Jay Inslee Quotes

President Bush's proposal to focus our resources on sending humans to Mars is intriguing, but it is not the most compelling reason that Americans ought to focus our interest on the Red Planet.

I am not one for half measures or half-hearted efforts.

We had some major successes and we did so because the country embraced the spirit of Earth Day and embraced this concept that we have to have forward-looking, visionary environmental policy and energy policy in this country.

Third issue, and again I think it is important to note, anyone can make a mistake and any administration can make a mistake once in a while, but this is just a long train of abuses, an unbroken chain of following special interests rather than the health of the American people.

Air is one we hold in common; it has a limited carrying capacity for pollutants and that's being used up by those who pollute the atmosphere. So we have to stop that externality. We would never allow a utility to put their coal slag in a dump truck and back it up to the city park and dump it in unlimited amounts for free. But that is exactly what we do with carbon dioxide and methane.

Because the sad fact is that the Enron Corporation and others manipulated with unfortunately great effect the energy market in the West Coast starting in 2000.

I reflect back 35 years ago, and look how far we have come in America with our environmental policy to improve the conditions of our air and water, and we have had some real successes.

We allow it to be dumped into this community asset, which is our one and only atmosphere. So that has to change, and there's really only one entity that can do that. So we have proposed a cap-and-trade system to stop that unlimited pollution, to use the forces of the market to efficiently allocate scarce permits to allow CO2 into the atmosphere. That's just one of 500 things we need to do, but it's probably the granddaddy of them all.

Renewable energy also creates more jobs than other sources of energy - most of these will be created in the struggling manufacturing sector, which will pioneer the new energy future by investment that allows manufacturers to retool and adopt new technologies and methods.

We have had a loss in manufacturing base and a loss of some of our productive capability that can be filled with the green-collar jobs of tomorrow. But it will only happen if we recognize the scale and scope of both the challenge and the opportunity.

So we are now still dependent on foreign oil, have a problem with global warming, and are losing jobs rapidly to the Japanese in fuel-efficient vehicles as a result of that very shortsighted progress.

We [USA and China] have a common responsibility with different numerical targets, and that's the situation ultimately we are going to have with China. We emit six times more per person than they do. It's hard to tell them to cut theirs in half right now until we start moving. Being the ostrich with your head in the sand and tail feathers in the air like some would have us to do while China continues to pollute is simply not an option.

We’re the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.'

I do care about the mercury contamination which this country will be experiencing because of the attempted sellout by this administration to special interests which will result in more mercury in the blood of young children in America.

Tolerance is carved into the rostrum of the U.S. House of Representatives and intolerance should not be carved into the U.S. Constitution.

We must start... rebuilding our cities around energy efficiency and human needs, rather than around the car and wasted energy.

We've introduced the New Apollo Energy Act, which is, I think, safe to say the most comprehensive and aggressive bill that has been introduced in Congress because it does have the scale, scope, and ambition of the original Apollo Project, and it attacks the problem in every way you can imagine. There's no silver bullet here, but there are lots of opportunities.

But most importantly, we can all be donors. It does not matter how old you are, your race, where you live; all of us can give the gift of life.

I would like to see whoever is our next president dedicate a significant part of their inaugural address to this challenge. We have to ignite the nation's energies and passions on this to make this happen. I think we do need the same kind of inspiration we had from Kennedy in his inaugural address in 1961.

What is a fish without a river? What is a bird without a tree to nest in? What is an Endangered Species Act without any enforcement mechanism to ensure their habitat is protected? It is nothing.

Back in the mid-1970s, we adopted some fairly ambitious goals to improve efficiency of our cars. What did we get? We got a tremendous boost in efficiency.

We need to get our sons and daughters home and their responsibility for the security of Iraq needs to be assumed by Iraqis who will stand up and toe the line for their countries.

On Earth, we still have a beautiful atmosphere that precisely maintains a thermally driven climatic system that shelters, shields and sustains our natural treasures.

Healing is a moral thing to do.

Tolerance is the value that was selected to put on here, and tolerance is as American as apple pie.

Lincoln said that the Patent Office adds the flame of interest to the light of creativity. And that is why we need to improve the effectiveness of our Patent Office.

I talk about reducing our dependence on foreign oil. If we're buying electricity from a solar-thermal plant in Tijuana, I'm not sure we should say that's evil. If we are buying wind power from Alberta, I don't have a huge objection to that.

If we had continued making progress at the rate we were during the Carter administration, we would be free of oil imports from Saudi Arabia today.

With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001, we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology, rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese, Danish, and Germans.

All of the economic signals in the marketplace are essentially subsidizing the use of dirty fossil fuels and penalizing clean energy. There's really only one entity in society that can solve that problem, and that is government. And the air is a scarce resource.

The 1st Congressional District contains almost half of the biotech and biomedical companies in Washington, and my job often allows me to meet the people responsible for this exciting research.

The need to help spread democracy and the ability to do that will be much greater if we break this addiction to oil, which gives the oil princes and sultans the power in the Mideast.

I am going to leave everything on the field. I am going everywhere, and I am going to listen to everybody.

We need to do for clean energy what Kennedy did for space in the original Apollo Project: Set a bold vision that will light the fires of innovation and make a game-changing shift in how we use and produce energy. And nothing less is adequate.

Not wasting energy. It is the least sexy, but the single most important and always the least expensive. You would be very interested in a report by the McKinsey consulting firm that concluded that 40 percent of everything that we have to do to mitigate our emissions are net economic winners. They are cost effective and the most cost effective is not wasting energy. That's actually going to be the largest part of this whole journey, I believe - using less energy with the same beneficial results.

The fact is that we cannot drill our way to independence. We cannot drill our way to freedom, and we cannot drill our way to create jobs in this country.

Things are difficult enough about Iraq without the Federal Government suppressing the truth about Iraq.

Now is the time to scrub ideology out of the energy discussion, so we can make bi-partisan progress towards investing in a shared and better future.

I'm sure that in the fullness of time we'll learn that one or more of these seemingly promising technologies were dead ends. And that's the nature of innovation, and that's why we should spread our bets; we should not put our eggs in any one basket. Some of these will be grand successes, some of them will be average, and some of them will be abject failures.

It is a happy coincidence between what my constituents believe and my interests.

When we design our national R&D programs, we ought to ensure a place for the small, the new, and the cutting-edge.

There is no excuse for this administration shielding information about Iraq and the fact that we have great difficulties there from the American people.

A lot of people do not think of forests as a health issue, but we have found out that is where our clean water comes from, from the forests.

Investing in industries and technology for the 21st century generates high-skilled, high-wage jobs for industries of the future.

We can't tell China what to do if we don't do it ourselves. You don't inspire someone to take an action by refusing to take it yourself. We are in a race to be the dominant clean-energy provider to the world. Maybe this goes without saying: We've got to get China into an international protocol and the magic words are "common responsibility with differentiated action."

We clearly need to break our addiction on Saudi Arabian oil that is a security threat to the United States.

We could never light another match, and if China continues to build one coal-fired power plant a week, we are doomed. China is going to have to have new technologies made available to it to stop this. They're not going to live in poverty.

With 1 million square miles of the Arctic melting unexpectedly this summer, these are warning signs that we have to act and act now. Our addiction to Middle Eastern oil obviously has security implications, and we think it's about time to be generating Eastern Washington wind energy instead of sending our money to the sheikhs.