The campaign’s week-long focus on the emerging green economy concluded with a “Green Jobs Showcase” held at the campaign headquarters. On display were a variety of homegrown items and technologies, ranging from “plastic” toys composed primarily of recycled rubber to a vinyl tile made from recycled carpet that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Ice cream was served, but even this frozen treat was done in a sustainable way. The ingredients were all locally grown and produced, and both the bowls and spoons were made from biomass sources, are entirely biodegradeable – and were sent to be composted at the end of the event.

Full text of Al’s speech from the April 27th Green Jobs Showcase:

I don’t think I have to tell anybody here about our energy crisis.

Here in Minnesota, we know the cost of Washington’s failure to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

We feel that cost every time we fill up the tank.

We feel that cost every time we pay the heat bill or the electric bill.

We feel the cost when the price of everything rises because the trucks that carry our food and our products to the store have to fill up, too.

We feel the cost when we see our trade deficit ballooning to nearly $800 million last year – with oil imports alone accounting for 35% of that.

We feel the cost in our national security, because we import so much oil from unstable and undemocratic nations.

We feel the cost when we read the sobering statistics about global warming.

We feel the cost when we look around our state and don’t see more wind turbines popping up in Southwestern Minnesota, don’t see plug-in hybrid electric cars being built at the Ford plant in St. Paul, don’t see inter-city rail linking our communities.

And we definitely feel the cost when we see other countries taking advantage of our failures. Right now, Japan is the world’s leader in solar energy. Denmark gets 20% of its electricity from wind power. And Iceland provides 100 percent of its energy production from clean energy resources.

No, I don’t think I have to tell anybody in this room about our energy crisis. But someone needs to tell Washington that, for Minnesota and for America, this isn’t just a crisis. It’s an incredible opportunity, one we’re letting slip away from us day by day.

This past week I toured some of the businesses, seeing some of the laboratories, and meeting some of the pioneers who are ready to make this state the epicenter of a green economy in this country.

They’ve been on the front line, fighting the battle against dependence on foreign oil, a battle George W. Bush and Norm Coleman haven’t even suited up for.

Year after year in the State of the Union, this President has talked about the need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But that dependence has grown consistently since he took office.

The war in Iraq that he started and Norm Coleman supports has added as much as $10 to the price of a barrel of oil. Call it the Rumsfeld tax.

The taxpayer-funded subsidies for Dick Cheney’s pals at the oil companies that Norm Coleman voted for have helped those companies’ profits skyrocket almost as fast as the price of a tank of gas.

And instead of working to address the energy crisis, this administration and the Republicans in Congress have cut funding for research and development, suppressed science, and prioritized those big giveaways to Big Oil instead of an investment in renewable energy.

Norm Coleman has voted against billions in funding for renewable energy programs. He’s opposed common-sense cap-and-trade programs that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions while creating new jobs developing green technology. And let’s not forget those big tax giveaways to his pals at the oil companies, the ones who have funded his campaigns to the tune of over $200,000.

Now, lately, it looks like even Norm Coleman has figured out that Minnesotans want a “green” economy. So he changed his position on a couple of issues and now he’s been running around the state calling himself a champion for renewable energy. But he can’t run away from his record. He can’t run away from what he said in 2002, when he called Paul Wellstone’s proposal that we get to 20% renewables by 2010 “extreme.”

And we can’t afford to waste eight more years playing politics and not addressing these issues. This administration will be to global warming what the Hoover administration was to the Depression.

Here’s what I want to do.

I want to power Minnesota homes and businesses with renewable energy that comes from Minnesota. Wind energy, solar energy, biofuels – you know, Al Gore says that there’s no silver bullet to address global warming, but there is silver buckshot.

I want to make those homes and buildings green. We should retro-fit foreclosed homes, make tax credits available to low-income homeowners so they can retro-fit their homes, and make every federal building we build carbon-neutral.

