Jay Inslee: “It has been very sad to see technology originally developed in the United States, particularly solar cell technology…”

“It has been very sad to see technology originally developed in the United States, particularly solar cell technology, now being perfected and commercialized in Germany and other countries. To see that hemorrhaging of jobs is really a pathetic statement of our inaction to have a national energy policy. And we effectively don't have a national energy policy right now, except to just sort of allow the status quo to stumble along. There is one thing that is very clear about energy: Somebody is going to create millions of jobs and millions of dollars, and we want that to be Americans. In the 1960s, they had the missile gap. Remember, during the Nixon-Kennedy debate there was a debate about the missile gap. In a way, we have an energy technology gap right now that, frankly, other countries are getting a leg up on us. And the reason is, is that those countries have developed energy policies that have decided to leapfrog technologies and develop technologies there. We can't allow that gap to continue to widen. And that is why this New Apollo Energy Project, H.R. 2828, if you want to take a look at it, is going to answer this challenge. When Kennedy set us forth in the original space race, it really was not for economic reasons, it was largely not for a job creation program. But if you look at what it did create, can you imagine had he not challenged America to start the original Apollo Project?…”