Daily Inspiration Quote by John W. Snow

Energy policy here is sold as emotional insurance. John W. Snow doesn’t pitch the North Slope as an engineering project so much as a way to quiet a national anxiety: the fear that Americans live at the mercy of faraway chaos. “Uncertain sources of supply” is a careful euphemism that lets Middle East geopolitics do all the rhetorical work without naming wars, alliances, coups, or oil-company entanglements. Uncertainty becomes the villain; drilling becomes the antidote.

The line’s craft is in its quiet slide from capacity to necessity. “We can” quickly becomes “it’s important we do that,” turning a technical option into a moral imperative. That’s classic policy persuasion: frame a contested choice as responsible adulthood. Snow also speaks in the collective “we,” yoking citizens, government, and industry into a single actor, smoothing over the messy questions: who profits, who bears environmental risk, and whose “dependence” is being reduced - consumers’ or the economy’s?

Context matters. Snow was a Bush-era Treasury Secretary, arguing in a post-9/11 atmosphere where “energy independence” doubled as national security branding. The subtext is that domestic extraction equals sovereignty: drill at home to avoid compromising abroad. It’s a tidy story, especially politically, because it converts a complex global market into a solvable domestic project.

What’s left unsaid is the economist’s inconvenient truth: oil is priced globally. North Slope barrels may cushion supply shocks at the margins, but they don’t dissolve the entanglement. The quote works because it offers control in a world that rarely grants it.