Jay Inslee: “We had a meeting with Hank Paulson today, Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush administration, and he had made an…”

“We had a meeting with Hank Paulson today, Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush administration, and he had made an interesting comment. I am very impressed with him, though I have been pretty critical of the Bush administration, because he has been a pretty outspoken advocate that we need to do something about global warning. He said everything he has learned since taking the job as Secretary of the Treasury, he comes from a very successful Wall Street career, has been worse than he thought. The deficit, the situation in Iraq, everything he has learned has been worse than he thought, except energy, because he has learned about the new innovations going on around the country. What we want to do is help businesses, like the Iogen Corporation, which is ready to build the first commercial cellulosic plant in America in Idaho. They are ready to go, as long as they can get their loan guaranty. They have 300 farmers that are going to give them their straw left over after wheat. They are going to chop it up, put an enzyme in it, and then free the carbohydrates and distill that into ethanol, and, boom, you have a product that is three to four times more productive per acre than the current type of ethanol we get from our farms. Ocean Wave Technologies has the first permit for wave power in the United States off the coast of Oregon, a 50 megawatt plant.…”