Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

Both of my parents were teachers. As you might expect, education was important in my family. Learning for its own sake was valued, and applying what was learned was the point. Abraham Lincoln, an exemplar of what education can do for a person, acknowledged the power of the printed word, writing, "…the great mass of men…were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were capable of improvement." You honor me with this degree, and I thank you for it, and for asking me to be with you today at this milestone in your lives.

You have worked hard to be here and I am honored to share this day with you. When you were freshmen, graduation day probably seemed to be a lifetime away. And now, compared to the hustle of finishing your final papers and exams, I know today can feel a bit anticlimactic. It may not have sunk in yet. But I hope each of you can find the time today to reflect on what you have accomplished, and to savor it.

What kind of world are you graduating into? It is a world of great challenges and of even greater opportunities.

We just went through a historic election which, to my mind, demonstrates that you are graduating into what Bobby Kennedy referred to as a "newer world" in a book he wrote called To Seek a Newer World. The title of that book comes from Ulysses, a poem written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, about an old man who longs for one more adventure before he dies. "Come, my friends, // 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world," Tennyson writes. Kennedy's book is his vision for how our country and the world could address some of the major problems we faced in the 1960's. By a "newer world" he meant a better world, a world of "accelerating economic progress," a world that "protects basic human freedoms" and "demands social justice." He meant a world made better through the hard work and courage of its young people.

Those of you graduating today are graduating into a world of fewer barriers and of greater possibilities than in previous times. When I graduated from college in the mid 60's the opportunities available to many people growing up in this country were limited and constrained.

There were fewer opportunities for women to succeed in careers such as law and medicine than there are today.  My wife and I began law school together in 1965 in a class of 150 first-year students. Only seven in that class of 150 were women, which seemed at the time to be the most natural thing in the world. This year, women make up at least half of the first year class at virtually every law school in the country. And the unofficial barriers that women faced in other professions have given way as well.

We all know that barriers for minorities have long existed in our society. For many African Americans, the right to vote wasn't secured until 1965 even though that right was recognized by the Fifteenth Amendment ninety-five years before. 1965 was the year President Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, just as he had signed the Civil Rights Act the year before. But 1965 was also the year of the marches in Selma, Alabama, where on one Sunday in March peaceful demonstrators were brutally beaten by the police.

From that perspective, the election of Barack Obama is truly remarkable. Your experience today and mine in 1965 are the bookends of a forty-year period of healing, a time when our nation has come to terms with our history. It has taken a long time to get to the point where the country rallies behind and embraces a person based on their character instead of excluding a whole group because of their skin color or ethnicity. Just two years ago – even six months ago – people in this country and around the world openly questioned whether we Americans could elect an African American to be our president. This is an extraordinary time, and even though discrimination and the arbitrary denial of opportunities still exist, we can all take heart from Barack Obama's success in the election. His victory is our victory, and it shows that our nation continues on its journey towards a "newer world."

This "newer world" is not only a world of greater opportunities and fewer barriers – it is also a world of greater integration and interdependence.

The current economic slowdown reminds us of how our economy is tied to the other major economies of the world. News reports that used to give daily updates only on the performance of U.S. markets now regularly tell us the status of Asian and European markets as well. And we have learned through hard experience that a change in the price of oil on world markets directly affects what we must pay for gas here in Las Cruces.

Along with the increased interdependence and integration of the world comes a greater need to understand the histories and cultures and world views of others. The causes and effects of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai have little meaning for us if we are ignorant of the history of tension and conflict between India and Pakistan.

The simple fact is that, like it or not, today we are all called upon to be citizens of the world to a much greater extent than in the past.

You, as graduates in this "newer world," are challenged to understand and embrace a much larger set of issues and concerns than were presented to your parents or grandparents. In a speech he gave in 1965 at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, then Senator Bobby Kennedy talked about how the world was changing then, and said the following:

"Everywhere [that] new technology and communications bring men and nations closer together, the concerns of one inevitably become the concerns of all. And our new closeness is stripping away the false masks, the illusion of differences which is at the root of injustice and hate and war. Only earthbound man still clings to the dark and poisoning superstition that his world is bound by the nearest hill, his universe ends at river's shore, his common humanity is enclosed in the tight circle of those who share his town or his views and the color of his skin."

He went on to say to that group of students: "It is your job, the task of the young people in this world to strip the last remnants of that ancient cruel belief from the civilization of man."

