María Elvira Salazar: “let me continue with respect to the comments I was making concerning the issue of energy. If you think about the 1970s…”

“let me continue with respect to the comments I was making concerning the issue of energy. If you think about the 1970s and the 1980s, it was the economy that was at the root of what we were trying to do to develop solar energy and wind energy and looking at biofuels and the like. A lot has changed in those times. There is tremendous interest and a tremendous amount of energy being spent in each of our committees here in the Senate and the House of Representatives and in the White House and the Department of Energy on a clean energy future for America. Some people will ask the question today: Well, is this another short-lived agenda in the same way it was in the 1970s and the 1980s? When you look at the charts and you see what we were investing in clean energy technology back in the 1970s and 1980s, it was significantly higher than what we are investing in the 1980s and the 1990s and the early 2000s. I submit that things have changed because the drivers today are not only the economic drivers of our time. Today when we look at the energy issues we face in our world, it is not just about the volatility of the energy markets we see around the world and here in the United States, there are two other drivers that are equally as important. The first of those drivers has to be our national security.…”