Future Forum: Climate Change

Floor Speech

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Mr. GALLEGO. Well, in Phoenix, we are always used to pretty warm weather. Of course, as of late, we actually have noticed it has actually gotten a lot, lot warmer, and we are worried.

Within that 73 percent range, you will meet a lot of people from all demographic backgrounds, especially Latino and African American communities, that are particularly worried. These are the communities that are growing still, a very young population, but also, unfortunately, tend to have less money.

What that means is, when it gets hotter--and it continues to get hotter in Arizona--and they are going to have to pay for higher air- conditioning costs or are going to have to pay more for water service, they are the ones who are going to be directly impacted by climate change.

These young people--the average age of the Latino in Arizona is about 25--have to see into the future. What they see in the future is a State and a country that is warmer, that has less water, and that did not make the kind of energy investments that we could have done for many years.

Right now the politicians of today do not have the vision for the new energy future. That is why you see those high numbers. Those high numbers are a direct reflection of young millennials who really, truly care about the future and are projecting into the future what they think is important for stability of not just this country, but the population on Earth.

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Mr. GALLEGO. Well, first we have to recognize that it truly is a national security issue in two areas. One, if you look at how we mobilize our troops, when you are out there--and I was a frontliner. I served with the United States Marine Corps as an infantryman.

Many times I was far away from a base, but I still needed resources. So people had to drop off my food. People had to drop off a generator to power the computers that gave us the information we needed.

That was all done, unfortunately, by trucks that were exposing themselves to IEDs to bring us gasoline to basically power these generators to even keep us warm when it got really cold, things of that nature.

If we had a strong investment in green technology that allowed us to have energy independence down at the module level, it would reduce the amount of men and women that have to be on these dangerous roads.

When we kind of look at the grander scope of how you actually effectively fight a war, the first thing you do is you try to take away their energy resources. The first thing you do is you take out their electrical grid, you take out any opportunity for them to actually be able to move. That includes what we know now as gasoline.

If you look at some of our greatest victories, when Sherman was pushing through Europe, when Patton was fighting in World War II, what they did was effectively cut off the axis powers' ability to basically feed their engines by destroying their capability of refining oil into gasoline.

If we want to also make sure that we, as a country, have strong national security going now and into the future, we have to make sure that we are energy independent. Most of the hydrocarbons that are still in existence in this world are not in the United States. They are found in a lot of countries that are not stable allies of ours or in a very unstable region.

For example, Venezuela is one of our biggest oil partners. Even if you go down to the Middle East, they are in a very unstable area. We still rely on that area for a lot of our oil or the world, in general. If we do not receive their oil, they do set the price of the commodities, which also affects, obviously, a lot of our national security posture.

If we were truly serious about understanding what we need to do in the future to continue having a strong national security that defends the American way of life, energy independence through renewables is the way to do it.

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Mr. GALLEGO. I think if we actually lean back on the strengths of our generation, that is what we need to do. We are a very empathetic generation. We care about our community. We care about our world. And being able to translate that into political power is important.

Whether you vote for a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, make sure they understand that is your priority, to be represented by somebody who understands the threat of climate change and you want to see action.

We also need to get involved more on the economic innovation side that comes with the new energy future. We are going to be developing the technologies that are really going to be making the biggest impacts in terms of slowing down the warming of the Earth.

And it is our friends and colleagues now that are working in labs and doing the startups in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco that are creating the technology of tomorrow. We need to continue to be pushing forward, supporting their efforts, supporting them through R&D. But, more importantly, having a Congress that is supportive and understanding of the challenges of climate change is the key to all that.

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