Since my trip to Mumbai last March, I have committed myself full bore, with every fiber of my being, to pushing a legislative agenda that could bust through the solid barrier of congressional apathy and create an aggressive American response to global warming. The world would not move if Congress would not move. Congress would not move if I did not move.

As Gandhi would say, I have to become the change I seek in the world.

This was not the easiest reality to face. It’s one thing to fly across the world to ask the Prime Minister of India to commit to an international agreement on global warming. It’s quite another to ask me to change in some basic way. I discovered an interesting principle of life. It’s much easier to ask 1.3 billion people to do something a bit difficult than to ask just one - when that one happens to be you.

But shouldn’t I at least try and get off the ground?  The answer was obviously quite clear. Not only should I raise my commitment, I could raise my commitment. So the question then became, how?

I had already started down the right path, I thought. My wife Trudi and I kept our house on Bainbridge Island at about 58 degrees, we drove a Prius Hybrid, had all the most efficient appliances available, used biodiesel in our furnace, walked when we could, and had spent the last Christmas break stuffing insulation under our house. So for a brief moment I asked, what was left to do?

Then my friend Rush Holt, the second physicist ever to serve in Congress and the only one to have won on TV’s “Jeopardy,” passed me a copy of Science magazine, and told me to read the article about biofuels. As I was reading it, one fact jumped out at me - to get a given number of calories from beef takes about 16 times as much energy to produce those same calories as does getting those calories from grains or vegetables. As an eater of cheeseburgers, steaks, and prime rib, I was spewing out 16 times more CO2 at a given meal than those munching on veggies.

That set off a big red light in the parts of my brain dedicated to food, which is about 83% of my total frontal cortex. Could I really even think about moving down on the food chain, at least a couple of rungs, at least most of the time?

If I was somewhat self-congratulatory for driving a car that improved its mileage, reduced its CO2 emissions by about 50% over the average car, why wouldn’t I also be willing to make a little change in my diet to obtain an improvement by a factor of 16  at the dinner table? It wouldn’t be as visible as driving around in my spiffy little Prius, but cutting my emissions by a factor of 16 could perhaps dwarf what other actions I could take on this journey.

If you ask me a year from now how many pieces of red meat I have eaten in the last year, it is going to be a mighty small number, making allowances for the odd celebratory hot dog at the two football games I go to a year with my Dad. At the end of that year, I suspect if asked, I would say that this small change hardly changed the world, no more so than my voting, not littering, and recycling haven’t individually changed the world.

But this small step put me, at least, on the path to becoming the change I seek in the world. More importantly, this was the first step, to be followed by many others, both public and private, that you may find of interest if the planet is on your list for saving.

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Jay Inslee represents the First District of the State of Washington (Seattle area) in the United States House of Representatives. He is the co-author of Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.

With the dead weight of one hundred years of petro chemical consumption paired with the overwhelming wave of development in the Indias of the world, how can we turn the tide of global warming?

As mentioned last week, I went to Mumbai with a congressional delegation in March 2008 in search of a way to build an international agreement on climate change with today’s Indian leaders.

In our first few days there, we had not heard particularly hopeful news from Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh. When asked if India would agree to an international agreement to cap CO2 emissions, he said sure, but only at the global per capita average. Unfortunately, if India ever reaches that point, India’s emissions would have risen by a factor of about ten, permanently dooming the planet.

When I got on our plane to fly home, the first thing I did was engage Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a discussion of how we were going to form a partnership with India to prod them into action, and how we would do some serious consciousness-raising amongst our own colleagues.

Both of these are real conundrums, the first because India is not entirely chomping at the bit to limit their CO2 emissions and second, because, many of my colleagues are still oblivious to the melting of the polar ice caps. Many of them would not “get it” on global warming if a melting ice berg slapped them in the face. So Nancy and I had a good strategic planning session on how to use the next several months in Congress to good effect. It was a small first step. But isn’t that how all great journeys begin?

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Jay Inslee represents the First District of the State of Washington (Seattle area) in the United States House of Representatives. He is the co-author of Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.

In March 2008, I went to Mumbai with a congressional delegation led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We went in search of an answer of how to fashion an international agreement on climate change from today’s Indian leaders.

But I didn’t find the answer from today’s Indian politicians; I found it from long-gone Indian revolutionary, Mahatma Gandhi.

His real life begs description. Trained as a lawyer, he made a personally wrenching transition from a stiff collared attorney handling civil rights cases and living in the finest traditions similar to the boys from Eton, to a world-changing revolutionary, scavenging for food, caring for goats, and wearing nothing but a twisty piece of homespun cotton as he reordered the civilization of south Asia itself.

I stopped to consider the challenges he faced along the way. The most important challenge-what must have appeared to be insurmountable-was taking on the British Empire at the peak of its power, an empire with not only massive military resources but also an insidiously effective manner of subjugating whole peoples.

I felt I was in a similar position as Gandhi. Not because I suffered under an empire, but because I was facing a fearsome threat just as daunting as the British Empire-the threat that the planet was to be shortly consumed by the fires of global warming.

