To the mat­ter of national secu­rity as it per­tains to energy inde­pen­dence. The United States is already lum­ber­ing under record trade deficits and import­ing for­eign fuel such as LNG for elec­tri­cal power gen­er­a­tion will only con­tribute to this deficit, fur­ther our depen­dence and expand our national debt. Ter­ror­ists would not have to blow up an LNG ter­mi­nal to attack the United States. LNG export­ing nations such as Iran would only have to with­hold shipment.

The result­ing havoc and chaos when elec­tric­ity demand couldn’t be met would make a mock­ery of our national secu­rity. The United States has a lot of expe­ri­ence in this very tac­tic. A US cor­po­ra­tion shut down its power plant in the Domini­can Repub­li­can to force the gov­ern­ment to pay its debt to them and in 1998 another US cor­po­ra­tion shut down its pro­duc­tion in Canada until it could nego­ti­ate higher rates. Import­ing for­eign fuel like LNG is worse than a bridge to nowhere it is a bridge to Armageddon.

Energy fuels US for­eign pol­icy and our sons and daugh­ters are fight­ing and dying in Iraq for energy that can be had right here. My own son is per­ma­nently dis­abled after two tours fight­ing for energy. It is time for an energy rev­o­lu­tion. We have the abil­ity to pull off a power gen­er­a­tion coup right here in Ore­gon with com­mu­nity owned, wide scale renew­able dis­trib­uted energy.

These con­cepts are not dreams they have and are being accom­plished in Europe right now. We can wrest con­trol of our energy needs back into the hands of the peo­ple and sweep energy inde­pen­dence from Salem across the nation to the US Con­gress. We can bring our kids home and put them to work man­u­fac­tur­ing and build­ing energy inde­pen­dence – REAL national security.