Jay Inslee

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, how much time remains?

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote, and pending that, I make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, we are all here a very brief period of time, not just in Congress but on Earth; and I would posit to all of my colleagues that we have a better legacy than this in the most pristine national forest we have. But more importantly, that is the sentiment of over 2 million of our citizens who turned out at over 600 meetings to urge the Federal Government to listen to their sentiments. It is the decision of the Taxpayers for Common Sense, because this rule is fiscally flexible. It is a decision of Trout Unlimited, because it protects water. It is the decision of the League of Conservation Voters. These groups agree with the 2 million people who know that this is a flexible rule, that, yes, allows us to deal with insect infestation. There is an exception in the rule, allows us to deal with fire. There is an exception in the rule, allows us to deal with access to leases. There is an exception in the rule, allows us to get access to our homes for private inholdings. There is an exception in the rule. This rule was very carefully calibrated and developed. Let us have a legacy for our grandchildren we can be proud of. Pass this amendment.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Hinchey), a person who has been a great champion of this issue for many years.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee).

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire of the remaining time.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley).

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Hill). (Mr. HILL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Mrs. Jones), former judge, who will explain about the court of appeals upholding the roadless rule.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman New York (Mr. Boehlert), who shares the views of almost 2 million Americans who support the roadless rule. (Mr. BOEHLERT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey).

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the highest court in the land to have dealt with the roadless area rule, affirmed the roadless area rule. It is true that a lower court in Wyoming, a State perhaps not known for great environmental policy, ruled contrary. But the highest court in the land affirmed the roadless area rule. It is the law of the United States.

Mr. INSLEE. I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.

Mr. INSLEE. In the second regulation, specifically roads built to maintain and restore characteristics of composition and structure such as to reduce the risk of end characteristic wildfire effects. The truth is, the roadless area rule allows building roads to deal with threat of fire of too much brush.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute and 40 seconds to myself. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young) has graciously suggested I know nothing about the Tongass National Forest. I do know this about the Tongass National Forest. Every single one of our constituents of every single Member of the House of Representatives is a coowner of the Tongass National Forest. And I know that that phoney settlement they had up there was a scam between people who used to work for the timber industry's lobbyists, not a judicial decision. And I know another thing, in answer to this fire red herring. We are going to hear a lot about fire during this debate. We have the ability to deal with fire in the existing roadless area rule. We have the regulation right here which allows specifically, if I can read it: ``When a road is needed to protect public health and safety in cases of imminent threat of flood, fire, or other catastrophic event, road- building is permitted.''

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis).

