Dear President Obama,

On election night last November, you committed to take bold action to reclaim our nation's legacy as the "global leader in technology and discovery and innovation" and to ensure our children grow up unafraid of the "destructive power of a warming planet."

Reducing our oil use by employing smart fuel efficiency measures and technological innovation as outlined in the Union of Concerned Scientists Half the Oil plan is the most strategic path to save people like me money, reduce global warming emissions, and unleash American innovation.

Industry leaders are already building more fuel efficient and advanced vehicles, and bringing cleaner biofuels to market, showing that we have the technology available to cut our projected oil use in half in 20 years.

You've committed to "freeing ourselves from foreign oil." But replacing foreign oil with drilling here is not the answer. Oil companies will sell to the highest bidder, no matter where they drill, growing their profits while Americans bear the brunt of the increasing costs. The answer to the high costs of oil is to cut our nation's oil use, and we need your leadership and commitment to move farther and faster down this path.

True oil use reductions, like the historic clean car standards finalized in your first term, will do much more to protect our country and our climate than an "all the above" approach that leads to increasingly expensive, dirty, and dangerous oil drilling.

I applaud the progress made in your first term and will fight with you as oil companies and their allies try to stand in our way. But we need your leadership to keep us on the right path.