The United States is the Saudi Arabia of wind and solar energy

U.S. Representative Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) said the new administration must invest in environmental and energy changes and should “get started in the next six months.”

In order to attain the necessary energy and environmental changes, Solis said it will take “political will,” and “leadership,” but emphasized it will not take a lot of money. She said that it will not be easy to convince Congress of the need for these big changes in environmental and energy policy, saying there are “not a lot of members in the House of Representatives, in my opinion, that grasp this concept.”

Solis advocated “greening our buildings, greening our infrastructure.” She felt this would increase jobs that would “stay here” and would allow for areas to “sustain communities.”

Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Van Jones said the economy is collapsing because the U.S. economic structure over the last 30 years was “not sustainable.” He felt that there are three inherent flaws in the U.S. economy: it has been “based on consumption, not production,” the U.S. can’t “run the economy forever based on debt,” and one cannot run an economy based on “environmental destruction, not environmental restoration.”

Jones claimed that energy change would not be as difficult as it seems because, “We have a Saudi Arabia of wind energy in this country, we have a Saudi Arabia of solar energy in this country.” He also said that energy investment “pays for itself” because it will lower overall energy cost, and will immensely increase available jobs. He claimed that if the government invested $100 billion, “we can have two million new jobs in two years.”