Welcome Remarks
1
Idaho Falls Mayor
Rebecca Casper
Standing before an audience of academics,
business leaders and policymakers — Idaho
Falls Mayor Rebecca Casper encouraged attendees to loosen their ties, enjoy Idaho’s laid
back atmosphere, and participate in a downto-earth discussion about energy policy.
“The task we have before us is very bold
and very simple — we are supposed to
envision what a good strong energy policy
scenario would look like in our region in the
year 2040,” she said. “Once we envision that,
we have to figure out how we get from here
to there.”
The mayor said before them is the everelusive puzzle of establishing a national and
regional energy solution. To solve it, it’s
important to look toward the future, rather
than dwell on the present.
“We all know there is no shortage of current problems to be solved,” Casper said.
“(But) to accomplish our goal, we must lift
our chins and look to the far distance horizon
of 2040.”
“We hope to establish a very bright light
— a pathway … for policymakers to follow.”
Casper remarked the role of policymakers
was not to invent solutions, but to find them,
champion them and then chart a course to
their success.
“Typically they turn to experts to recommend solutions. When experts achieve
consensus, policymakers can easily champion that solution,” she said. “But without
broad consensus from experts success is very
elusive. Championing solutions is an art that
not all policymakers excel at.”
Casper offered the example of President
John F. Kennedy’s resolve to reach the moon
as an object lesson of how policymakers can
discover energy solutions. She quoted Kennedy from a 1962 address at Rice University
in Houston, Texas:
“In short, our leadership in science and
industry, our hopes for peace and security,
our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve
these mysteries, to solve them for the good of
all men, and to become the world’s leading
space-faring nation…
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose
» About Rebecca Casper,
Mayor, City of Idaho Falls
Rebecca Casper
“We don’t need to
solve every
problem, we don’t
need to solve the
funding piece this
year or next … we
don’t even have to
have all the
technologies. We
simply need to
know where we are
going and where
we want to go.”
— Rebecca
Casper
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…”
“The growth of our science and education
will be enriched by new knowledge of our
universe and environment, by new techniques
of learning and mapping and observation,
by new tools and computers for industry,
medicine, the home as well as the school.
Technical institutions, …will reap the harvest
of these gains…”
“To be sure, all this costs us all a good
deal of money. … But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon,
240,000 miles away from the control station
in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet
tall, the length of this football field, made of
new metal alloys, some of which have not yet
been invented, capable of standing heat and
stresses several times more than have ever
been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying
Rebecca Casper was elected
November 2013 on a platform of solving City programs,
growing the local economy and
enhancing community assets.
In addition to her role in
Idaho Falls, Casper serves on
the Idaho LINE 2.0 Commission making recommendations
to policymakers on nuclear energy development and research
in Idaho.
Formerly, Casper was an
adjunct American Government
professor at Brigham Young
University-Idaho and Eastern
Idaho Technical College. She
has an undergraduate and
master’s degree in political
science from BYU-Provo and a
doctorate from UC-Berkley.
She previously owned Omnia
Strategies, a political and professional consulting business.
all the equipment needed for propulsion,
guidance, control, communications, food
and survival, on an untried mission, to an
unknown celestial body, and then return
it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per
hour, causing heat about half that of the
temperature of the sun -- almost as hot as
it is here today -- and do all this, and do
it right, and do it first before this decade
is out -- then we must be bold…”
Those inspiring words took the nation
from 0 to 60 miles per hour in seven
years to get them to the moon, Casper
said. The same can be the case in the
development of energy policy.
“We are working on the ideas that
policymakers will one day want to champion,” Casper said. “We can do it — we
don’t need to solve every problem, we
don’t need to solve the funding piece
this year or next … we don’t even have
to have all the technologies. We simply
need to know where we are going and
where we want to go.” n
Intermountain Energy Summit l Conference Report