Rep. Inslee Rallies The Troops

Apollo Summiteers are off to Capitol Hill today, meeting with congresspeople and their staffs and pressing for increased government support of renewable energy.

Before they took to the Hill, Rep. Jay Inslee (WA) addressed the Summit and deemed the Apollo Alliance the "most important coalition" in America today, because "this is a matter of our American destiny ... to lead the world in solving this global warming crisis."

Though he cautioned that without strong government policies to quickly create clean energy jobs, those jobs would go to other countries such as China, Germany, England and Denmark.

He argued that a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon dioxide emissions was needed to create those jobs. Otherwise, "companies use the atmosphere as their garbage dump for free."

Inslee characterized the debate as between "the optimists and pessimists," and Americans are "the greatest optimists in the world and the greatest innovators in the world."

And with that, the Apollo optimists headed to the Hill.