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 5 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I rise to offer this amendment to the House to preserve the most significant, probably the most significant, conservation measure for our precious national assets in the last decade, the 2001 roadless rule; and I do so by bringing to this House the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt who said, ``We want the active and zealous help of every man and woman farsighted enough to realize the importance from the standpoint of the Nation's welfare in the future of preserving the forests.'' That spirit of Teddy Roosevelt is one we have a chance to confirm and affirm today by upholding the roadless rule, the largest advance in our conservation history for several years. I think it is appropriate in talking about this just for a moment to think about the national assets which are now at risk. This picture of the Tongass National Forest, it has beautiful cathedral Sitka spruce and western hemlock, and it is a national treasure. It is a jewel in the crown of our national forests. It does not deserve nor should it be clearcut, and the roadless rule we seek to preserve in this amendment would prevent that depredation. It is for us to consider the ramifications of not passing this amendment, and those ramifications are clear. The failure to pass this amendment tonight will allow this administration to clear-cut hundreds of thousands of acres of our most precious national forests. This is the picture that we will see on the television screens that Americans repudiate. Because Americans, when we adopted this roadless rule, in the largest, most democratic rule of all time, 2.2 million Americans volunteered to render their opinions. And what did they say? Over 93 percent of them said do not render this clear-cutting to our most pristine national forests. Now, there are four reasons, substantive reasons, to adopt this amendment. Reason number one: this administration wants to essentially exempt the very largest, the very most pristine, the very most ecologically productive rain forest in the entire Western Hemisphere, the Tongass National Forest, and turn it into 300,000 acres of clear- cut, arboreal rubble. And they intend to do this same thing in the Chugach National Forest. Alaska is a beautiful State. Many of our constituents have been there, and all of our constituents have an interest in not seeing this clear-cutting take place. Second, this administration has made clear that it intends to infect the lower 49 with the same policy disease. Because this administration has said quite clearly that it intends to do an amendment to the roadless rule that will essentially allow decisionmaking authority to move towards governors, rather than the United States House of Representatives, the Senate, and the executive authority of the United States. I quote Mr. Mark Rey, the Under Secretary of State, who will propose a change ``that would allow States to play a greater role in land use decisions that affect them.'' The roadless rule, which blocks development of 58 million acres of Federal land remains law; and he said, but, we will leave it up to the governors to see where on a limited basis relief may be appropriate. We know this for a fact. The stewardship responsibility belongs in this Chamber and this Chamber alone. There is already the ability for the governments to participate. The third reason, if I may. This Nation is already interlaced with roads. There are 377,810 miles of roads in our national forest system, enough to circle the globe 15 times, 15 times. And the unmet needs of maintenance on those roads is $10 billion. If somehow, in the midst of our $450 billion deficits we can scrape up $5, the first $5 we ought to spend ought to be in protecting the roads that our people already enjoy going up to the lakes fishing, taking their kids hiking, which are now falling into disrepair and washing out. This is a fiscally sound measure. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I want to answer the gentleman from Pennsylvania's (Mr. Hoeffel) original question about what we should do in Iraq now, with two points. One, I think it is important for the President to clear the decks to restore our credibility on this issue because our ability to act in Iraq is negatively affected by this credibility issue, and many of us believe and I believe that the best thing the President could do in that regard is to embrace a bipartisan review of the intelligence failure here. Having a respected Republican like Warren Rudman or someone else run a commission to have sort of a referee to figure out what happened here is a lot better than to have the flacks at various agencies throwing grenades at each other in the newspapers. If we really want to find out here why forgeries ended up at the State of the Union address, why we did not get the straight scoop about the intelligence coming out of Iraq, why the President told us there was no doubt, and that was his word, no doubt that Iraq had some of the most lethal weapons ever devised by man and we cannot find a thimbleful to date of mustard gas, the best way is through an independent commission; and this is good for the administration, not just good for the people. And this is not a debate. We may find some of these weapons to date. That still may occur. This is not a debate even about the propriety of the war. Even if one thinks the war was justified about humanity and civil rights in Iraq, they have still got to join us in a bipartisan belief that truth from the American President is the most precious commodity we have in international affairs. We have all got to be joining that in a bipartisan manner; so I say clearing the decks first. But the second issue, if I can, it is just imperative that we engage allies in this effort, in this maybe 2-, maybe 3-, maybe 4-, maybe 5- year effort to restore order and some sense of civility in Iraq, and I would encourage the administration to shuck aside its unilateral approach that unfortunately they have adopted for so long in Iraq and welcome our allies to get in there to shoulder some of this burden. Iraq is not a prize. It is not a glorious prize for the American people. It is a burden. We still have people not coming home from Iraq, and that burden ought to be shared with every nation in the civilized world rather than just Americans. And to date, unfortunately, this administration still has not been willing to embrace allies to get them in there taking sniper fire instead of our neighbors' kids, and I hope we will see it that way.