I want to invest in transportation options like light rail, commuter rail, inter-city rail, and plug-in hybrid electric cars, made in Minnesota factories by Minnesota workers.

And whatever the next innovation is, I want it to be discovered and developed at the University of Minnesota, not the University of Stockholm, so I want to invest in research and development.

To pay for new investments, I’ll support a cap-and-trade system that cuts carbon emissions by 80% by the year 2050. The proceeds of that system, combined with ending the subsidies for the big oil companies, will allow us to launch an Apollo program to invest in new sources of renewable energy and energy efficiency, as well as continue to develop and commercialize the technologies we’ve already discovered.

These are common-sense, win-win proposals for Minnesota. We can finally end our dependence on foreign oil, address the climate crisis, create jobs here in Minnesota, and provide Minnesota families with lower prices at the pump and better values when they open their monthly electric bill.

You know, I was six years old when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. It freaked everybody out. The Soviets had nuclear weapons, and now they were ahead of us in the space race.

This was a threat to our national security, and it was a threat to the world that only America could solve. So we invested in science and math education to train more American scientists and engineers to compete with the Soviets. By creating a generation of researchers and teachers in technologies that would be the engine of American industry.

In aerospace and telecommunications. We created the first transistors for computers. Hard plastics used in automobiles and appliances. Optical fibers that made possible the Internet.

In 1961, President Kennedy announced that we were going to invest in our greatest national resource – our innovation and our intelligence and our creativity – and we were going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

People thought he was nuts.

But we did it. We did it by unleashing the genius of Americans.

We saved the world.

Well, it’s our turn to save the world again. And we can save our manufacturing sector, our balance of trade, and our ability to take the kids on vacation without paying hundreds of dollars just to get them to the cabin – all at the same time.

I believe that the epicenter of the next Apollo program should be right here in Minnesota. We are the Silicon Valley of windows and one of the windiest states in the nation. We are the home of some of the world’s foremost research universities and some of the nation’s most creative and hard-working farmers. We can be the big winners in the “green” economy.

And you can see how much Minnesota has to offer, and to gain, just by looking around this room. I saw that all week.

But I also spent part of my week at a roundtable at the University of Minnesota. That’s where brilliant kids – and their brilliant professors, who aren’t kids – are working on tomorrow’s solutions. The “green” jobs that will keep our state’s economy strong for the next century are growing in labs at the U.

But when I was there, I met a kid named Stephen. Stephen grew up on a 300-acre farm near New Ulm. And he’s really freaking smart. He’s getting his PhD in electrical engineering, and, I am not making this up, he home-built a kit to convert his Geo Metro into an electric car. In his free time.

Stephen, thank God, wants to work in energy solutions for a career. But he told me that he’s worried that he’ll have to move thousands of miles away from New Ulm to do this.

Here’s why what we do in Washington matters. I don’t want Stephen building electric cars in Copenhagen. I want him building them in Minnesota. I don’t want Minnesota consumers to be buying build-your-own-electric-car kits from Denmark. I want Danes buying them from Stephen’s company right here in Minnesota.

And I want every kid in this country to look at Stephen’s highly-profitable company, which employs hundreds of Minnesota workers, and get excited. Stephen is one of this generation’s Sputnik kids. And if we rise to meet this challenge, we can gain even more than we did the last time we saved the world.

With the Bush-Coleman economy heading into a recession, we need a new direction. And I believe this is it.

If building a “green” economy becomes a priority in Washington instead of just a talking point, Minnesota will lead the nation and the world, and Minnesota families will be able to harvest what we sow.

We’ll feel the benefit at the pump and in our monthly electric bills.

We’ll feel it in the job market and in our balance of trade.

We’ll feel it in our air and in our water.

And we’ll feel it in ways we haven’t even begun to imagine yet.

I’m ready to get to work to make that vision a reality.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 2:44 pm and is filed under From Al's Desk, From the Trail, Special Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.