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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.