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I wholeheartedly concur with the suggestion by the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) that we need a bipartisan, independent investigation of this. The reason that I have joined this effort tonight, and I have delayed doing so for a few weeks in the hopes that the administration would be more forthcoming about this intelligence failure, but what inspired me to come here tonight are the comments of Condoleezza Rice and Mr. Rumsfeld who said this is the end of the story; we can forget about these issues. I am here to say this is not the end of the story; this is maybe the end of the beginning of the story. The type of questions that Americans are asking tonight as to how a fraudulent, forged document got into the address of the leader of the free world to the people of this country and to the world and to the House of Representatives, how that happened is just one of the questions. I know many of us have been hearing a lot of talk and dialogue about how that happened. And it was as predictable as rain in Seattle that George Tenet was going to get thrown overboard by this administration at some point. It is amazing it took so long. The point I want to make tonight is that I do not think we should get seized on whether this was 16 words or 16,000 words. The fact of the matter is that there is a whole boatload of other questions that this independent Republican and Democratic commission needs answered, and I want to pose just a couple. The first question this commission needs to answer is why was the President successful in convincing over 50 percent of the Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind the attack on September 11 and was in cahoots with al Qaeda when in fact the intelligence had enormous amounts of information that that was not true? Why did the President of the United States in urging America to start a preemptive war not level with the American people to tell the American people all of the intelligence, not just the selective intelligence? And let me just mention one fact. As reported in The New York Times on June 9, 2003, two of the highest-ranking leaders of al Qaeda in American custody have told the CIA in separate interrogations that the terrorist organization did not work jointly with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein according to several intelligence officials. Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda planner and recruiter until his capture in March 2002, told questioners last year before the war that the idea of working with Mr. Hussein's government had been discussed among Qaeda leaders, but had been rejected. The same statement came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who insisted that the group did not work with Mr. Hussein. Do Members recall President Bush telling the American people that the two highest operatives in our custody in Guantanamo Bay had told our intelligence services that they had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein? I do not remember that information being disclosed to the American people, nor do I remember the President quoting Greg Fieldman, a former State Department intelligence official, who said, ``There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operations.'' Intelligence agencies agreed on a ``lack of meaningful connection to al Qaeda'' and said so to the White House and Congress. I do not recall the President sharing that intelligence information with the United States or the world.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I would yield any remaining time to the gentleman. Mr. Speaker, there has been a lot of history made in this building, and one of the most magnificent things that happened in this building happened right behind me on May 9, 1961, and that decision by young President in 1961 I will talk about a little bit is a model that I think we ought to follow given the challenge our country now faces. On May 9, 1961, John F. Kennedy came to this Chamber to the rostrum behind me and challenged America in a very bold, visionary challenge to put an American on the Moon within that decade, and it was an extraordinarily ambitious challenge, and he did so because he had the innate understanding of the can-do attitude of Americans, of the tremendous technological creativity of Americans, and the recognition that America is not a country that ever rests on its laurels but always is looking over the horizon. Indeed, that challenge was met, and when you think about it, it was a relatively historic thing to meet that challenge because, at the time he made it, frankly many pundits thought that the challenge was wildly unrealistic, wildly optimistic and there was no way that America was going to meet the challenge. Kennedy's sense of optimism was fulfilled, and America indeed put a man on the Moon within the close of that decade and brought him and them home safely. That decision and that challenge and that sense of optimism of John F. Kennedy is something we now need to recreate this year, in the year 2003, in adopting a brand-new bold, visionary energy policy for America because many of us here believe in this Chamber that the moment is ripe for the Congress to create a promise and a challenge of America that is equally bold, equally visionary, and ultimately equally achievable as Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the Moon in the next 10 years. As a result of that, I am working with a group here in the United States House of Representatives in an attempt to propose and pass into law what we call the New Apollo Energy Project, and we do so because we believe that we need to seize the moment of technological promise and the can-do spirit of America to, in fact, move forward to a new clean energy future for America, an energy future that will not be bound by the chains that are hampering us so much in our foreign policy, by the fact that we are now losing jobs to other countries who are moving ahead of us, regrettably, in new, clean energy futures and in an energy future that will reduce the amount that we are contributing to global climate change gases in our atmosphere. So what we are doing is working to build a consensus in the House to adopt not an old, previous century policy that is dependent on the technologies of