven Chu, USDA Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack, the mayor of Los Angeles, the mayor of Mesa, Ariz., a large crowd of Georgetown faculty and students, and many others. Just as Obama had said nearly a month earlier about the U.S.’ dependence on foreign-based fossil fuel, he told the crowd again today that he doesn’t want to leave the current U.S. energy situation to future presidents. To make sure that doesn’t happen, he spoke for nearly an hour on all of the clean energy areas the country could excel at, including advanced biorefineries.

Obama explained that over the next two years, the government will help break ground on four new biorefineries. “Just last week our Air Force used an advance biofuels blend to fly an F-22 Raptor faster than the speed of sound,” he said. “There’s no reason why we can’t have our cars do the same.” Renewable fuels from feedstocks like switchgrass, wood chips and other biomass, he said, should all continue to be developed. The reason, he pointed out, starts and ends with the cost of energy. “Here is the thing,” he said. “We have been down this road before. It was just three years ago that gas prices topped $4 a gallon.” At that time, he was running for president and all of the candidates, he said, were waving their three-point plans on how to reduce the price of gasoline. “Drill baby drill,” he said, “we were going through all of that.”

Although the cost of fuel did go down, much of the reason for it was the global recession and a general lack of demand for fuel. “Now that the economy is recovering, the demand is back up,” he said, pointing out that every time the price of a barrel of oil rises by $10, a gallon of gas goes up about 25 cents. The country will remain a victim of those price swings, he said, until we get serious about a long-term energy future.

As part of that future, Obama stated that the U.S. now has a goal of reducing oil dependence by a third by 2025. “Our best opportunities to enhance our energy security can be found,” he said, “in our own backyard.” Among the likes of natural gas, increased U.S. oil production (both on and off shore), wind, solar, and biomass-based renewable fuels and power, he also spoke about the need for clean energy investment in the U.S. “A clean energy standard can expand the scope of investment,” he said, adding that sacrifices in research and technology along with investment in clean energy is “not acceptable,” especially considering the U.S. has fallen to third place in global clean energy investments behind China and Germany. Nuclear Power is also not out of the question, he said. “We can’t simply take it off the table.”

The current administration is also committed now, he said, to a Clean Energy Standard, a goal of generating 80 percent of the country’s electricity from clean energy sources like biomass.

To end his speech on the country’s clean energy future and the pathways that will secure it, he directed his final statements at the students in the crowd. “Maybe some of you are kind of skeptical about solving this problem,” Obama said. “Everything I have seen from your generation convinces me otherwise.”