Obama: US will control its own destiny

Stressing on the need for "American-made energy", President Barack Obama on Thursday asserted that US will control its own destiny as it can't allow itself to be held hostage to the events in other parts of the world. In the 21st century, US, he argued, can no longer depend the energy policy of the last century given that the galloping energy demand of India and China and disturbances in the Middle East would always be instrumental in hike in gasoline prices. "An energy strategy for the last century is one that traps us in the past. What we need now is an all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every source of American-made energy not just oil and gas, but wind power and solar power; biofuels and fuel-efficient cars and trucks that get more miles to the gallon. "That's the future. That's where I want to take this country," Obama said. In his remarks on energy and gas prices in Maryland, Obama was a vocal critic of the Republican policy of "drilling more oil", arguing that this is not going to resolve the issues in the decades to come. It is time to think and come out of the box ideas which would reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. "Since I took office, America's dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year. In 2010 our oil dependence, the amount that we're bringing in, the percentage we're bringing in, was under 50 percent for the first time in 13 years. "We've got to do better than that, and we can do better than that," he asserted. Obama, tried to rip apart, his Republican presidential opponents who are opposing his "all the above option" on energy policy, by arguing that they do not know what they are talking about. "They dismiss wind power. They dismiss solar power. They make jokes about biofuels. They were against raising fuel standards. I guess they like gas guzzlers. They think that's good for our future," Obama said referring to the recent statements from Republican presidential aspirants. "We're trying to move towards the future. They want to be stuck in the past. And we've heard this kind of thinking before. Let me tell you something: If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society. "They would not have believed that the world was round," he said. America, he argued, has always succeeded because it refused to stand still. "We put faith in the future. We are inventors, we are builders, we are makers of things. We are Thomas Edison, we are the Wright Brothers, we are Bill Gates, we are Steve Jobs. That's who we are. That's who we need to be right now," Obama said.