the past, but one that leans forward to the technologies of the future and the industry of the future and the jobs of the future; and we believe this is the year to do that. Right now, the other Chamber is considering an energy package. The House has passed one which is regrettably very, very short of this goal; but we want to continue to work on that, and I have come to the floor to address the House tonight about what a New Apollo Energy future would look like and why it is necessary. This New Apollo Energy future we think needs to accomplish three goals, and we think goal-setting is important for a Nation as it is for any other group or team. So we would set three national goals in the New Apollo Energy Project. Goal number one, we believe we should set a new national goal of creating 3 million new jobs, well-paying jobs in the next 15 years that would, in fact, be dedicated to these new technologies that are on the cusp of coming to become market-based technologies, and we believe it is fundamentally important for America to say those jobs need to be American jobs. They need to be home grown, and the reason they need to be home grown is that we know, looking over the horizon just a bit, that there are going to be new industries built up with these new technologies, wind, solar, a huge number of efficiencies from cars to air conditioners to housing implements, to geothermal, a whole slew of new technologies and new industrial bases that are going to come on line, and we want the jobs to manufacture those goods, to build those transmission lines, to build those wind plants to be right here in America. Sadly, right now, that is not happening. Sadly, because of our retrograde policies, we are giving away those jobs. We are giving away the jobs for solar cell production to German companies. We are losing the jobs in the auto industry to energy efficient vehicles in Japan. We are even losing good, high-paying manufacturing jobs to the little, though impressive, country of Denmark which is ahead of us in wind turbine technology. We think it is time to right that ship and say that this Nation is going to seize its manifest destiny of being the technological leader of the world and at the same time grow these 3 million jobs at home. This is an economic development issue, and we believe that one of the most prudent, highest payoff investments that America can make is to invest $300 billion over the next decade in the research and development, in the incentives, in the incentives for manufacturers to help them retool their industries, incentives to consumers to help them buy energy-efficient products, to the use of the government facilities to help spread this new technology. That is an extremely wise investment to make sure that we grow jobs at home in the new technologies of the future. This is an industrial development program for this millennium, and we need to seize that moment. Second goal: We need to break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. We all know that on a bipartisan basis we have been slaves at various moments to the addiction of oil coming from the Persian Gulf, and it has tainted our foreign policy in various ways. It has made America, for its own economic interest, act in ways that is not in its long-term liberty interest or security interest. And it is high time that America become more energy-independent so that we can make decisions about foreign policy free from the chains of this addiction. So we believe that we need to set a national goal to reduce our oil consumption, and we believe there is some very realistic goals we can set. Again, goal-setting is important, and we need to set a national goal in three parts: Number one, to reduce our oil consumption by 600,000 barrels a day by the year 2010. Now, that is roughly the amount of oil that we previously had gotten from Iraq. It is doable, it is achievable, and it is important to our foreign policy and our economic development. By the year 2015, we ought to adopt measures to reduce our oil imports by 1.5 million barrels a day, which is roughly the equivalent we have imported from Saudi Arabia historically. And by the year 2010, we should have an ambitious but achievable goal of reducing our consumption by 2.4 million barrels a day, roughly the equivalent of what we have historically imported from the Persian Gulf. These are goals that will set us free both in our foreign policy and in our industrial base. As we will talk about a little later, they are achievable goals using the technological creativity that is so important in this country. Now, let me address the third goal as well. We need to deal with the issue of reducing our emissions of global climate change gases, and we need to do so because it is clear from the science that the concentration of these gases, these pollutants that are now going in the air when we burn oil, when we burn coal, when we burn any fossil fuel are radically increasing the concentrations of carbon dioxides and methane and other global climate change gases, which have the impact of essentially trapping energy in the Earth. And we will talk about that in a few minutes. So we would basically set a goal to keep our emissions of these pollutants at 1990 levels so they do not increase. Now, let me address why these are achievable goals. They are achievable goals for a couple of reasons. One, any historical review will show that our country is the most technologically creative and productive and forward-thinking group of human beings ever on Earth. That is quite a mantle, and we want to harness that energy, and we want to harness that genius. We have to have an attitude that recognizes that we are not satisfied with the technologies of today. We want to go forward and have the same type of creativity that we had in the software industry, in the biotech industry, in aerospace, and we now need to unleash that power of thought and intellectual capability by creating a new energy future for America. It is doable, and it is achievable, and I will show some reasons why we believe that is so today. I want to refer to a picture of a home in Virginia, the home of Alden and Carol Hathaway. This is a home, it is quite a nice-looking home, and I have been in a similar home, which is very comfortable. It has kind of a classic architecture style. It was built in Virginia, and you will notice there is some snow in this location when this picture was taken. It cost about $365,000 to build, roughly