Jay Inslee: “Mr. Chairman, we all recognize the difficulties in dealing with appropriations bills. The committee, under noble…”

“Mr. Chairman, we all recognize the difficulties in dealing with appropriations bills. The committee, under noble leadership, has done an admirable job in dealing with priorities, but I think we ought to support this amendment because it is a statement of intent by the U.S. House of Representatives to, in fact, embrace the type of visionary leadership that came from this podium right behind me on May 9, 1961. As we all know, on May 9, 1961, President John F. Kennedy stood at this well and challenged America to go to the moon and bring a man safely back within the decade. And that is the type of visionary leadership and over-the-horizon thinking that we now need in our energy policy in the United States. Many of us have been talking about the need for us to embrace a new Apollo energy project to, in fact, establish very high bar goals for us that, to date, we have not done; that we need to embrace a goal of eliminating our addiction to Middle Eastern oil; that we need to embrace a goal of significantly reducing our global climate change gas emissions; and, most importantly, we need to embrace a goal of building these new technologies here of hybrid cars and solar power and wind power rather than giving those jobs to Denmark, Germany and Japan. So I think we ought to pass this amendment as a statement of congressional intent to move in that direction.”