Political Quotes

“Mr. President, this is going to be an unusual set of comments for me because I am going to start out with some personal history, which I hope will make sense in terms of what I want to address. I started working in the alternative energy industry in 1983. When I say industry, it was, actually, a very small company developing small hydro projects in Maine and New England. We then worked on the development of biomass projects. We, later on, worked on wind power and then also on the development of large-scale conservation. So my professional life has largely been occupied with energy and particularly with renewable energy. At the same time, I had a deep history in Maine in environmental matters. I represented the environmental community in Maine before the Maine Legislature, in the seventies, if you can believe that anybody around here was still doing things in the seventies. I also, as Governor, was very active in conservation matters and am proud to say that, during my 8 years as the Governor of Maine, we put aside and set into conservation and protection status more land than in the prior 175-year history of Maine combined. This has been a passion of mine, the protection of the environment, for my entire life--so the history of renewable energy development and also environmental advocacy. I learned some lessons when I was working in the field of developing alternative or renewable energy. The most important lesson is that there is no free lunch when it comes to energy.…”