Clark, who retired as a four-star general, began his career as a West Point graduate and junior officer in a combat command in Vietnam and rose through the ranks, eventually becoming commander of NATO forces in Europe. In 2008, Clark ran for U.S. president on the Democratic ticket, and today he is a businessman heavily invested in alternative energy markets, including shale, natural gas, wind, tidal and biofuels.
As keynote speaker at the opening session of the Alternative Clean Transportation Exposition in Long Beach, Calif., Clark said the knowledge-based economic boom of the 1990s seemed to be the fitting conclusion to the “American Century,” as the Internet and the rise of personal computers fed an ever-growing economy that was the envy of the world. But as American wealth grew, the country as a whole invested in real estate instead of manufacturing, research and development.
At the same time, Americans discovered to their dismay that a knowledge-based economy was difficult to contain within national borders. “As it turns out, knowledge moves very quickly overseas,” Clark said. “We discovered that people in Eastern Europe and Asia can write programming code and create software just as good as anyone in America can.”
Today, with the American economy flat and slowly regathering momentum, Clark said that while the United States has no real superpower rivals at the moment, the Chinese are gaining steam and telling the world that America was the economy of the last century – while the future belongs to Beijing.
To counter this, Clark said the United States needs a growth policy – an idea that seems alien to many Americans. “We’ve always grown naturally,” he said. “But for most countries around the world, an economic growth plan is absolutely vital to create and sustain prosperity.”
Brazil is an example of this, he said. The Brazilian government realized that as long as the country was sending billions of dollars overseas to purchase oil, it never would be able to invest adequately to grow its own economy and spur growth. So Brazil decided to shift energy production within its own borders with an aggressive ethanol fuel program. “It worked,” Clark said. “Not overnight. But today, Brazil is one of the premier up-and-coming economies in the world.”
