The mayor reminded his audience that just five years ago, on 14 August 2003, the US got an object lesson in how big a gamble people were taking with their future if the country didn’t change course. About four o'clock that afternoon, the power suddenly went off for 50 million people across the North Eastern US and Canada. “As New York's mayor, I'll never forget what happened that day. Fortunately, because our first responders were well-trained and well-equipped, they rescued hundreds of people who were trapped in high-rise elevators all over town without incident,” Bloomberg recalled.

The mayor continued to say that right now, energy was the number one issue in America. “Anyone who's filled up a gas tank recently can tell you that. And we ought to be getting a real debate on our energy future from our major Presidential candidates. Instead, sadly, they're treating us to a political silly season, with one candidate calling for opening up the nation's strategic oil reserves and the other for giving the federal gasoline tax the summer off. For shame - the best that can be said about those ideas is that they're pandering. Far worse, they're distractions from the deadly serious business of creating a new national energy policy,” the mayor warned.

Bloomberg described how, unlike for the current US administration, cities across the country were working for new ways to conserve energy in homes and businesses. "You may find it interesting that generating more renewable power is a real priority for New York, too. And it's on its way. In June, we won a big legislative victory, persuading our State government to let us grant property tax breaks that encourage private building owners to go solar. And the State also okayed a proposal we backed that will permit New Yorkers who generate their own solar power to sell what they don't use to other power customers - a real economic incentive for renewable energy. By this time next year, we'll have more than doubled the amount of solar power produced in New York City,” the NYC mayor described.

Michael Bloomberg also listed other possible sources of renewable energy, such as wind, tidal and geothermal. "Such projects might, for example, be designed to draw power from the tides of the Hudson and East Rivers - something we're already doing on a pilot basis. They might call for dramatically increasing rooftop solar power production, which we've estimated could meet nearly 20 per cent of the City's need for electricity. They could tap into geothermal energy. In fact, some private home and building owners have already drilled their own 'heat wells.' Or perhaps companies will want to put wind farms atop our bridges and skyscrapers, or use the enormous potential of powerful off-shore winds miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, where turbines could generate roughly twice the energy that land-based wind farms can. Wind farms located far off our shores, some evidence shows, could meet 10 per cent of our city's electricity needs within a decade,” the mayor concluded.