Mr. BLUMENAUER. I appreciate the context that you have provided, and your unrelenting interest in understanding and acknowledging and advancing American technology, but, sadly, we are not--you mentioned having fallen behind the Germans, for example, in technologies that we developed in terms of the commercial application.
China is spending six times more than we spend on clean energy, $12.5 million every hour of Chinese expenditure. We can't afford to be complacent about this. We need a sense of urgency.
While we are pleased with what's happening in the Pacific Northwest, you referenced the large wind farm in southeastern Washington. Portland, Oregon, is competing with Denver and Houston to be the wind energy capital and a couple of international companies have located their American headquarters there. And there are many technologies that we helped initiate, but we are falling behind.
We rank below Spain, Denmark and Portugal in the use of wind power. We watched what happened where little Denmark, what, about the size of the State of Washington, set its sight on being a wind energy leader, being the wind energy leader 30 years ago and have accomplished amazing feats, both in terms of their own energy production and the dominance of world wind energy activity, that one of those leading companies I mentioned that has its American headquarters in Portland, is Vestas, a Danish company.
So we watch what countries that we think are less developed than in the United States, like the Chinese, or small countries, like Denmark, really making significant advancement and putting the pressure on us to step up and do what we know we can do.