in the neighborhood of what it would cost to build essentially a standard home in the Virginia area. This home has a feature with today's technology that is pretty extraordinary, and that feature is that this home, using a combination of solar panels that take the sun's energy, that create electricity, and are integrated right into the shingles of the roof. It uses an in- ground heat pump and passive solar heating in the windows, and essentially, at some point, having net metering, where the excess capacity of electricity it generates goes back into the grid, goes back into the utilities, and has a net energy consumption of zero using today's technology. That means that the Hathaways, to heat and cool their home, do not burn any fossil fuels, do not buy any Mideast oil, do not put any global climate change gas emissions in the air, and, perhaps most importantly, have created jobs for the American industrial base that are now involved in building homes of this type and this type of technology. This is a plus-job home, it is a plus-environment home, and it is a plus-national security home. And it is here today in a kind of standard climate that does include heat in Virginia, it sure is hot here tonight in D.C., and snow as well. This technology is possible. But if we can, let us look on a larger scale as to why these technologies have tremendous potential if, in fact, we have the wisdom to put them to use. Basically what has happened, because of the combination of intelligent design by American scientists and economies of scale, the renewable energies, some of which we are talking about tonight, have come down in price dramatically over the last couple of decades. What were once sort of dreamy little ideas about new technologies 10, even 6, or 7 years ago, are now very close to being market-based. Let us look at some of those examples. For wind power, for wind turbine prices, in 1980 it was costing about 30 cents a kilowatt hour. This has come down dramatically over the last two decades. It is now at about the 3\1/2\-cent range and will continue to come down when economies of scale are realized, meaning when we build more wind turbine plants, the per-unit price comes down. We need to be utilizing the fact that wind is becoming more economically competitive, and we need to make the small tax credit that this industry now enjoys permanent and predictable so that this industry can blossom and so that we can build American jobs building those wind turbines and building those transmission lines to get the power where the wind is to the power where the people live. Those are jobs that we ought to have in building those transmission lines. That cost has come down. If you look at photovoltaic, basically solar energy, in 1980 it started at basically $1 a kilowatt hour. That has come down dramatically now. It is in the range of about 20 cents per kilowatt hour, and will continue to come down fairly significantly as we increase the production capability, and the unit price will continue to come down. I may note, too, that these prices actually are very conservative, because in distributed energy, that means energy you create at your home or business site, you do not have transmission costs. So actually, you can pay a little more for the cost of photovoltaics but come out ahead because you do not have to pay the transmission costs. The same thing has been the case in thermal energy. The price has come down dramatically for thermal and biomass, which we have tremendous potential within our agricultural industry. So the fact is we have an economic model which has demonstrated the ability of these new technologies to become market based, and they just need a little boost and some incentives to get them off where they stand today. Let me turn to the environmental reason for this. We have talked about security. We have talked about the job reason, but there is another reason that calls on us to adopt these new technologies, and that is the phenomenon of global climate change. Global climate change is a phenomenon that is fairly well understood in science and basically involves a physical fact which essentially every scientist in the world agrees on, and that accepted scientific principle is that we have gases in our atmosphere that essentially trap energy in the Earth. The way this system works is that energy comes in from the sun in essentially ultraviolet wavelengths of light. It strikes the Earth and is reflected back into space except for one fact: we have a blanket of gases in our atmosphere which traps that energy from going back into space. The light comes in the ultraviolet range or spectrum, but it bounces back in the infrared spectrum, and these gases are a one-way door, if you will. It will allow the ultraviolet light in, but it will not allow the infrared light out. So it traps radiant energy in our planetary system. Every scientist who understands anything about meteorological systems understands that phenomenon and accepts it as a fact. The other uncomfortable fact is that the concentration of these gases that essentially are responsible for this phenomenon are going up dramatically. If I can demonstrate this chart here, this is a chart of carbon dioxide concentrations. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless gas. It is emitted any time we burn fossil fuels. Basically, since the dawn of the industrial revolution, we have had a dramatic increase in concentrations of carbon dioxide. As you see on this chart back in 1860 when we really started burning fossil fuels, the levels were about 285 parts per million in the atmosphere. If we look at the concentrations since 1960, they are beginning to skyrocket. And we are now at levels approaching 370 parts per million, radically increased compared to the preindustrial levels. The thing that is disturbing about this is what is not on this chart, which is that this line if projected out goes through the ceiling of this roof in the next 100 years or so. This line continues to go up if we continue to do what we have been doing for the last 100 years. As that line continues to go up, it is not too surprising that we are playing Russian roulette with our global climate systems. If we have a gas that traps energy and we double that gas, it stands to reason and it is an accepted fact that it is going to have an impact on the world's climate. Generally speaking, there will be a warming, but there may also be very untoward results of