His words are as true now as they were then. And while this interdependence and integration of the peoples of the world makes us more vulnerable to changes and forces over which we have no control, we must remember that in sum it benefits us all. It erases national boundaries, reveals the commonalities we share, and reminds us of our responsibilities to one another.

I have talked about how this "newer world" into which you are graduating is a world of increased opportunities, and a world of greater interdependence and integration than ever before. It is also a world that is physically and visibly being transformed in profound ways.

Change is happening around the world and happening at an unprecedented speed. Three billion people – half the world's population – are entering the global economy for the first time, and most of them are Chinese or Indian. Ancient cities of tile and clay have grown skyscrapers as tall as any in Los Angeles. It seems that these transformations are happening everywhere, and often in places most of us have never hear of. Take Chongqing, for example, which is a city in the center of China. Chongqing is the fastest growing city in the world. In the four years you have been in college, Chongqing has grown by two million people -- that's about how many people live in our state. Ten years ago the tallest structure in Chongqing was a monument about one hundred feet tall; today, its skyline is packed tight with sixty and seventy story high office buildings.

These three billion new people change both the scale of the global economy and how it fundamentally operates. We all know that when you call a customer service number that you're just as likely to speak to someone in New Delhi as you are to speak to someone in Denver. But your generation knows better than any other that the internet makes it possible to provide many more services from afar. During tax season, your tax returns might be started by the accountant down the street but transmitted to India to be completed. Legal teams in Bangalore draw up contracts that are signed the next day in Chicago. Management consultants in Mumbai analyze businesses in California and tell them how they can be more efficient.

This growth in Asia and the developing world creates challenges for us. The two most prominent of which are climate change and the economy. We must become more competitive economically; we must adapt.  Global warming is a challenge that the world has to face together. The key to meeting both these challenges is our energy policy. We need to rethink how we confront climate change and at the same time meet our energy needs.

In your lifetime, we will see a complete reengineering of how energy is produced and used around the world. Since the industrial revolution, our western economies have been fueled mainly by coal and oil. These high carbon fuels were a cheap way for us to build our cities and expand across the continent. But now we know that we were not counting the full cost of climate change in our budgets. That must change.

We need to shift our economy to a low-carbon economy, one that relies more on clean energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear and less on coal and oil. For the coal-fired power plants that we will have, we must develop the technologies needed to capture the carbon pollution and store it underground.

This is an enormous opportunity to rebuild the United States economy and the world economy. We know what we have to do and it is a huge task, but this is one of those rare instances when the medicine tastes good. Building the new electricity grid to harness the wind power in the Dakotas and the solar power here in New Mexico will create design and engineering jobs for your generation. Growing those wind farms and solar plants will boost local economies and revitalize rural areas.

With the right policies and the right leadership, we can leverage this transformation to help our weakened manufacturing sector. We know we need solar cells, so we should make them right here. We know we need better batteries, so we should make them right here. We know we need electric cars, so we should make them right here. We know we need these jobs, so we should create them right here.

But climate change is a global problem, with global causes, and we need to make sure the clean energy technologies we create here are affordable in the developing world. The global demand for energy is projected to double or triple by the time you retire, with almost all of the growth occurring in the developing world. These countries are focused on growing their economies and improving their living standards as quickly as possible. They want their people fed, housed, and healthy. The developing world is trying to catch up with us, and we have had a hundred-year head start. To catch up, they need energy, lots of it, and the cheapest way to get it is to build dirty coal-fired power plants. Their decisions are completely understandable because we made the same ones ourselves.

Thus, what we must do is make clean energy an affordable choice for the developing world. And one way to do that is to start deploying it here in large quantities. As the demand for solar cells increases here, more manufacturers will produce them, increasing global supplies and driving down prices around the world. The same is true for wind power, biofuels, and nuclear power. And we have to act quickly. A new coal-fired power plant has a lifespan of forty or fifty years, and China alone is building about two of them per week.

Climate change is an enormous challenge for our country and for each of us individually. We all must play a part. But as your generation realizes, it is just one of many challenges you will face during your adult lives.

The challenges you face in this "newer world" are great but the opportunities are much greater.  On the night of his election, Barack Obama spoke of those challenges and opportunities. That historic election, he said, was the answer to those who "still doubt that America is a place where all things are possible." He said:

"It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day."

In the 1966 speech in Cape Town that I quoted earlier, Bobby Kennedy also spoke of that "arc of history". He said:

"Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation."

I have no doubt that each of you graduating today will make a positive contribution to the history of this generation. 

I wish you godspeed as you begin.