To me, global warming was a steamroller, a global monster, and an armored tank that would take the complete reordering of the world economy to defeat. To succeed, we would have to almost totally decarbonize the world economy, just as Gandhi would have to almost totally “de-violence” India if his plans were to succeed.

In the days leading up to my visit, I had been bombarded with global warming facts. Pre-eminent national scientist James Hanson had just published a paper predicting an entirely new environmental epic that would remove us from the Holocene era and take us into a whole new climactic regime, even at current levels of CO2. Weeks before that, the head of the International Panel on Climate Change told our committee that even in the best case scenario, we had only a 50-50 chance of preventing 30% of the world’s species from going extinct because of the massive impact of climate change on thousands of species.

My first two days in India showed little political initiative. Just the quickest glance in the New Delhi newspapers or the packed streets of Mumbai told a grim tale. The papers reported worsening electrical outages caused by an explosion of electrical demand in the rapidly growing Indian economy. In the streets, millions of cars and three-wheeled taxis created the very definition of mayhem.

One peek out the window of our bus revealed a simple truth-if India did not start to use radically different technologies to power their homes and cars, the earth’s atmosphere would be effectively destroyed. There was much to love about India visible to me in just my first two days there, from its uniformly gracious people, to its intoxicating mix of religions, to it surprising food. But these national virtues could not hide the glaring fact that I was visiting the country, which could imperil the planet and the parallels to our situation in the United States.

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Jay Inslee represents the First District of the State of Washington (Seattle area) in the United States House of Representatives. He is the co-author of Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.

On the same week I encountered the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, I had the once in a life time chance to meet a world figure who lived, and led, a community in what must be considered the closest thing to Shangri-La we westerners can comprehend. When she was about twelve years old, my wife Trudi wrote a seventh grade paper about Shangri-La. To her at the time, it was almost an imaginary place of high peaks, prayer flags, and ever-present scent of jasmine flowers. She never dreamed that one day she would actually find such a place in real life. Neither did she dream that such a place may disappear as a victim of global warming.

She found out that both were true earlier this year when she and I ascended into the foothills of the Himalayas to visit the Dalai Llama in Dharamsala, India. We went there to discuss his Tibetan people’s struggle for freedom in the face of the China’s invasion of Tibet, but we came away with an understanding that another, more existential threat hung over the Buddhist monks, one that could make the Chinese invasion seem like a walk in the park.

At the Dalai Lama’s residence, matters soon turned to this equally pressing threat to the Tibetan people, that of global warming. I asked for his advice on this subject, about how to engage the developing world in this effort. He immediately perked up and let us know it was much on his mind. “It will be the people of Tibet who will suffer first,” he said. “We know that what little water is available on the Tibetan plateau will be diminished as these changes take place. I know how dry our home is and I can hardly imagine what it will be like as global warming kicks in.”

“It’s not just Tibetans,’ he continued. “All four rivers that provide India’s water are fed by the Himalayan glaciers. Those glaciers are going to shrink and they are. When the Ganges is dry, it will be millions of Indian’s who are parched. Yes, this is not right. It is dangerous and people all over have to act.”

If the people of the developing world are to be the first victims of global warming, the Dalai Lama should not be the number one spokesperson for these endangered billions.

Perhaps no one else could be both as close physically to the epicenter of destruction and spiritually to the heart of understanding that non-violence ought to encompass the earth itself, not just we two legged occupants. I was surprised at the strength of his comments on global warming since he was necessarily immersed in the mortal threat to his people that was then raging in Tibet.

So we learned two things in the foothills of the world’s tallest mountain range. First, Shangri-La actually exists. Second, it won’t exist in its current state much longer if we do not act to prevent violence against the planet.

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Jay Inslee represents the First District of the State of Washington (Seattle area) in the United States House of Representatives. He is the co-author of Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.

On December 18, 2007, there was a sound heard across America coming from Washington D.C. It was the sound of the beginning of a revolution - the clean energy revolution. Until that day, we had been waiting 30 years for the first shot to be fired in this effort to totally transform America’s energy economy. That wait finally ended six months ago when I joined 234 of my colleagues  in the House of Representatives and passed a comprehensive clean energy bill that finally broke the strangle hold of the oil and gas industry on congress and ushered in the era of clean energy. With oil and gas prices now through the roof, it is important to revisit the successes of that day.

Our fuel efficiency standards were last raised in 1975. Since then we have developed the internet, mapped the human genome, and even invented the cup holder, but our cars get less mileage than they did in 1985. The passage of the clean energy bill raised mileage standards 40% to a combined fleet average requirement of 35 m.p.g. by 2022. We accomplished this feat after years of frustration due to the growing thirst by Americans for efficient cars, the commanding certainty of the science of global warming, and the fearless leadership of Nancy Pelosi who took no prisoners in her relentless quest to reshape our energy economy.