increased tornadoes, of increased dry spells, the lack of snow melt in the Pacific Northwest, and today the Arctic ice sheet demonstrably is smaller and thinner. The tundra in Alaska is melting, snow packs are being reduced. Alpine meadows in Mount Rainier National Park are disappearing in part because the tree level is rising. The International Meteorological Society of the United Nations issued a report last week pointing to the dramatic increase in very significant high-energy abnormal meteorological events, including tornadoes and hurricanes. We are experiencing significant changes in our climate and someone, some country, is going to make money off responding to this challenge, and it needs to be America. We need to grow the jobs in this country which will create the technologies that sure as the Creator made little green apples are going to be used by the world in responding to this problem. We in America ought to be the ones fulfilling our destiny to do that. What we have proposed in our plan is a multi-pronged approach. We realize that there is no silver bullet to this issue. We realize that we are going to have to do several things to jump start this new technological revolution. So what we have done is to look at various ways to approach this problem. We have recognized there is no one magical solution. There is going to be a multitude of technologies. There are going to be a lot of roads to get where we need to go, and we have not been prevented to have the genius to know which are the right ones. What we have suggested in our plan is to take a very smorgasbord approach. We have essentially in our plan proposed research and development in a whole slew of new technologies, including clean coal technology to try to find out if there is a way to burn coal without putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We think research and development is appropriate to find out if there is a way to do that. We think research and development is important to find out a way to find efficiencies of our heating and cooling systems. We have put in significant research and development dollars to do that. To address the cost of that investment, the number we have proposed of $300 billion, or in that range, is a significant sum. But to put it in context, it is less than each of the last two tax cuts which have passed this Chamber and will be signed into law. What we are suggesting is that the future of growing jobs in this Nation and the priority, the imperative to grow our economy by capturing these new industries in our country of retooling our industrial base, of making sure these high-paying manufacturing jobs are in our country, we think that priority is at least equal to the priority of passing the very significant tax cuts, two packages which have now passed the House. If Members believe in technology, if Members believe in America's destiny to lead the world in doing so, surely this investment in our future is every bit and probably more important than the tax cut package that passed, and we are suggesting an investment of that nature and that magnitude because this is not a time for baby steps. Our challenges to our economy, to our environment, and to our personal security associated with being addicted to Middle East oil does not permit timidity in that regard. We need to act boldly and with visionary thought. The other thing is we have used many of the tools in the Federal Government's tool belt to try to move this plan forward. We have suggested tax credits. We have suggested tax credits for our industries that need to retool, very generous tax credits for our automobile industry. We want our domestic automobile industry to lead the way in fuel-efficient vehicles, and we have suggested very generous tax credits to our automobile industry to be able to retool their plants so they can be the technological leaders in the world. Those tax credits also need to go to consumers, and so we have suggested generous tax credits to consumers who buy fuel-efficient vehicles, who buy fuel- efficient refrigerating systems, who buy energy-efficient homes. We think there should be a better financing system for energy-efficient homes. We are exploring ways to improve financing of energy-efficient homes and vehicles. But we have also realized that we need to use all of the tools of the government, which include the abilities to have standardized regulatory systems to require where possible, where technology exists that we move forward. One of the things that is pretty interesting to me is that if we had simply continued the rate of improvement in efficiency of our automobiles that was occurring in the late 1970s and early 1980s, if we had continued to improve the efficiency of our vehicles at that rate, we would have been free from imports of Saudi Arabian oil by now. Think about that. Unfortunately, we fell off the wagon. We stopped in the mid-1980s making any improvements in the fuel efficiency of our vehicles, and as a result here we are, still stuck in the morass of the Middle East, addicted to oil, losing jobs to the Japanese, the Danish, and the Germans. And if we had simply continued on the path of efficiency, we would have been in a much better situation today. Now it is time, we believe, to get back on the road to efficiency and use all of these methods that we can to really seize the destiny of the United States. Mr. Speaker, I would like to wrap up here just by a comment. America's history has always been forward and up, and we believe now that this is a pivotal moment to take a bold step in our energy future. Anything less shortchanges both America and the promise of America. And we are going to be working, we hope, on a bipartisan basis to build a consensus around this new Apollo Energy Project. We would like to make this a bipartisan plan. Unfortunately, the President's plan falls woefully short of the promise that we think America deserves, but we are going to try to continue to push this ball because America's future depends on it to grow these jobs in this country to make sure our industry leads the world. That is the American way. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo). Victims of our Porous Borders

Mr. INSLEE. I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I would advise the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) that there may be time left at the end of my presentation.

Mr. INSLEE

Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.