Our Energy Future

Our Energy Future. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Washington Congressman Jay Inslee has a vision for the future. He recently took an audience on a brief tour of what he sees in the next 10 years for the renewable energy business. INSLEE: I think the beginnings of a whole new clean energy economy will be very much in place in 10 years. It won't be the completion. This is a multi-decadal transition to build a clean energy economy. It took more than 10 years to go from the horse to the internal combustion engine and I think it will take more than 10 year to go from our sort of fossil fuel based system where we don't bury carbon dioxide in some way to a new cleaner, more economically efficient system. Inslee was talking to attendees of the 2010 Harvesting Clean Energy Conference and he believes that his vision will happen but with just one question. INSLEE: The question is whether we're going to do it or China's going to do it and whether we're going to have farmers making a buck on it in Eastern Washington or whether were gonna just have the Chinese investors making money on solar cells. So I really do believe this is a matter of great national interest for us and I think it has tremendous opportunities for the agricultural economy because photosynthesis still works pretty well. It was designed really effectively. He says that he sees the aviation industry being fueled by camelina and algae based fuels. Another idea that Inslee is excited about is a feed-in tariff. INSLEE: There's a lot of ways to help businesses grow and get the capital they need to develop clean energy but one of the tools is a thing called the feed-in tariff and basically it means if you are a business person and you want to generate electricity, let's say you are a dairy and you want to produce methane and generate electricity, a feed-in tariff means that if you do that you would feed your electricity into the grid system and the utility would be legally obligated to pay that business a guaranteed rate for a number of years. That in turn can be used as a way of helping to get loans from banks. As for American's being gas hogs, Inslee feels that September 11th had a dramatic impact. INSLEE: We realize that even if gas was dirt cheap if we're still sending billions of dollars to the countries that are now attacking us, that's not a very good national security policy. One of the nice things about the clean energy movement is that it really can unite kind of everybody no matter what are their beliefs. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org