I rise to introduce legislation that is designed to speed up the development of renewable ocean energy--wave, current and tidal energy--across the nation and also in my home State of Alaska. The Hydrokinetic Renewable Energy Promotion Act…

I think a decision has to be made to support an environmentally acceptable way for greater production in the United States.

We're causing it ourselves.

We're at a time when we are looking at budgets. We're pretty quick to pick winners and losers through the budgetary process.

We think about it more not just in terms of rare Earths, but also in terms of strategic minerals.

I think it's hard when you pick up the phone and you call an agency and there's no one there on Friday to answer the phone.

They're using that as basically an energy weapon, if you will.

From the investment side of things I know one of the things that I hear as I'm talking to folks is you don't give us any level of predictability with the subsidies that are out there.

We should start doing that.

The real question is is how effective, how efficient are they really in the process that we're all trying to advance?

Typically it comes from either South America or China.

I think we need to keep that in mind.

We can and we should work with China wherever possible to make progress on our energy challenges.

It's become popular, particularly when focused on energy policy to say that we're falling behind China in sort of a clean energy race. I guess I would challenge that.

I appreciate the comments.

I think that that's just one tool in the tool box. I would argue we need a broader set of tools.

We want to have fair labor standards. We insist on those. We want to have environmental compliance. We insist on that.

Because it would appear that when you look to those countries around the world that seem to be leading when it comes to the clean energy investment, they also appear to be leading in the category of subsidies as well.

I think it plays into what we're talking about here in terms of the--how we lower the costs.

This bill is a major step towards allowing the United States to substantially increase the capacity and generation of clean, renewable hydropower resources.

We are seeing an evolving Arctic; an opportunity, viewed by many, but also a very noticeable challenge to us.

Even the most modest current trends in climate change, if continued, will present new national security challenges for the U.S. Navy, for our Marine Corps, and our Coast Guard.

I do feel pretty strongly that we need to take the initiative, here in the Senate, to move toward ratification of that treaty.

Two weeks ago we conducted a hearing in this subcommittee on the impact that the failure to complete a fiscal year 2011 Defense Appropriations Bill is having on our military services.

If the Navy and Marine Corps were financially stressed in performing their missions before, how does the unanticipated challenge of responding to an earthquake and tsunami further stress the ability of your service to perform their mission?