As one who has been fighting this battle for years, and having just co-authored with Bracken Hendricks the book Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy which calls for just this action in, it was a thrill to be on the floor exchanging high fives with my allies after the resounding victory last December. The particular delight was in knowing that the mileage standard improvements were just one of a heavenly host of leaps forward the bill made. In writing Apollo’s Fire, it became obvious that we need an entire suite of new technologies and practices to tame global warming, so it was a real pleasure to have produced a bill that would have called forth the country’s genius to develop and deploy the whole panoply of measures we need from solar power, to wind power, to electrified cars, to the thousands of ways we can conserve energy.

The cumulative impact of the actions in the bill will be staggering. When implemented, the bill will reduce the amount of CO2 the nation puts out by the entire amount spewed by our cars and trucks annually. That is a great first step on the long road to reducing our emissions by 80%, the reduction we will have to do to stop CO2 levels from more than doubling pre-industrial levels.

This success would flow from the combination of the many requirements in the bill. These include a requirement that lighting efficiency be improved radically, cooling and heating systems be improved dramatically, building codes be improved to achieve a 50% reduction in energy by our buildings, and utilities being given the obligation to start helping their customers save energy, rather than the utilities just trying to maximize profits by selling more electricity, a measure know as “decoupling.”  Steps like these have allowed California to keep its per capita energy use stable while the rest of the country has gone up 60% in twenty years. Now it’s time for the nation to enjoy similar success.

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Jay Inslee represents the First District of the State of Washington (Seattle area) in the United States House of Representatives. He is the co-author of Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.

Rocket launches are always exciting. So are clean energy revolution launches. Although I have never attended the launch of an American space rocket, I have been there at the launch of a clean energy revolution, a more terrestrial but just as important effort – one that will surely be as big a leap for mankind as the one that took place on the Sea of Tranquility.

There is a difference between the starting points of these two types of endeavor, of course. The launch of a rocket has well defined and inarguable starting point – the electric moment when the dragon roars to life and spits incandescent clouds of flaming gas into the Florida sky. The countdown is precise, and the ignition point a thunderclap of promise.

The launch of clean energy revolution is, in contrast, a nuanced affair, and it’s starting point itself subject to interpretation. When would all the national signs signal an unalterable commitment to this journey? Could such a moment be so clear it could not be subject of debate?

Probably not. But if a national consensus about that moment is impossible, a personal recognition is not only possible, but actually happened to me on April 24, 2008. On that day, it all seemed to come together – the political, the personal, and the economic.

Politically, the day brought a long awaited cutting of a Gordian Knot that had stymied our efforts to pass an extension of the renewable energy tax credits for months before. Those tax credits were absolutely fundamental to the growth of the most promising clean energy technologies, and their imminent expiration was threatening the continued growth of the wind, solar, wave, and enhanced geothermal industries. On that day, the Ausra Solar Thermal Company was on the precipice of losing a major contract with PGE for one of the nation’s first solar thermal plants in 20 years. So I had been tearing my hair out for months as we sought a way to break the logjam that kept our extension from passing, a logjam that resulted from the Senate’s refusal to “pay for” these tax breaks with some other form of alternate federal revenue, a requirement of the House to abide new tax breaks.

But that afternoon, I talked to Dave Obey, Chair of the Appropriations Committee. After listening to Dave’s standard tongue-lashing of how doing such a radical thing would destroy his ability to move a bill at all, and would probably be the end of western civilization, he suggested it may be possible to put our measure in the imminent supplemental appropriation bill, if the Senate wouldn’t present a problem. This was golden because I already had assurances that Harry Reid would go along with the deal.

So that day, a major piece of the political puzzle came into place.

One hour later, as I strolled into National Airport (I refuse to call it Reagan), a glance at the shelves of the book store showed that three of the nation’s most mainstream magazines all had devoted virtually their entire issues to the clean energy revolution. That day, there was no escaping the issue by anyone wanting to read some light material in National Airport.

That day, a cultural piece of the puzzle came into place.

Just a few minutes later, I called Jim McDermott, the son of my colleague, but couldn’t reach him because he turned out to be in Saudi Arabia selling them his one-of-a-kind solar thermal system to which he holds the worldwide distribution rights – a system that has what may be the world’s most promising technology capable of storing energy generated by the solar thermal system. This system uses molten salt to store energy when the sun is not shining, a critical virtue that may be the final piece required to make solar energy a truly fundamental part of our electrical grid. Here was an American company selling an energy technology to the heart of the oil and gas beast, retrieving some of the billions we had sent to the Mideast. What a sweet turnabout!

That day, a piece of the technological puzzle fell into place.

So as I took seat in 15E on my Alaska flight, the fact that I was in an uncomfortable middle seat was assuaged by a new feeling, a feeling that the revolution had started, that the political, the cultural, and the technological pieces had come together, and that we were finally on our way. At that moment, as the plane took off, so did my sense of boundless optimism.

Houston, we have liftoff.

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Jay Inslee represents the First District of the State of Washington (Seattle area) in the United States House of Representatives. He is the co-author of Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.