Success Quote by Ron Kind

The sentence is a complaint dressed up as a blueprint. Ron Kind doesn’t just want “leadership” in the abstract; he wants the White House to do the one thing administrations hate doing: put dates on the calendar and let themselves be judged. “Setting dates certain” is bureaucratic-sounding on purpose. It signals seriousness, measurability, and the political courage to accept a future headline that reads “missed the deadline.”

The subtext is that America’s clean-energy debate often lives in the fog of aspiration. Everyone is “for” renewables until timelines threaten to collide with budgets, lobbyists, or the next election. By pairing “dates certain” with “certain goals,” Kind is calling out that sleight of hand: goals without deadlines are vibes. Deadlines force trade-offs, force agencies to coordinate, and force Congress to fund what it claims to support.

His phrase “greater alliance” is also doing quiet work. It frames alternative energy not as a niche environmental cause but as a coalition project - among federal agencies, states, industry, and potentially allied nations. That matters because renewables policy isn’t only about technology; it’s about building political durability against backlash from fossil-fuel regions and price spikes.

The sting is in the last clause: “but we are not.” It’s terse, almost parental, and it pins responsibility upward. In a system built to diffuse blame, Kind tries to re-centralize it at the executive branch, arguing that the absence of deadlines is itself a policy choice - a way of avoiding accountability while pretending progress is happening.