Clean Energy Economy For The Future

Floor Speech

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Mr. INSLEE. Well, with 10 percent unemployment, we know this country needs to act and we need to act quickly, and we need to act quickly in the job front of jobs that just won't be temporary and just won't be make-work jobs but will be part of the transition of our Nation to a Nation that can lead the world in the clean energy economy of the future. And we know that we have to get in that race for those jobs right now. We have bills pending, as we have already passed in the House the energy bill, which is now pending in the other Chamber; the stimulus bill, which is still in the process of being implemented; and we may have another bill on the floor of this House within the next month. All three of those bills are ways that we can jump-start the job growth in this economy by putting people to work on the jobs that are going to be the long-term jobs.

I want to note something. Our President was in China yesterday. I believe he's still there today. I was there about 4 months ago meeting with Speaker Pelosi, the President, and the Premier of China, and I will tell you the risk our country really has is that there is a country across the Pacific who fully understands where the jobs of the future are going to be. And when we talked to the President and Premier of China, they made very clear that they were going to try to dominate these industries and dominate job creation in building electric cars, electric motors for electric cars, wind turbines, solar voltaic plants, solar thermal plants. The Chinese are spending about $12 million an hour on renewable energy job creation. They spent three times as much on their stimulus bill as we did on ours in job creation in clean energy. They want to dominate the job creation of the future. And we are determined in this Chamber to get in that race both in the energy bill we passed in August and in this job creation bill we hope to be considering in the next month on the floor to continue this job creation.

I just want to mention two things that I think we ought to do very quickly. Number one, we should be putting thousands of Americans to work in retrofitting our homes and our businesses and our public buildings and our schools to make them energy efficient.

We started down that road in the stimulus bill, but there's more we can do to put people to work putting insulation in our homes, putting new windows on our homes, putting more energy efficient heating and cooling systems in our homes, in our schools and our buildings; and we will be proposing to leadership in the House, actually, this afternoon of this Sustainable Energy and Environment Caucus four or five ways to promote that type of job creation.

Second, we hope to use the Tax Code to continue incentive for Americans to make these kind of investments. We have a tax credit for homeowners right now, but it's just a credit you could take at the end of the year. We want to make that an advance so homeowners possibly can get the cash to work with this right now to hire people to put people to work in retrofitting their homes. We want to use the Tax Code to extend a couple of the tax credits that we're now using to develop job creation, for instance, the bio-fuel industry, that is expiring this December if we don't extend it. So there's just two ideas. I know we'll have some time tonight, but I would suggest that we could at least start at those two ideas.

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